Electroshock Therapy Is No Good

I am a 28-year-old woman and I think I may be a lesbian. I am very much depressed due to this. I have come to know that I will never be able to marry and have true a life partner. I am destined either to live alone all my life or to marry a man I don’t love or want and be forced to have children. I often weep in bed due to this. Sometime ago, I read somewhere that psychotherapy can convert a homosexual into a heterosexual. In which hospital can I undergo this therapy? What will be the approximate expenditure I will have to incur?
–Want To Be Cured

I have no intention of telling you where you can get conversion therapy or how much it would cost, because conversion therapy doesn’t work. Being lesbian isn’t a disease or a psychological disorder; it’s a state of self. The other things you mentioned—the possibility of not finding a life partner, the pressure to enter a heterosexual marriage and have children—now, those are problems. But being lesbian itself is not the issue and it’s not something you should seek to change. Obviously, I can’t make you feel better about your orientation. You have to find a place of self-acceptance and peace, and I can’t do it for it for you. But I can tell you that conversion therapy is emotionally and psychologically undermining, and it’s not going to change anything anyway.

As for the other issues, I empathize with your anxiety. It’s absolutely true that as a lesbian woman, you will face a tremendous amount of pressure to get married to a man and have children—and stress, fear, and loneliness of trying to submerge your identity and desires in a heterosexual marriage are no joke. You may also have to confront the possibility of not ever finding a life partner (although in all fairness, everyone has that problem). But ultimately, this is the world we live in: a world of injustice that censures and punishes those who, in their desires and identities, challenge unequal social structures. What can we all do but keep fighting for equality? You are a lesbian woman: you have the right to make your own decisions about what kind of life you want to lead, whether you want to be partnered with anyone, and whether you want have children. It’s as simple as that. While those may not be rights that the state protects with any degree of regularity, they are rights that are yours simply by virtue of being alive. That said, what you need now is a solid support and counseling network to help you work through your feelings of fear and sadness. You can contact any of these organizations for help: Sangama in Bangalore, Sahayatrika in Trivandrum, or the Shakti Center in Chennai. We’re all here to help, and we’re all here for you.