Lesbian and Gay Inter-University Organization

Transcription

MALE SPEAKER: Hello, everyone, and welcome to our third installment of the Pride Series in Mountain View. We have today with us Samual Brinton, and we'll be talking about ex-gay ministries and conversion therapy, which I like to think Sam is one of my closest role models just because of how far he has come with this story and sharing that with others, and as a survivor myself, knowing how far you can come. I met him, I believe, four years ago now and found myself from a super small town in Iowa all the way to Google here. Definitely a testament that things can change and how far you can come. With that, Samual Brinton. SAMUAL BRINTON: Thank you so much, Charles. Awesome. It is great to be here with you today. I will probably be walking back and forth a bit, because standing in one position for me is little bit weird. Today we're going to be talking about-- I have a title, but it's a work in progress-- "You Can't Change What We Never Chose." Today, I'll be talking about conversion therapy. Conversion therapy is also known as reparative therapy or sexual orientation change efforts, or whatever we want to call it. In actuality, pretty much what I'll be talking today is about the torture that we have legalized here in the United States and in 48 states, which is a huge problem and something that we're hopefully going to be able to address. I'll try to tie-in a little bit of how activism and academia have been coalescing in these spaces, and we'll have a lovely journey. As we go through today, if you ever have any questions, feel free, of course, to ask. We'll also definitely have a lot of time for questions at the end. It's very, very important to me that I get through this experience and then we discuss what we think we're going to do next. Please have questions ready because it's really awkward at the end if I'm standing here looking pretty and you don't have any questions. Let's get started. Initial questions-- who is this person? Hi, I'm Sam Brinton. I was a graduate student at MIT. I just graduated two weeks ago, I just got two Masters'-- one in nuclear engineering, and the other in technology policy. I work in nuclear waste management and disarming nuclear weapons are my two areas of expertise, which I know you probably haven't seen very many nuclear engineers in heels before, but this is OK. We're going to work on this together, and soon, the entire nuclear industry will be fashion forward. Why am I talking? I'm talking because this is an important issue that's affected me personally. But at the same time, I recognize that even without a personal investment, this is something that is being silenced in our community. For example, I live there in Massachusetts. For 10 years, we have had the ability to have same sex marriages, yet we still have the legality of converting our children from gay individuals to straight individuals. That is still a completely legal practice in Massachusetts and 47 other states. While we may be having a great debate about a lot of other issues, this is something that I see as a very important space that is not getting enough attention. What am I going to learn in this session? You're going to learn a little bit about the history of conversion therapy. You're going to learn a little bit about my experience, which is one experience. I should be very, very, very clear. One experience of many different types of experiences. You'll also learn a little bit about how we're addressing this currently. It's kind of a history lesson, a sob story, and then a really happy story of how we're going to make it better. You're in the wrong room, and should you leave, the exits are located to the rear end. It's totally OK if during this conversation, it gets a little too emotional and you feel like you need that space to walk out. I work a lot with survivors. What I'm going to be going through is in front of you rehashing of my story, which can be very traumatic. It's very possible that at some point during my presentation, I might start crying. That's OK, because guess what? Humans cry. This is a thing. I want to make sure that if you're a survivor in this room, I don't know what you look like-- because guess what? Not all survivors have as good fashion as I do, but other than that, this space is that survivors don't look any different. Just because as the LGBT community doesn't necessarily stand out, and we're in all communities-- survivors are in all communities. We have to recognize that some of you in this room may also be that. Feel free to go out. Is he ever going to stop talking? I've been told I only have so much time with you all, so I'm going to try to stop talking. It's a work in progress. I also definitely tend to go off on tangents. So if I end up on a tangent, I'm going to try to pull myself back. But we'll see where it goes. If you haven't guessed, I'm also moderately energetic. If you need to be boring, just let me know, and I can sap all energy and be monochromatic. That's pretty much where we are for the intro. I use humor a lot in order to get through this experience. History 101-- if you don't know about the LGBT community, we've always existed, so that's step one. Step one, the world is created. Gays make the world a little bit better. Step two. Then over time because a lot of different features, we were classified as a mental disorder. In that experience, I tend to bring up Sigmund Freud because he's a well known psychoanalyst. In that space, Sigmund Freud was influenced about homosexuality by another researcher who will go unnamed at this point who believed that homosexuals could be changed to heterosexuals by simply replacing the testicles of a straight man and putting those testicles into a gay man. Question one-- how many straight boys are raising their hands and are like, give my balls to the gay dude? Please give my balls to the gay dude. Not