#draft from 2019

🍹 yelyah

1. ABA/IBI and conversion therapy use the same theory and process, just targeting different behaviors to extinguish. for autistic people, this can be anything that makes them look non-NT (which frequently includes gnc behavior). for trans people, this means squelching any outward indication of gender noncomformity wrt the birth assigned gender.

2. the claim seems to be based on a misunderstanding of what the theory and goals of conversion therapy are. the theory behind any behaviorist technique is that people's internal experiences that produce the behavior are irrelevant, and behavior is altered by positive and negative reinforcement. the therapy is considered successful entirely based on the person's behavior. for trans people, this means repression, and it's considered a success if the person is abused and gaslit enough into saying that they're not trans. by conversion therapists' own metrics of behavior, it "works." (obviously by trans people's metrics, it doesn't, because we understand transness as about things other than behavior.)

3. it's a really insensitive claim to make, because people who have been subjected to anti-trans conversion therapy do report that the mind games that made them suppress and ignore their internal experiences of themselves "worked" for as long as the therapy continued. and because of the therapy "working," it is extremely difficult for a trans person to get to a point where they can actually acknowledge that their internal experiences do make them trans. this is also true of autistic people who experienced ABA/IBI where a a goal was suppressing stimming—after the therapy has ended, the person continues to be motivated by shame. a goal of conversion therapy is to create feelings of shame about the behavior to be extinguished, and by that metric, it absolutely works.

4. medical labels are things created by people and societies. doctors labeled a group of behaviors "autism." since then, autistic people have written a lot about the internal experiences that produce the observable behavior, and have redefined autism to refer to those internal experiences. the internal experiences are absolutely real. autism is a category we created to refer to certain internal experiences.