Raised in an ultra-conservative Anglican family, transgender woman Roe Johnson says she spent her childhood being told she was broken.
The 49-year-old from Melbourne says she lived an ideology of repression and was made to choose between her faith and her gender identity.
“My story really starts when I was very young, being part of a family system that was very much dominated and controlled within a religious ideology,” she told SBS News.
The problem doesn't exist in every religious community but Roe says her story is similar to that of others in the trans community who were raised in very religious families.
“Very controlling, very much ‘this is the way you must live, this is the way you must be’."
Roe said she struggled from the age of three until her mid-teens, before choosing to “play the game”, to essentially repress who she was and “pretend to be what they wanted me to be".
“You had to go and talk to a minister, go and talk to the youth pastor or whoever it was, some supposedly caring person that told you, ‘no, that’s not ok, you can’t be like that'," she said.
Roe remained in the church, married twice and had three children, all the while grappling with who she was.
“I was never really able to make life hang together because constantly there was this thing within me that knew I was playing a game,” she said.
“The traumatic experiences of my life were very much grounded in an ideology of brokenness and an ideology of fundamentally not being ok as the person that I am and having to be fixed from that.”
Roe says it took years to find the language to talk about the trauma she experienced - about what she says was a pervasive yet subtle conversion practice and ideology - and to feel confident speaking out about who she is.
“In the mid-2010s, we started to see a lot of trans stories in the media. We saw Caitlyn Jenner, we saw Cate McGregor, we saw a bit more representation, so I started to listen to those stories and I realised those stories were my story.”
‘Informal’ conversion practices
Roe and other advocates, including Nathan Despott from the Brave Network (a support and advocacy group for LGBTIQ+ people of faith), are urging politicians to see the problem of conversion practices as one that runs much deeper than formal so-called ‘therapy’.
“Most of what we see now doesn’t happen in the context of formal practices. It happens in informal settings, in small church groups, it happens undercover and it happens in pastoral care relationships,” Mr Despott said.
A estimated 10 per cent of LGBT Australians were “currently vulnerable to LGBT conversion therapy, being members of religious communities that practice and promote conversion therapy”.
And after years of calls by advocates, the states are beginning to address the issue.
Queensland is taking action with a report on a proposed bill due on 21 February.
Under that legislation, introduced in November, practitioners would face criminal charges and prison if caught proffering formal conversion therapies like aversion therapy, psychotherapy or hypnotherapy to suppress a person’s gender identity or sexual orientation.
But Mr Despott warns similar laws in the US have been too narrow to be effective.
“What we’ve learned around the world is that jurisdictions that try to merely implement a ban, whatever that means, on formal conversion practices such as psychotherapy and psychological therapy to minors doesn’t really work," he said.
"That legislation has often been seen as symbolic but it hasn’t really stopped most of the harm.”
The Brave Network has thrown its support behind Victorian government efforts to craft a bill tackling the issue through civil law. Consultations have been ongoing for five years.
“The legislation we’ve been working on in Victoria for a number of years as advocates with the state government is what we’re hoping will be a gold standard piece of legislation,” Mr Despott said.
“We hope it will institute support for survivors through some kind of redress program, address the transmission of the conversion ideology, which is the belief that LGBTIQA+ people are broken, and also looking at more tightly regulating this nebulous concept of pastoral care which is the context in which most conversion practices occur.”
Religious groups push back
The legislation has the strong support of medical bodies such as the Australian Psychological Society, but religious groups are pushing back.
Christian Schools Australia, in a joint submission with other Christian school organisations in response to the bill, called on the Queensland government to "guarantee that Christian schools can continue to teach a traditional Biblical sexual ethic and a biologically and medically accurate view of sexuality".
In a separate submission, the Christian Medical and Dental Fellowship of Australia suggested "the great majority of children confused over gender will re-orientate to an identity in accordance [with] their chromosomes", and argued that banning conversion practices would force a "crisis of conscience" on therapists.
The Queensland Law Society suggested that the current definition of conversion ‘therapy’ in the legislation is "extremely broad" and may have unintended consequences.
Martyn Iles of the Australian Christian Lobby, which also made a submission on the Queensland bill, advised caution.
“There’s no sense in which I or anyone else would want to delegitimise their stories, but there is a sense in which we can say, ‘alright, let’s learn something from their stories’,” he said.
“But at the same time, it doesn’t give us the platform to embrace laws that effectively go so far as to prevent basic Christian teaching from being expressed that shouldn’t be harmful to people, that should be done in a sensible way. I don’t know that you can legalise ‘sensible’ but you can go too far very easily with laws like this."
Mr Illes said he is particularly concerned by any law that reaches into the family home “and dictates what parents can do and say, or reaches into the pulpit and the scriptures people can read and the prayers they can pray”.
Laws needed 'to regulate harms'
Constitutional law expert Luke Beck rejects suggestion the proposed laws in Queensland and Victoria are an affront to religious teachings.
"This is not about a state trying to regulate what Christians or other religious groups can and can't believe. It's simply a law proposed to regulate harms that might be inflicted upon people,” the Monash University associate professor said.
“There is a legitimate debate and question around ‘what is the best way of doing this?’" he said.
“Will the criminal law path work? Or do you go down the civil law path and create regulations that, yes, prohibit the practise but don’t do so in a way that drives it underground, and have associated community education programs to try to prevent these practices happening in the first place.”
As the states edge closer to action, Roe just wants those involved to realise the impact it could have on the LGBT community.
“We’re just a fabulous bunch of people, we just want to live our lives and be who we are, “ she said.
“We just want equality, we just want inclusion, we just want to walk down the street without having slurs yelled at us, without being shoved and pushed, called names.”
“That’s our agenda: to live our lives safely.”
LGBTIQ+ Australians seeking support with mental health can contact QLife on 1800 184 527 or visit
