Therapy to change a person’s sexual identity may soon be regulated through a new California law.

The question of whether gay conversion therapy — a kind of therapy designed to change a person’s sexuality, typically from gay to straight — violates the First Amendment, particularly freedom of speech, reached a San Francisco appeals court Wednesday. The bill concerns individuals who are younger than 18, indentifying as homosexual, and would prevent his or her guardian from being able to place him or her in such therapy.

This therapy is implemented by parents who attempt to change their child’s sexuality. Law advocates say conversion could be detrimental to a person’s mental health because it enforces the message that something is wrong with a person. Students and staff from different campus organizations said the law brings the nation one step closer to recognizing that homosexuals should be accepted rather than fixed.

Wyatt Humrichous, an LGBTQ Resource Center worker and sophomore from Chrisman studying political science, said many of the questions that surround the policy concern whether it can be state regulated.

Humrichous said he supports the bill because he doesn’t think minors should be forced into conversion therapy. The therapy process is very harmful for individuals, especially during adolescence, he said.

“Being under 18 is hard for anybody, gay or straight,” he said.

A person’s sexuality isn’t something that can be removed, but rather a complicated part of who they are, Humrichous said.

“I feel like I was gay from the moment I was born,” he said.

Humrichous said his sexual orientation became more apparent to him and developed as he grew up. His parents had their issues when he came out, he said, but he is very thankful no one tried to put him through something like conversion therapy.

Sarah Self, LGBTQ Resource Center worker and graduate student in social work from Lafayette, La., said she became aware of her transgender identity around the age of 11. Attempts for social control through conversion therapy, however, can be very harmful to the individual, she said.

“If this was for anything else (besides sexual identity), it wouldn’t be legal,” she said.

Self said the law should have been implemented sooner.

While resource center workers agreed conversion therapy should be illegal, several organization heads said the therapy has already been banned in their fields.

Social work professor Laura Dreuth Zeman said social workers are not supposed to practice anything the National Association of Social Workers says isn’t within the profession’s boundaries, and that includes conversion therapy. If a parent wants to put a child in therapy under any circumstance and the child doesn’t want it, she said, social workers should respect the rights and desires of the individual regardless of age.

“The profession isn’t about social control,” Zeman said. “It’s about respecting the individual’s rights — respecting the life that they want to have.”

Zeman said the association issued a position statement in 2000 stating social workers would not practice conversion therapy. A social worker who violates these boundaries would cause malpractice liability issues, she said.

She said social workers are also required to report parents who come to them searching for help, which is an action defined as a type of abuse. Zeman said the therapy could cause mental issues comparable to sexual trauma. Because the therapist would cause the trauma, she said, a new alliance with a therapist to heal the resulting problems would be nearly impossible to create.

The child’s parental bond would also be compromised — a fundamental relationship for any individual, she said.

“It’s hard enough to be a gay adult in a lot of America,” she said. “We should try to do as much as we can to foster a nurturing environment between a parent and a child, even if a parent can’t come around and accept them now.”

Therapy should be geared toward fostering the parent and child’s relationship by accepting the child’s homosexuality and creating a supportive relationship rather than trying to change the child’s identity, she said.

“You can’t have a treatment for something that is not a disorder,” Zeman said. “Homosexuality is not a disorder.”

Counseling center director Rosemary Simmons said the American Psychological Association also removed gay conversion therapy from its practices in 2000, and there is no research that shows the therapy’s effectiveness. Most psychological issues associated with homosexuality is a result of societal oppression, she said.

“You just can’t change people’s attraction toward each other,” Simmons said.