A Q&A with William Ingaldson, Counsel for the ‘Hot Sauce’ Mom

As an AP I have witnessed that whatever behavior a biochild may do, it is seen as transitional as they will outgrow it or it is a normal kid thing.
BUT... if an adopted child were to do the SAME thing, the child is referred to as a problem child and suggestions are made to the parent to get help for the child.

The adopted child wears an "A" on their shirt as seen by many biased people. My advice to other parents is to protect your child from these biases.

Agreed. There are as many differences as there are similarities, but this story just came to me: Survivor: MIT grad student remembers "ex-gay" therapy

12-year-old Sam had been "punched out cold" by his father, and would end up in the emergency room for similar reasons seven times in quick succession.

"He really thought if he scared me enough I would change," Sam remembers of his father.

At Sam’s mother’s suggestion, he found himself in therapy, happy to face Bibles on a coffee table rather than lying to hospital staff about his injuries.

During his first one-on-one appointment, the session leader?who Sam specifies was a "religious therapist" and not a doctor?told Sam, "I want you to know that you’re gay, and all gay people have AIDS." The therapist then showed Sam pictures of men dying from AIDS, using them as visual indicators of how Sam, himself, would die. Together, the therapist and Sam’s parents instilled in the boy the belief that he was the only living gay person in the world, that the government had killed all the other gay children, and that they’d kill him too if he acted gay. He carried this belief as truth until his second year of college.

Loneliness colored Sam’s thirteen-year-old world. "I’m dying of AIDS, I’m completely alone, and the government is looking for me," Sam remembers feeling. The worst part? Sam’s parents and therapist told him God had abandoned him and his chances at getting into heaven were shrinking every day. "The strongest thing my family has is its relationship to God, and now He hates me," Sam recalls.

For the next few months, the journal Sam kept?read by his therapist?fueled the sessions, which were escalating in intensity. What Sam calls "the first step" of his therapy involved attaching his hands to a table with leather straps, palms up. The therapist placed blocks of ice on each hand and showed Sam pictures of two men holding hands, so that the young boy began to associate touching men with the "burning cold."

"The second step" was similar, but the ice was replaced with copper heating coils that had been wrapped around his wrists and hands. The heat was turned on when pictures of two men holding hands were shown, but turned off when pictures of a heterosexual couple holding hands were shown. Following these sessions, Sam would shudder when hugged by his father, experiencing what he calls "heat flashbacks."

"The third step" accompanied Sam’s first attempt at committing suicide (there have been five). He was strapped into a chair, and small needles were stuck into his fingertips. The needles were attached to electrodes, and Sam received shocks when shown pornographic images of two men engaging in sex acts.

During the months of therapy, Sam was kept in his bedroom "24/7." His parents told his younger sister that Sam had murdered someone, and they were hiding him from the police. Sam says he was "sequestered" to protect his parents’ reputation at the mission.

As for the physical side of his therapy, Sam says of his parents, "they knew what was going on. They said they were going to do whatever it took to save my soul. They wanted me to go to heaven with them."

Though it's not adopition/foster/care-related, I quote this at length to illustrate what parents of nonconforming children will do to them. The mentality is identical: you are to be molded into whatever I say you are. Deviate in any way, and you will be punished and made to wish you were dead.

Because kids in care are fostered and adopted, because kids are gay, because they are vulnerable with disabilities and supposed advocates telling them they should be grateful for their treatment, they easily become walking targets for parental aggressions. It's only really been in the past year or so that much public understanding of the harm these pseudoscientific "diagnoses" that require equally pseudoscientific treatments has started to percolate. It has elicited campaigns like "it gets better".

For young Sam, and a lot of others like me, it got way worse before it got better. And even then, it didn't turn out to be so hot. Adopted kids who get murdered, maimed, damaged by totalitarian parents...their it gets better campaign is coming. But like the 20 years of documentation like the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force's stats on gaybashing (yes, I am one of their stats), "it gets better" didn't just pop up on youtube one day. Even with the stats, pr campaigns, educational drives, and such, there is still a prevailing view that young men like Sam got what was coming to him, being put in the hospital by his father, then subjected to pseudo-medicalized torture.

Anonymous mentioned the coercive and punitive nature of these so-called "therapies" applied to children.  I see a parallel with RAD and holding therapy, and reparative therapy (which do have historical ties), being applied to vulnerable, isolated young adults who do not outgrow whatever behavior bugs the parents. The overlap, of course, is those authoritarian, totalitarian APs who have already been primed for these pretexts to inflict violence on children. I won't mention what religion has the most sects that do it, since it kinda goes without saying at this point.