MSU Must Remove Autistic Conversion Therapy from its Curriculums

In 1961, UCLA psychologist Dr. Ole Ivar Lovaas invented Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) to “fix” autistic children. Using “aversive stimuli” ranging from withholding affection to electrocution, Lovaas and his autistiphobic colleagues attempted to coerce their neurodivergent victims to act like their neurotypical peers. Years later, in the 1970s, Lovaas and his team applied the same techniques to “treat” gay children in a homophobic endeavor called the Feminine Boy Project.

When the Gay Liberation movement pressured the American Psychiatric Association to remove homosexuality from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), the government ceased funding the Feminine Boy Project. But that didn’t stop religious right-wingers from leveraging Lovaas’ work to justify developing what we now call gay conversion therapy, which was banned in the state of Minnesota last summer under executive order from Governor Tim Walz.

ABA, on the other hand, has not been banned in Minnesota or any state in America, largely because autism is still considered a mental disorder in our society, a position I and other members of the Neurodiversity Movement fundamentally oppose, in part because it justifies the systemic abuse levied by the ABA industry onto the autistic community. Indeed, when the autistic community discusses ABA, we call it “autistic conversion therapy” because, contrary to what modern ABA abusers claim, so-called “non-aversive” forms of ABA are still inhumane attempts to turn autistic people into non-autistic people, which is just as physically impossible and traumatizing a task as turning gay people into straight people.

In short, if you’re against gay conversion therapy, you should also be against autistic conversion therapy; for the latter inspired the former. That is why I, an autistic graduate student, am so appalled by the fact that autistic conversion therapy is taught as part of the curriculum in the Department of Psychology at MSU. Not to mention all the other academic programs on campus that teach ABA, and thus train the next generation of professionals to be autistiphobic. (On that note, it isn’t “professional” to be an autistiphobe.)

Predictably, when MSU students graduate from these prejudiced programs, they proceed to work for local autistic conversion clinics like Caravel autism Health. This conveyor belt of autistiphobia, which I call the MSU-ABA Pipeline, is a manifestation of what Anne McGuire termed the “autism industrial complex,” or AIC, which, in essence profits from waging the “War on Autism.”

To dismantle the AIC in my community, I recently wrote a letter to state senator Nick Frentz to advocate banning Autistic conversion therapy in Minnesota. He and I will meet to discuss the issue soon. 

Regardless of how my meeting with Frentz goes, one day, autistic conversion therapy, like gay conversion therapy, will be banned in Minnesota and, with effort, the rest of the U.S. and human society. When that day comes, MSU will be on one of two sides of history: those who stayed ahead of the curve and banned ABA “before it was cool,” and those who conveniently opposed the War on Autism after it ended. The higher-level administrators of MSU still have time to do right by the Autistic community and stop the MSU-ABA Pipeline now, before it’s too late to save their legacies. But their window is closing.

I suggest they move swiftly.

Bruce Wenzel