really a huge population that are doing that. Two, sanitation in surgery at the time is not the highest quality, so we're losing a lot of patients not to heterosexuality, but to infection. After a while, this practice was thankfully ended. After a while, this practice is thankfully ended. We over time start to realize that maybe it's not a useful process, and maybe homosexuality itself isn't the mental disorder. We go into those spaces and we keep trying to get it all a little bit better. As soon as we are no longer classified as a mental disorder, predominately religious organizations step up being like, nope, still a problem, still needs to be fixed. A majority of conversion therapy spaces did occur in the past. I'm not negating that fact. But they're still occurring, and that's why we're still addressing this. But the reason that they started to occur was because religious organizations were like, we can still help you get away from this disorder. Those organizations include Love in Action, which tends to run the large campus to help train individuals on how to be straight. Exodus International, which was a large umbrella organization of a lot of practitioners trying to help connect parents to a way to help their child. Then you have NARTH, the National Association for the Research and Treatment of Homosexuality. NARTH is the MIT of conversion therapy science, i.e. tries to bring in research into this area. If an individual from NARTH is in the room, I apologize. I'm going to bash your field for a pretty much the entire conversation, so good luck. NARTH, highly discredited, not scientific. You're here at Google. I will allow you to do your own research. Most of their research has obviously been conversations right as a person leaves an ex-gay facility. Well, if you just paid tens of thousands of dollars to change, you're likely right after you leave to say yes, it's had some type of effect. If you don't do a follow up and you don't watch these individuals, obviously, we're never changed, and have actually come out to live healthy, productive LGBT lives. You don't really get the research going forward. A lot of people have, thankfully, discredited their work. You also have organizations like the American Psychological Association, which in 2009, stated that all of these things that we were doing were just wrong. This is no longer a mental disorder. Not only is that true, but the health impacts of this conversion therapy is intense on these poor individuals. Also discredits a lot of NARTH information that this is not an actual conversion. These are not really conversions of people, and as well, speaks about the health impacts, mostly, which were most important. You also had individuals like Spitzer, who in their original research stated that there's these NARTH spaces. These individuals have the ability to change. And thankfully, in 2012, comes back out and says, this was not a strongly scientific space, and I pretty much recant what I've said before. I apologize for science trying to be used to harm these individuals. If we go on into the most what I would call modern age conversion therapy, in general, these have been led by religious organizations. I need to be very, very clear right now. I am myself a QPOF-- a Queer Person of Faith. I was praising my Jesus on Sunday, and it was wonderful. Really good music. That's really important for me, but it's not important for everyone. But I do want to recognize that what I'm going to say may sound anti-religious, but is not in any way, shape, or form. It is simply that a minority and loud voice in that community is getting too much attention that these processes are actually valid. The majority of the faith community is starting to recognize that this is not something we should be doing to our children. I want to make sure to make that association. However, for example, the Mormon church has one of the more famous examples. There was a number of individuals who were attending Brigham Young University in Provo, which is a beautiful city. These individuals were found out to be gay, and the university told them, you will either convert and go through this process, or we will kick you out of university. In case you haven't figured out, that's called coercion. That's not a really good scientific process for getting your candidates for your study. These individuals go through this process-- electroshock, all types of very, very excruciating experiences, similar to if you ever have seen the movie "Latter Days." It kind of captures parts of this story. Once they come back out, many of these survivors later would commit suicide or die because of the mental trauma. The university originally ignored that it ever happened, saying that nope, we never put these people through anything like this. Once it's pretty much scientifically proven that there can't be this many stories of this experience without some corroboration, the University says, well, they volunteered. We have this space, which is a central tenet of the conversion therapy question of, well, sorry. They decided that they wanted this change. Coercion is never a form of want. For myself and my story, I was forcibly coerced into this space. Especially if you're a minor or a student in college, you're just starting to develop your sexual orientation. You're just starting to figure out how you actually relate to this space. Being told that there's this easy way out and that it's not going to be hard, don't worry-- with enough prayer, you'll be fine is a lie that we're telling our children and can be very, very, very harmful. We need to recognize that there may be faith spaces that don't align with sexual orientation, but that for many of us, we have found a community of sexual orientation and faith together. I'll go through a few trigger warnings. I'm about to go into my actual personal story in this space. One, if you're a survivor, highly graphic