Trump-Headlined Anti-LGBT Summit Featured Gay Conversion Therapy Exhibit, Guidance on ‘Overcoming Transgenderism’

“Ex-Gay is OK!”

Donald Trump became the first sitting president to headline the anti-LGBT Values Voter Summit Friday, which not only promoted the “health hazards of homosexuality,” but also featured an exhibit on gay conversion therapy and offered guidance on “overcoming transgenderism.”

Business Insider reported late Friday that the summit’s convention “featured an exhibit on gay conversion therapy, which seeks to navigate homosexuals and their family members from an anti-gay perspective.”

The report continued:

The Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays and Gays (PFOX) organization, which was founded in 1998 “to be an alternative to the misinformed gay family groups which insist that parents can only prove their love for their gay child if they support gay rights and affirm their child’s self-proclaimed gay identity,” distributed a number of pamphlets and literature about guiding families on what do when they learn their child is gay. The pamphlets include two descriptions of the types of homosexuals: “the struggler” and “the seeker.”

According to PFOX, a “struggler” is “someone wrestling with unwanted feelings of sexual attraction for the same-sex,” while a “seeker” is “someone who has been, or [is] currently, on the journey of overcoming unwanted same-sex attraction.”

Attendees were given free buttons along with pamphlets and other materials:

Business Insider further reported that additional materials offered “guidance on dealing with being transgender, citing one individual who ‘overcame’ his transgenderism and converted back to being a man after having transitioned to being a woman.”

They continued:

“Affirming gender dysphoria via public education and legal policies will confuse children and parents, leading more children to present to ‘gender clinics’ where they will be given puberty-blocking drugs,” another document being distributed by PFOX claimed. “This, in turn, virtually ensures that they will ‘choose’ a lifetime of sterility, toxic cross-sex hormones, and likely consider unnecessary surgical mutilation of their healthy body parts as young adults.”

The Trump administration has a longstanding relationship with gay conversion therapy. In 2000, Vice President Mike Pence proposed that Congress should audit their federal spending to ensure that “federal dollars were no longer being given to organizations that celebrate and encourage the types of behaviors that facilitate the spreading of the HIV virus.”

At the time, Pence was running for Congress, and advised that “resources should be directed toward those institutions which provide assistance to those seeking to change their sexual behavior.”

The administration has ignited a war with the LGBT community, despite the (clearly false) claims of the president that he was a friend. This week, they pulled support for the historic Stonewall National Monument, designated by President Obama in honor of the Stonewall Uprising, a launching point of the modern LGBT civil rights movement.

They further worked to ensure that the first permanent pride flag on federal land, raised Wednesday, would be certified as adjacent to the monument: and thus, technically not on U.S. government property.

Neil Gorsuch, an advocate for religious exemptions that have been used to gut LGBT civil rights, was named as Associate Justice on the U.S. Supreme Court in a seat stolen from President Obama.

Trump completely ignored the first Pride Month after marriage equality and the massacre at Pulse in Orlando, issuing no White House proclamation and holding no White House events.

On a tweet-storm whim, the president announced a total ban of transgender service members in the military, a move still hotly-contested that’s left transgender men and women willing to die for this country in stasis.

And within this month alone, the Trump administration argued in court that gay workers weren’t protected from discrimination under federal law, didn’t support a U.N. resolution condemning the death penalty for same-sex relations and rescinded Obama-era government policy protecting transgender workers from discrimination.

Furthermore, Attorney General Jeff Sessions issued a sweeping order prioritizing “religious liberty” over the civil rights of LGBT Americans.

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