I have personally (and recently) seen examples of people trying to conflate exploratory and supportive therapy with conversion therapy. A friend of mine has a son who is a transgender teenager and something of a minor YouTube personality. He mostly posts positive vlogs about his experiences living as a trans teen, but recently he posted a piece that was a little more controversial, a series of tips about how teenagers who are forced into conversion therapy against their will can subvert the process and avoid being sent to disciplinary camps or other punitive institutions, which can be a real problem in the United States.

His videos don’t typically get a ton of traffic, but this one got mobbed, mass reported, and comment bombed.

The typical commenter tried to conflate involuntary conversion therapy with the kind of genuine therapy provided by gender-specialist clinicians who help teenagers explore their identities and options.

Basically, they accused him of urging teenagers to subvert supportive therapy, when he was actually doing the opposite.

Obviously, it is neither supportive nor exploratory to begin a clinical relationship with trans-identifying or questioning teenager when the presupposed correct outcome is convincing them that they are not or should not be transgender.