content. I will be going through all of my experience, so if you are a survivor, I want to mentally prepare you that this is my chance to kind of share with a non-survivor community, so I'm going to lay it all out on the line. There will be multiple trigger warnings, for example-- abuse, suicide, a lot of anything with electroshock. Also, I have already warned you about my emotional state. I'm finally getting to the point where I can get through this story without completely emotionally breaking down, and I will have a lot of lemon sorbet tonight, which is my coping mechanism to get through this. But I want to warn you that especially since we have people watching online and this will be recorded, that if I do emotionally breakdown, that's OK. I will get through it. I'll probably stop the story, and we'll just move onto the next section, because guess what? It's my story to share when I want with who I want. I'm sharing it with you because I want to inspire you to do something good with a story. You are free to take it out, but I ask that you do provide these trigger warnings people as you share the story, because you don't know, again, what a survivor looks like. Let's get started with [HIGH PITCHED VOICE] some of my favorite pictures in the world. I was talking high, sorry. [LOW PITCHED VOICE] Some of favorite pictures in the world. So that's me as a baby. I'm adorable. If you haven't noticed, you can kind of see it, but my hair pretty much matches the color of that red fire truck. My mom loved to do this with me as a child. She would put me up next to a fire truck, and you couldn't tell where my hair stopped and the truck began because I literally had that bright red hair. So I just consider this going back to my roots. This is not my actual hair color. Just letting you know. Also, I wanted to point out my family. That's my father. Me and my sister. Obviously, both of us have such wide smiles that we can't ever seem to show our eyes. And then my baby brother, 12 years younger, who's getting to the same level of smiling. I grew up as a Southern Baptist missionary, traveling to South America and across the globe trying to share the love of Christ with others. My passion for that was mostly through humanitarian spaces. Obviously, as a child, I recognized the importance of faith, but I was definitely doing it more of a, oh, we're doing this good work in a village. We're teaching a language, or we're giving them written word. A lot of these kind of spaces. We moved back-- I'm not going to go through all my missionary life because we only have so much time-- we moved back to Florida. You may be wondering why there's a random Playboy on this screen-- because I adore Playboy. The missionary child has a very limited scope of information. We didn't, one, have Google that we really accessing at that time, and two, we were very much censored. If any of you grew up in the evangelical community, the largest thing that I got to experience was Veggie Tales, which are large, singing vegetables about Christ. I will not go into the song right now, because if anyone else sings it, we'll all start singing it together. It'll be really creepy, and you'll be like, what do they drink? Anyway, imagine moving from Christian vegetables to a Playboy magazine. That's a large, large social jump for a lot of us. We'd found one out in the trash. All of the boys start getting excited. I consider myself so holy and righteous that it doesn't affect me, and started praying for the sinners, starting praying. Go to my parents, and my dad's very proud of me that I didn't react. Because I told them everything, I look at my father, and I say, yeah, but sometimes I have those feelings when I think about Dale. Because it was a natural thing that literally came out just like that like. Like, you tell your parents when you sin sometimes. Because you know what? I have problems too, Dad. I'll pray for myself, and I'll work on it. I thought it was totally OK to have it with Dale, just like it would be OK to have it with Sarah. Doesn't everyone just have these feelings? My dad's face dropped. Dale, if you haven't guessed at this point, is a male identified individual. I sometimes identify as male. At that time, I was. It was a very interesting space of my father's face dropping, him coming toward me, and then I woke up in the emergency room of the mission organization, which was just down a few floors. My father had knocked me out cold. I would get beaten a few more times before my parents would finally recognize that maybe this wasn't working. This wasn't quite the space that we wanted for him. We moved into conversion therapy. I still don't know how they found out about it. It could have been googling for it but again, I don't remember if they did that back then. Or it could have just been hearing about it at the church. We showed up to the conversion therapy site, and it's across from a beautiful, pristine, blue lake, which is useless in Florida for finding it, because there's like a million lakes. We walk into the room. There on the coffee table are seven bibles all in a stack. To which, I look up at my mom with the largest grin, which you've already seen previously, before saying, oh my gosh. He loves Jesus just as much as we do. I was so happy that someone would be just as excited as I was. My mom looks down and says, yes, yes he does. He loves Jesus just as much as we do. That would begin my conversion therapy experience. It ranged from me being told that I was the only gay left in the world, that the government had come through and killed off every other single gay in the entire globe. And that somehow, myself and a few others would every once in awhile get through. But that was enough work, it'd be OK. Some of you in this room, a mildly intelligent group, are like wow, Sam, how did you get through to MIT? Because you're obviously the biggest ditz I've ever met. Imagine, again, where