Conversion Therapy: Understanding and Confronting Harm with Dr. Lucas Wilson

Join DignityUSA and Dr. Lucas Wilson (editor of Shame-Sex Attraction: Survivors’ Stories of Conversion Therapy) on May 20 at 8pm ET/5pm PT for Conversion Therapy: Understanding and Confronting Harm. Conversion practices—commonly referred to as conversion therapy—constitute the damaging efforts to change queer individuals' sexual orientations and/or gender identities and expressions. Despite the common misapprehension—in North America, at least—that conversion practices are a thing of the past, such anti-LGBTQ+ efforts persist and continue to wreak havoc on countless queer and trans individuals, particularly those in high-control religious contexts. As a survivor of conversion therapy himself, Wilson will present a broadened definition of conversion practices before discussing the prevalence of conversion practices in North America. Wilson will flesh out the ways by which conversion practitioners seek the eradication of LGBTQ+ communities in North America and beyond.

Dr. Lucas Wilson is a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow at University of Toronto Mississauga and was formerly the Justice, Equity, and Transformation Postdoctoral Fellow at University of Calgary. A current Humanist Thought Fellow through the American Humanist Association, Lucas is the editor of Shame-Sex Attraction: Survivors’ Stories of Conversion Therapy (Jessica Kingsley Publishers). He is also the author of At Home with the Holocaust: Postmemory, Domestic Space, and Second-Generation Holocaust Literature (Rutgers University Press), which received the Jordan Schnitzer First Book Publication Award. His public-facing writing has appeared in The Advocate, Queerty, LGBTQ Nation, and Religion Dispatches, among other venues. He is currently working on two new anthologies: Don’t Ask, Tell All: Stories of Christian Colleges’ Anti-Queer Regimes (under contract with The University of Georgia Press) and Queer and Trembling: Stories of LGBTQ+ Religious Trauma (under contract with Jessica Kingsley Publishers).

Registration is required. A $10 donation is recommended to support the mission of DignityUSA.