One patient we helped was brought to his mother's therapist when he came out as a gay and then as transgender. His mother told him he was a sinner and would go to hell. The conversion therapy, as it is in many such cases, was filled with false information about what went wrong in childhood to create a gender identity problem — none of which has any basis in clinical findings. Such damaging counsel serves to bring on feelings of shame and self-loathing that can lead to patients engaging in high-risk and self-harming behavior.