I've lived. I've lived in places where the government coming through and killing off a group of people, totally normalized. I've watched people shot right in front of me. That was a part of my childhood. The government coming through and killing people? Sure. Obviously, that's something that could happen. That's also a really great way to keep a person in the closet. If you think the government is going to kill you, you pretty much don't tell anyone. We then moved to the space of not only did the government want to kill me, but the reason they wanted to kill me was because the gays had brought AIDS into America. That was why the government was purging us, was they were trying to save the population. I've been to South Africa. I've worked in an AIDS orphanage. I know that this is an actuality. I know this is a possibility. I didn't understand why they had AIDS because they didn't seem to be same-sex, but I'd seen what this horrible disease could do. So now I'm dying internally, the government wants to kill me, and then the next few weeks were about how God hated me. The last straw, this beautiful central tenet-- I know that I'm probably harping on too much, but for a child like myself, that was what I could hold onto was that at least God loved me still. That was taken away from me. God hated me, we went through the verses, and now I understood that these abominations were myself. We'd always talked about abominations. But Jews were abominations. Catholics were abominations. People who wore white after Labor Day were abominations. Baptists are very good at judging. I wonder how I turned out like this. We're very, very good at judging. Because I had become that space, I didn't understand that I was one of those people now. Once that connection was made, emotionally, I am devastated. This is where the suicide began. This is where I do prove I'm a ditz. I'd heard-- I don't know where-- that if you took a lot of pills, you would die. Instead of two Advil, I took three. I laid down on my bed, definition of princess. Crossed my arms over my body, and just prayed that God would just take it away, like, I'm so sorry that I failed you so badly. I woke up without a headache and realized that it wasn't going to work. I tried really hard. For the next month, I would wake up praying and go to sleep praying and eat praying and cry and sob with my parents, telling them I was doing everything I could, but I just didn't understand. I was too honest. I was honestly trying to figure out why it wouldn't go away, why this feeling wouldn't go away. Then we moved into physical therapy, where my hands would be either placed in ice or ice cubes placed on them while pictures of men touching other the men were shown. So I would associate that freezing cold with a touch of another man. To this day, is still hurts to touch another man. Heating coils would be wrapped around my hands, and they'd be turned on with heat when pictures of men touching men were shown, turned off when pictures of men touching women were shown. I'm supposed to associate that it's going to be horrible if you touch a man, but it's going to be OK if you touch a woman. If you have ever taken a psychology class, what they were doing to me was Pavlov's dogs. It culminated in electroshock therapy. Electrodes were attached to my fingers and then shocks were given to me while I was shown pornographic images of men having sex with men. This would be later on-- my first kiss, within seconds, I would puke just simply from the excruciating pain of remembering what that felt like. To this day, any male-identified individuals in this room or whoever I meet, I tend to pull them in to hug me because I don't want to have them be the one that hurts me. I want to hurt myself when I touch them. It's also a very important space for me that they feel OK to touch me because the concept of being a leper is even worse. Recognizing what this has done to our children has complete-- I was in the exact zone that I was mentally developing. So for the rest of my life, I will probably have some of these effects. It's getting way better. I happily have had boyfriends. I've happily moved to a lot of these spaces where I can deal with this, because I'm a champion in those zones that I'm able to move forward. But those lasting effects are eternal. I finally realized that there's nothing left. I tried a few other suicide attempts, and finally, say goodbye to my family-- my sister, excuse me-- go to the roof, and I'm about to jump because I just can't deal with it anymore. Suicide's a sin, but let's be honest, at this point, there's nothing really that much worse than what I'm at this point. My mom finds me, tells me that she will love me again if I will just change, which is not a thing to say to your child who is about to commit suicide, just for future reference. Then, because I'm moderately logical-- thankfully, not ditsy at this point-- I turn and say, he did it, meaning God had changed me. Because I looked down, I was like-- if I don't die with this fall, it's going to really hurt a lot. I'm not going to do this anymore. I realized that lying was a bad thing, but it was all I could do at this point. Instantaneously, whoosh. Everything stops. We don't talk about any of my past. It is as if everything has changed, and we're now in Oz. Everything is beautiful. Funny that we said Oz. We would then move to Iowa where my dad had grown up. I would go to high school. I would convince my parents let me go to public high school so I could be a missionary to the other kids. I would do most of my schooling at home and then move over. It was a beautiful moment. It was this space that I could finally experience. I still thought the government was going to kill me if I came out. I'd never met another gay individual. I'm in middle of Iowa where the only person that I heard that was gay was literally dragged behind a truck by the football