Trans conversion therapy survivor was strapped to a chair and electrocuted repeatedly

TW: Conversion therapy, abuse

It was meant to be Carolyn Mercer’s first day at college, but she simply couldn’t face going because of the tensions swirling round her head.

Carolyn, then presenting as male, was experiencing intense gender dysphoria. The first person she spoke to about this was her vicar, who happened to pop round on the very same day she was set to go to college.

He told her that he knew a psychiatrist who would help her, and subsequently Carolyn was referred for treatment at a local hospital.

It was here that the 17-year-old was taken into a dark room and strapped to a wooden chair, with electrodes attached to her arms. She was terrified and surrounded by walls plastered with pictures of women.

Electric shocks were sent repeatedly through Carolyn’s body. Her arm shot up in the air every time the switch was flicked. This went on and on until finally it was over.

“At the end of the process, I regretted not the pain, not the humiliation, not the self-hatred,” Carolyn tells me. “At the time, I regretted that it didn’t work.” Years later, she understood the truth: “It can’t work, it’s a natural part of me.”

The government says it will ban conversion therapy…but not for trans people

Carolyn is now 74 years old. Her experience of what we now call conversion therapy was back in 1964. And 58 years later, the practice is still not banned in the UK.

Conversion therapy is, according to Stonewall’s definition, “any form of treatment or psychotherapy which aims to change a person’s sexual orientation or to suppress a person’s gender identity.”

While successive governments have repeatedly promised to prohibit the practice, a ban is yet to materialise. Everything changed last month when a Downing Street spokesperson said that while the government will outlaw conversion therapy for gay or bisexual people, this ban will not cover trans people.

Having gone through the practice herself, Carolyn is unsurprisingly angry. “If the government says it’s acceptable then it’s going to continue and get worse,” she says.

‘I remember wanting so much to be female’

Carolyn first became aware she had “gender issues” when she was just four years old. She vividly recalls playing a game with her sister in which the pair would swap clothes and pretend to be each other. “I remember wanting to so much to be female,” Carolyn tells me.

From that moment on, Carolyn started to “lock things inside.” She thought she was “wrong” and with no literature or internet to help her come to terms with the way she was feeling, she began to hate herself.

Carolyn attended an all-boys secondary school and threw herself into traditionally masculine pursuits like rugby, boxing and weightlifting. In hindsight, Carolyn concedes she did this “to prove to other people that I wasn’t soft, or effeminate in anyway.”

At 13 years of age, Carolyn was finally confronted with the language that would later give shape to her identity. This came in the form of a newspaper article about a trans person. The paper in question chose to grotesquely sensationalise this individual, only adding to Carolyn’s turmoil and commitment to “keep everything a closely-guarded secret.” Unfortunately for Carolyn, this moment would grimly foreshadow an incident later in her life.

News reporters fabricated stories about Carolyn and took pictures of her without her consent

Carolyn’s dysphoria continued throughout school and long after she underwent conversion therapy. She went onto become a teacher and then a headteacher after that, all the while seeing different psychiatrists about the issues she was facing.

At 40 years of age, Carolyn was referred to Charing Cross gender identity clinic. This was when she started taking hormones, in her words, to see if she could “approximate a female presentation.”

At school, however, she was still presenting as male. The school was thriving under Carolyn’s guidance, but then one day in 1994, some tabloid reporters heard rumours about Carolyn and started fabricating stories.

Carolyn hadn’t spoken openly about her gender dysphoria, but headlines like “Headteacher wants sex change” started appearing in the national press. One reporter wrote that she wore a bra under her suit to school, something Carolyn says is completely untrue. “They made up things to make a better story because I wouldn’t talk with them,” she tells me.

After a disciplinary hearing found that Carolyn had done nothing wrong, she returned to school to teach, deciding to continue presenting as male. She even had a bilateral mastectomy to remove any breast tissue, to “try and make a go of it.”

Carolyn maintains that she’s never had any problems from parents or schoolchildren alike and is still in contact with many of them to this day.

Today’s media coverage of trans people is ‘poisonous’ and ‘vicious’

I asked Carolyn how she thought media coverage of trans people has changed since then, to which she said: “If you’d have asked me three or four years ago, I would have said that it’s improved enormously.”

She said that media coverage today has become “poisonous” and “vicious,” putting this down to various groups not trying to understand one another. “They’ve tried to argue not to have dialogue,” she tells me.

‘You can be miserable for the rest of your life or you can try to do something about it’

Carolyn says she’s only ever had one positive experience with a psychiatrist in her life. This came in 2000, bringing with it a moment of epiphany.

Up until this point, Carolyn had been trying and failing to understand the way she was. A psychiatrist told her that she didn’t have to understand her identity, she just had to accept it.

“For the first time ever, a professional said to me whatever decision you take I will help you with it,” Carolyn says. “That was for me a green light. You don’t have to understand it, you just have to accept it. This is me. You have choices. You can be miserable for the rest of your life or you can try to do something about it.”

Carolyn knew that while she couldn’t heal the wounds inflicted by the past decades of her life, she did have hope for the future. From 2002, Carolyn started openly presenting as a woman.

Conversion therapy ‘destroys lives’

Two decades later and Carolyn is in a much better place. She hopes that no one will ever have to go through any form of conversion therapy and thinks that the government’s recent decision to not cover trans people with the proposed ban is nothing short of unacceptable.

While the specific method of conversion therapy Carolyn endured is much less common today, and certainly not available on the NHS, different types of physical, emotional and psychological conversion therapy still take place.

“Where you have counselling that is neutral, that doesn’t have a particular outcome in mind, that is genuine counselling,” she tells me. “Where you have a pre-determined outcome, that is not counselling, that is bullying. That is the conversion practice that needs to be stopped because it destroys lives.”

Carolyn adds: “For forty years I physically shook every time I thought of the conversion therapy I went through. I’m still suffering from this lack of positive emotion. That’s what imposing this feeling of self-hatred as on you.”

Related stories recommended by this writer:

• ‘It’s upsetting and disgusting’: Young trans people on the muddled conversion therapy ban

• The media needs to stop demonising trans people – this Bristol Uni case is a prime example

• Conversion therapy ban will go ahead but won’t cover trans people