When Kate McCobb was 25, she began seeing a Berkeley, California therapist who told her he specialized in helping individuals cope with trauma. Instead, Lloyd Willey, Kate’s therapist, became fixated on her sexual orientation, according to a lawsuit filed against Wiley by the National Center for Lesbian Rights (NCLR) last summer. Willey repeatedly told Kate that her identity as a lesbian was “pathological,” according to the suit, and pressured her to change her sexual orientation and become straight. He publicly shamed her during group therapy sessions and urged her to change her appearance to become more stereotypically “feminine,” including losing weight, growing out her hair, wearing make-up, and changing her wardrobe to become “softer” and “sexier.” During group therapy with Kate, Willey pointed to straight women in the group as potential role models. He told her that if she tried hard enough, she could become as “womanly” and heterosexual as they were.

Once, Kate disclosed to Willey that she had begun a new relationship with a woman. Willey harshly criticized her, told her that she had made a “terrible decision” and that it was a “dead-end relationship” from which nothing good could come. Instead, Willey pressured Kate to begin a sexual relationship with one of his male patients. At one point, Willey even urged her to touch this male patient’s arm so that she could “feel the love” they purportedly shared. Willey also pressured Kate to move in with this patient “as an experiment.”

Wiley, the NCLR’s lawsuit alleges, was practicing a form of conversion therapy on Kate, in which therapists attempt to “convert” clients from queer to heterosexual. Over the course of eight years, Kate paid Wiley more than $70,000 for “therapy” that has been discredited by every major medical and mental health association as ineffective, unethical, and dangerous.

Meanwhile, California is considering a bill that makes clear that conversion therapy is a type of business fraud. This lawsuit and legislation highlight a powerful new tool in the fight against a debilitating and still-widespread practice — using consumer fraud laws to protect LGBTQ+ people from the dangers of conversion therapy.

The medical community has known for decades that same-sex attraction is a normal part of human sexuality. There is an enormous body of clinical data and research, also dating back decades, about the effectiveness and necessity of transition-related care for transgender people. So why does conversion therapy still happen?

The Williams Institute estimates that 698,000 LGBT adults have experienced conversion therapy and that 77,000 youth will be subjected to it by a licensed therapist or religious advisor before they turn 18. It is a lucrative business for a small but well-funded segment of anti-LGBTQ+ groups that prey on parents and young people. Many parents are fearful when a child comes out, either because they don’t personally know a gay or transgender person or because they fear that their children’s lives will be all the more difficult. The “snake oil” of conversion therapy endangers those families, sometimes irreparably. It also harms and defrauds young adults who pay thousands of dollars for “treatments” with no scientific credibility.

Because conversion therapy can cause serious harms, including suicide, it is unsurprising that several states have explicitly banned the practice for minors through state licensing laws. To date, ten states and the District of Columbia have passed such laws, in addition to more than thirty cities and counties across the United States. As Governor Jerry Brown said when signing California’s law, these practices have “no basis in science or medicine and they will now be relegated to the dustbin of quackery.”


It was not until the Southern Poverty Law Center’s historic 2015 case against a New Jersey-based conversion therapist group, however, that lawyers began to focus on consumer protection laws to attack these dangerous practices. SPLC obtained a jury verdict finding that “Jews Offering New Alternatives for Healing (JONAH)” violated New Jersey’s consumer fraud statute when it claimed it could “cure” a group of gay men from their same-sex attractions. As a result of the case and the jury’s verdict, JONAH was forced to cease all operations and dissolve as an entity.

Consumer fraud laws typically target business practices that are unfair and deceptive. Conversion therapy fits this description perfectly, as it is premised on the false and dangerous belief that being LGBTQ+ is abnormal and something that can and should be “cured.” In the fight against a practice as dangerous as conversion therapy, it is imperative that the LGBTQ+ community use every strategy has at hand, including consumer protection laws. State legislatures are increasingly considering bills that would expressly recognize that these therapies are a type of consumer fraud. California’s version of such a bill, AB 2943, has already passed the Assembly and is now headed for the Senate. The bill’s author, Assemblymember Evan Low, has been personally touched by conversion therapy’s harmful effects and spoke passionately about the bill during legislative hearings.

Conversion therapy has wreaked havoc on families and individuals for far too long. The LGBTQ+ community will not rest until every conversion therapist is put out of business and consumer protection laws will be a vital part of that fight.

Shannon Minter is the legal director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights, one of the nation’s leading legal advocacy groups for LGBTQ+ people. He has litigated impact cases affecting LGBTQ+ people across the country, including representing same-sex couples seeking the freedom to marry in California and many other states. Minter, a transgender man, is currently counsel in Doe v. Trump, the first case to challenge President Trump’s ban on military service by transgender people.