team. This is not something that I'm experiencing, ever. We never, in all of my years of high school, ever mentioned the word "gay" once in my school, which is fascinating to me. I'd now look at their current spaces and be like, that would never happen. But in my space, it was completely normalized. Decided to be a nuclear engineer because my parents wanted me to go to Kansas State University in Kansas-- excuse me. My parents wanted me to go to Pensacola Christian College. Pensacola Christian College didn't have nuclear engineering. I chose nuclear engineering so I wouldn't have to go to Pensacola Christian College. Probably a better reason to choose nuclear engineering than to not go to Pensacola Christian College, but it worked really well, and I liked it, and it was a good academic challenge. Went to university and would later come back out after finding a community, which we can talk about more in the questions space, but then would start talking about the story thinking that other people had gone through exactly what I'd gone through and started realizing that people like Charles and others had gone through this experience. That I wasn't the only one who had gone through these pains and these sufferings. That's why we work on this, is because although that is one story, and there are thousands of others, they're all that wretched mental torture, which is completely legalized in this country. Again, I can't fathom it. We would never allow this to happen to prisoners, and yet we do it to our own children. This is the space that I'm at. Let's talk about how we get that to stop. One, we get professional organizations on our side. If there's an APA in the country-- except for the podiatry association, or something, I don't know-- hahaha, heels. They are against conversion therapy. It is blatantly been shown by professional organizations to not work and be very damaging. Great. So we have professionals on our side. Social workers, medical doctors, psychologists, psychiatrists, everyone says this is a problem. The challenge is that just because you're a professional organization doesn't mean that you actually have control over the entire situation. These organizations actually came out awhile ago saying it, but yet, it was still massively practiced because a lot of people were just ignoring this fact. One, we have special organizations on our side. The problem is we don't have mass education. No one knows that this is still happening, and so because of it, we're not actually making the major strives that we need, which is where you come in. A lot of my friends will every once in a while invoke issues-- both in nuclear weapons and in conversion therapy, be like, the 1980s called. They want their issue back. And I'll be like, 2014 called. Still an issue. We still have many nuclear weapons. In case you didn't know, 23,000 nuclear weapons in the world. Trying to disarm them, but it's a slow-going process. We also have thousands of students who are put through this conversion therapy every single year. The National Center for Lesbian Rights, which I'll cover a little bit more in the future, is starting to work on this issue and starting to really delve into why this is a problem. But a lot of other major LGBT organizations are not. This is my call to them, that they need to start telling these stories. They need to start working together as organizations so that we can actually make a difference. Because if we can be married for 10 years but can still electrocute our kids, something's wrong. This is why we need more of this educational space. We also need to protect those who've gone through this. For myself and for others here at Google and for other survivors across the country, we are highly prone to suicide. Let's talk a little bit about why. You've just gone through conversion therapy with a therapist, so who are you supposed to talk to about your feelings once you're done with conversion therapy? The person who was horrifying traumatic to you? Going into a mental health situation for me was horrible. I couldn't go into-- I can't sit on a couch opposite of a therapist. It took me years to be able to do that. In the last three months, I've finally been able to sit on the couch opposite of another male while we talk about mental health. It took me that long because I couldn't experience all of the trauma again. We have this major issue that we have no one to go to. Our partners-- again, I told you, I puked a few seconds after my very first gay kiss. That's not a very great way to start the date, was just letting you know of that right now. Boyfriends have had to not be able to touch me when I'm crying. That's the moment you want to be there for your friend and your partner, and you can't do it. We feel very alone. Because of that, it obviously leads-- the APA and others have said to substance abuse and suicide and major, major mental health connection problems. I highly recommend, in case you don't have it in your repertoire, the Trevor Project. We work for the Trevor Project. They know about survivors. They know about how to deal with us. Just telling us that it's going to be OK and that it's OK to be gay is not the best system for a person who's just been told for years that it's not OK to be themselves and that by even using the word gay, they're going to eternal damnation. You probably shouldn't use some of those terms. They've worked with these phases, and they're really good helping us deal with it. Connecting a survivor community to say that you're OK as you are, and we're going to work with you to find you the mental health that you need is a very important space. Then we have to work to actually make it stop. Not only do you educate about the history and work with the survivors, which I consider more important, but you also have to make this end. Exodus International-- the group that I told you about, that I was telling you earlier