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For a long time, many religious parents have operated with a narrow menu of options when a child comes to them questioning who they are. Conversion Truth for Families is working to expand that menu—and to make clear that the most dangerous item on it was never a real choice to begin with.
Conversion Truth for Families is a resource organization built specifically for parents whose faith is central to how they raise their children and make decisions. When those parents learn that a child is questioning their identity or attractions, the organization wants to be available with something conversion therapy programs are not built to offer: accurate, complete information.
The definition Conversion Truth for Families works from is broad by design. Conversion therapy encompasses any effort to change a person’s sexual attractions or gender identity through counseling, prayer programs, or residential treatment, whatever it’s called. “Reparative therapy,” “change efforts,” and “exploratory psychotherapy” are all labels for the same practices. The “exploratory psychotherapy” rebranding, Conversion Truth for Families says specifically, is an attempt to make conversion therapy sound thoughtful and new to parents at their most afraid.
What the research actually shows is consistent regardless of label. JAMA Psychiatry found that conversion therapy recipients were more than twice as likely to have attempted suicide at some point in their lives. For children who started these programs before age ten, the lifetime risk was four times higher. Research from The Trevor Project found that youth who underwent these practices were more than twice as likely to have attempted suicide and more than 2.5 times as likely to report multiple attempts in the prior year. U.S. Transgender Survey data, analyzed through ScienceDirect, found that conversion therapy exposure increased suicide attempt risk by 17 percentage points—equal to a 55% increase—and more than doubled the chance of a young person running away from home.
Dr. Jack Turban of Harvard Medical School, who led the JAMA Psychiatry study, described it as the first research to definitively establish that efforts to change a person’s identity lead to adverse mental health outcomes. The American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Psychological Association, the American Psychiatric Association, and the American Medical Association have each formally rejected these practices. A UK government evidence assessment concluded they are ineffective and harmful.
Paulette Trimmer, a Pentecostal mother in Virginia, shared her family’s experience with multiple conversion therapy programs in documentation compiled by Conversion Truth for Families. Her son Adam, who initially sought these programs wanting to align his faith with who he was, returned from the first one disconnected from his parents. The programs regularly taught participants to attribute their struggles to parental failure. That damage outlasted the programs themselves. Adam eventually ended his own participation and has since been working to rebuild what was broken.
Other parents have not been as fortunate. Linda Robertson and Joyce Calvo both submitted sworn statements to the U.S. Supreme Court describing how conversion therapy took their children’s lives. They were both told by counselors they trusted that these programs would bring their children back to them. The children are gone.
The money spent in pursuit of these outcomes is staggering. JAMA Pediatrics research estimates $650 million in direct annual costs to American families, with the full economic burden—factoring in suicide attempts, substance abuse, and downstream harms—reaching $9.23 billion per year. The Ferguson v. JONAH verdict established that these costs were also fraudulent: a New Jersey jury found the organization liable for making false promises, and the judge stated that the belief in fundamental identity change is as outdated as flat-earth theory.
The Christian Family Companion, offered free through Conversion Truth for Families, starts from a different premise. Built with input from parents, grandparents, and guardians who walked this path and came out with their families intact, it provides day-by-day guidance for the first 24 hours through the first year. It includes emotional regulation tools—breathing exercises, grounding techniques—and strategies rooted in faith rather than in fear of what a child might become.
The Family Acceptance Project at San Francisco State University found that young people who experienced family acceptance were eight times less likely to attempt suicide and nearly six times less likely to report severe depression compared to those who faced high levels of rejection. Brandon Boulware, whose testimony before Missouri legislators reached millions, described the transformation in his daughter once his family stopped trying to change her: it was immediate. She became the child they had always hoped to see—through acceptance, not intervention.
Groups like PFLAG, Fortunate Families, FreedHearts, and the Association of Welcoming and Affirming Baptists extend that support beyond the home, offering community for families of faith who are learning to hold their beliefs and their children at the same time.
Conversion Truth for Families leaves parents with one clear message: the programs that promise to fix your child are selling you something that doesn’t exist. What you already have—your love, your presence, your faith—is the only thing that actually helps.
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