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Lebanon's LGBTQ+ suffer impacts of discredited ‘conversion therapy’

From simple dialogue to electroshock therapy, hormonal treatments or surgery, these “professionals” are convinced that they can “cure” patients of their homosexuality. Once treated, the victims are scarred for life.

Lebanon's LGBTQ+ suffer impacts of discredited ‘conversion therapy’

Illustration: Stéphane Torossian

BEIRUT — When he was 17, his parents made him go through electroconvulsive therapy, says Hassan*.“It all began when I was 13, when I naively asked them why I liked boys. My father took me straight to a forensic doctor to find out if someone had raped me,” he recalls. Hassan remembers being sent to sheikhs and hospitals several times.“They said I had the devil inside me and performed horrible exorcisms on me,” he says. Hassan, who comes from a Shiite family in Sour, has since cut all ties with his mother and father. The 28-year-old struggles to talk about his buried past. In Lebanon, there seem to be all kinds of “conversion therapy,” designed to push LGBTQ+ people of various religious sects toward heterosexuality.While “unnatural sexual relations” are still punishable by law in this country, conversion therapies are not. Health...
BEIRUT — When he was 17, his parents made him go through electroconvulsive therapy, says Hassan*.“It all began when I was 13, when I naively asked them why I liked boys. My father took me straight to a forensic doctor to find out if someone had raped me,” he recalls. Hassan remembers being sent to sheikhs and hospitals several times.“They said I had the devil inside me and performed horrible exorcisms on me,” he says. Hassan, who comes from a Shiite family in Sour, has since cut all ties with his mother and father. The 28-year-old struggles to talk about his buried past. In Lebanon, there seem to be all kinds of “conversion therapy,” designed to push LGBTQ+ people of various religious sects toward heterosexuality.While “unnatural sexual relations” are still punishable by law in this country, conversion therapies are...
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