on-- has thankfully been shuttered. It has been changed over in part to the Restored Hope Network. Umbrella organizations are tough, because when you tumble the head, you still have all the babies, and they still keep flying all over doing evil damage. There's more networks that are going to keep coming forward. Until you start actually addressing all of those sites, you're going to have these problems. You also have organizations like Focus on the Family or the Family Research Council, which produces books like, "How to Make Men be Like Men" and "How to Make Women be Like Women," which may seem to only be a slight challenge, but it's obviously conversion therapy. This is blatantly telling you, you're not fitting into the gender identity or the gender spaces that we expect of you to act like, and therefore you must be changed. In case you haven't figured out, I don't always fit into the gender identity and gender expression spaces that I was assigned at birth, but that's OK, because I'm being myself and I'm OK with those spaces. We have to be able to create those self-centering spaces. We also have individuals like Michelle Bachmann. I realize this is now recorded, so there goes my political career, but anyway. You can't really see it, and I apologize for it, but Crazy Eyes, as I lovingly referred to her as-- obviously, if you haven't guessed, ran a presidential campaign and actually did pretty well, whose husband practices conversion therapy on individuals. It's not like this is the most hidden organization and not-talked-about thing. It is blatantly known that Michele Bachmann's husband practices conversion therapy, which means that we had a presidential candidate who the first "lady" would have practiced conversion therapy. That's a problem. When it's not called out for what it is, that's a problem. This is why we're needing each of you to be involved. Here's what we need you to do. The ultimate goal is that anyone under 18 should not be able to undergo conversion therapy. It should be outlawed. Some of you are like, whoa, what about over 18? I can't stop you from eating as many Big Macs as you want. You can do it. It's not good for you. I can tell you all the health. I can put as many warnings on it as possible, but I can't stop me you doing it, necessarily. I can stop you from force feeding Big Macs to children because that's called abuse. What I'm doing is I'm creating a space where at least I can get the children out of the home or into a safe space where they can learn about the damages that this can cause. Over 18, you shouldn't do it. Conversion therapy is bad, it's harmful. But I can always try to warn you as a person who will have to choose to go through all of this red tape and say OK, I want to make this damage happen. Under 18, you don't have that option. You never had that choice. That's what I'm trying to protect first. I know we can have a debate about that, and I'm totally fine with it, but that's at least where we're starting. Let's go with that space. This is literally the best week to be presenting this. On Monday, for the very first time in my life-- hopefully not the last, because nuclear waste is going to be solved at some point-- I was interviewed for Time Magazine. We had the front page of Time talking about the Born Perfect campaign. This is actually San Francisco. This is the Golden Gate Bridge Park, and I actually went to the same spot on Monday just to remember what it felt like to be there. This is a campaign from the National Center of Lesbian Rights specifically targeted to end conversion therapy. The first campaign of its kind. There's no country that has outlawed it, but there are two states which have, and I'll talk a little bit about those. This is a space where we can actually start to have a conversation about conversion therapy on a national scale. We can actually begin to make this something that is important and a conversation. I will talk a little bit more about Born Perfect and I'm happy to answer questions, but I wanted you to know that this finally becoming a space. Our two successes far, of many, is Senate Bill 112 here in California. I'm literally talking to the choir. You're the very first time I've ever spoken about this in California. It's the time that I can actually say, you've already done it. Because no other state has, really, so it's been a lot of work. You have actually made it illegal for conversion therapy to occur here in California. To those of you who are watching, you haven't. You have work to do. Or if you're watching in California, you're kind of-- anyway. The second state that we have made it illegal is in New Jersey. A Republican governor and a Democratic governor have both signed legislation making this illegal. This is a nonpartisan. When this gets to a vote, it is very hard to say no, I really want to shock my children. That is not something that is a very easy thing to argue. Yes, there will be arguments against us. There will be First Amendment issues that they're going to try to raise. There are going to be religious exemptions that they're going to try to raise. But in general, when we get this to a vote, is pretty one-sided that we're going to win. The challenge is just that we don't have enough education about people talking about this. There are amazing other survivors other than myself. There are not a lot of us who are able to speak about it. Again, what I just went through-- not to sound sad-- was traumatic. I'm going to have trauma tonight because of what we talked about. And that's OK, because it's important space. Other survivors do the same exact thing, but it is very hard for us to do it because we don't always have the strongest network of people who support us. There's Deb, who I just met this weekend, and as another person of faith, is recognizing that the traumas that she was put through, yes, happened in the name of faith, but do not represent that faith. There's Ryan, who worked here in California to pass the bill and just graduated from Columbia, a champion among these spaces who stands beside me. We hug each other knowing that it hurts, and look at each other saying, well, we made it through another day. There's Matthew, who's working to currently get the bill passed in New York State, a man who recognizes that the trauma that he went through does define his path, but does not define his future and recognizes that although he may have had a horrible experience, he can do great things with his story. These survivors like myself are trying to get the word out and are trying to get the space out, but there's not very many of us and we need people like you to share our stories and to share what is going on, so that it doesn't happen again. Here's where we are. You can see New Jersey and California, orange, which is, first of all, not a beautiful color to wear. I'm just, as your fashion police, be very careful with it. Be very careful if you're going to wear orange. Anyway. Sorry, dejection. Orange, yay, states that we've passed. Green are states with active legislation, and yet even more are considering legislation. Each day, we have more and more spaces with the National Center for Lesbian Rights and other organizations coalescing to say, this has got to stop. 12 states alone this legislative cycle have added legislation just considering it. This is the definition of the beginning of a movement, and we're excited. When I got the invitation to come and speak, this is exactly the spaces that we can actually start making a difference. We can start taking this story out there. As you can see, they're starting to take over. We will, in five years, have eradicated this horrible torture. Now it's your turn-- because I went to a school that gave me a lot of homework, so it's my turn to give homework. First, you need to tell people about this session. You can mention the bright red stilettos. You can mention the red mohawk. I don't care what you say. But you need to talk about this awesome session-- well, it was awesome. There's other options. It was an awesome session-- this awesome session that you went to, and then take the story out. That's a very important space. Talk about Born Perfect. It just came out on Tuesday. There's so much press about it right now that it's something that you need to be at this moment catalyzing. Then, read an article about this. My story is one voice. There's many other voices out there, and I want you to be able to get a perspective of how wide the range can be. Also, I know that we're at Google, but Facebook friends. I have a public page where I talk about all of these spaces. Please go on and actually check out the page and we'll happily have a conversation. This is my Gmail account. I changed it this morning so it wasn't my MIT email address. I was like, ah yes. This is how I'll tailor it to you guys. There you go. You're welcome. I would happily have a conversation with you also about these kinds of spaces. That's where we wrap up the conversation here. I'm looking forward to your questions. Like I said, please don't make me just stand up here looking pretty. We'll obviously take questions from the stream, as well. Thank you for being here. I hope that was helpful. You can't choose what you never chose, but you can change this horrible torture to make sure it doesn't happen to another child. Thank you. [APPLAUSE] AUDIENCE: My parents didn't believe in therapy. They sent me to a doctor. They gave me hormones. I had a hormone treatment for like three years that sent me up and down, up and down all the time until I went to therapy. The therapist was like, you should get off of all the medicines. The law will include something like that? Or it's going to be just-- SAMUAL BRINTON: That is a great question. We talk a lot about therapies that also-- and especially in this legislation, that identify with gender identity-- I would consider a good lawyer would be able to connect that forcing hormones onto someone is probably somehow related to how you're expecting their gender expression or their gender identity to coalesce. I would say that in my non-lawyer experience, that is something that would definitely be covered. Because it's connected to trying to change someone's sexual orientation or gender identity spaces. There are stories like this of overloading a boy with testosterone because you really think it'll make him a man, which, if you haven't guessed, is not the best system for your health. Be very, very, very careful as it's going through. One, thank you for sharing your experience, because that's a very important thing and a very hard thing, sometimes, to share. But yes, these types of legislation will help correct that. Thank you for asking. AUDIENCE: Also not a lawyer, but the California law, the way I was reading it, said something specific about mental health professionals. Does that wording make it limiting? Do you wish that would be more broad? SAMUAL BRINTON: This is why I shouldn't just have Sam up here. The first space that I'll enter would be yes, it is limiting. That is partially how you get some of these bills through, is by limiting it to licensed mental health professionals and making that addressed. Other conversations also start to relate it to a responder. Anyone like a librarian or a teacher or someone that can hear-- someone that is forced to tell about abuse, some of the legislation is also starting to address them, as well, saying that this is not something-- if you hear about this and it's not through a mental health professional, at least we can find you and say no, that's something we can protect against. You can't take a license away from someone who doesn't have a license. Religious organizations will probably practice this for the rest of time, unless I can figure out a way to stop it. I may not able to find every little camp. I may not be able to find every pastor. But I can make it something that culturally is unacceptable. Three years ago-- again, we wish we would've screen shot this-- if you would have looked up conversion therapy, it would've been Exodus International, the very first one, with lists of providers. Everything would've been about these positive spaces about how to get connected. And now, it is holy crap, this is a horrible thing. It's illegal in two states. It's much more difficult for people to get access to it. That's kind of the way that I address this. We actually have a lawyer in the room, so if I'm not completely correct, we can correct some of those spaces. But that's a space that as I see it, is that yes, it's directly addressing mental health professionals, but it's also by proxy affecting everyone else because it's getting that reporting spin. Is that correct? AUDIENCE: It is correct. SAMUAL BRINTON: Yeah. AUDIENCE: You said that in the beginning, you loved God, and you believed in God and Jesus and all that. How exactly has your situation changed? Has it altered it at all? And if so, how did you get through that? SAMUAL BRINTON: Great question. Definitely. My degree is partially in system dynamics. This system has been quite dynamic in my faith journey. Initial therapy, why does God hate me? Post therapy, God hates me, but at least I can act like-- I had to go to church every Sunday anyway, so I might as well act like the space. Second coming out, where I find that I'm not alone, and I have been involved in inter varsity. I have been involved in all of these organizations, because that was my community who then again turned against me, and that was last straw. Like, come on, God. You're not going to do this twice to me. I rejected, went to study abroad in Shanghai, China, and found an underground church and realized that these people were dying for the faith that they held. If something was that important, maybe I should least understand why I rejected it. And then starting to have the study of whoa, this is the concept of man made religion versus personal relationship. That's how I started to evolve and move to. Ah, I just used the word "evolved." That's really funny. I still don't understand evolution. I've been trained for many, many years on how to refute it. I'm an MIT graduate who doesn't necessarily quite believe in evolution, which is really, really confusing. Ah, but I just used the word "evolved." Yay. Moving forward. Or backward. I don't know. Heathen. Liberal heathens, anyway. The space for that, to get back to your question, is that currently I live in a space where I believe that interpretation, in the past, has been damaging and that relationship in the current and future is enlightening. I find it as a space where I can connect, where I can center, and where I can find a home. That doesn't mean that I have to be in a specific denomination. I was raised Southern Baptist and I still feel the most comfortable in Baptist churches, but I can go to a Catholic mass and sing beautiful music and realize that that's OK for me at that time. I can go to a Unitarian Universal Church and see a message that is in line with what I'm believing because it's a relationship space. I know that this conversation is kind of interesting because it's about conversion therapy, but a lot of conversation therapy is centered around these faith conversations, so welcome to Google having a lot of faith conversation right now. But that's an important space for me. It's good in my life. I don't prescribe it to others because I don't want to force a way of thought on others, but don't take it away from me. I think a big part of the LGBT community is so anti-faith because of what has happened that they're damaging their own brothers and sisters and non-identified individuals. I should be able to practice my faith. That isn't something you should be taking away from me. You should be supporting. OK, you found it. Not for me, but you found it. That's how I address it right now. It's not always easy. I do personally love also getting into the arguments about faith, because you get a lot of battle. I'm a missionary kid, so I can quote a lot of these verses in the original Greek and Aramaic. I can be like, OK, I just quoted you the verse. If you can translate that for me, we can have a conversation. OK, so we're done. That's the space that I'm at, in that you have to study this issue. You have to know what you're talking about rather than just being told what to believe. It is a personal moment, and especially when it comes to my sexual orientation and my gender identity, you don't get to define it for a God that you haven't talked to about this specifically. Yep, that's where I'm at. AUDIENCE: This is in no way meant to be an attack or anything like that. I'm just speaking towards inclusion. I'm just curious, for the Born Perfect message, which I think is really bold and captures this, but does that really speak to our trans friends? SAMUAL BRINTON: A great question, and one that we've been getting a little bit of. We are born perfect and we tell our story. I'm sorry, we. I sometimes identify in that space, sometimes not. So I won't speak as a member. I will speak trying to represent that space. Trans individuals are born perfect, we just aren't listening to them. We're not hearing the stories that they're telling us, and we're not hearing that what we're identifying them as and what we're placing on them is not perfect. I feel that Born Perfect captures that sentimentality, that internally, we are born perfect. We're born the way we're supposed to be. We're just not listened to sometimes. Whether that be in sexual orientation or whether that be in gender identity, the stories aren't getting heard. This is a campaign to say no. No longer. Let them be who they are. That's the way I would address that question. Thank you, again, everyone, so much. [APPLAUSE]