I was kicked out of Girls’ High for being gay in the 1970s. Not enough has changed in this country.

I wasn’t quite 16 in the 1970s when I was expelled from the Philadelphia High School for Girls — Girls’ High — for being a lesbian.

As I sat next to my father across the desk from the principal, she said that I was a “bad moral influence” on the other (more than 2,000) girls at the school. She held up newspaper clippings from the Village Voice about a group called “Radicalesbians” and said I was spreading “controversial political views” about gay liberation. The principal also claimed I was “engaging other girls in reading obscene materials.” On this, she had a point: I had purloined some (now classic) lesbian pulp novels I’d discovered on a high shelf in the library of a married couple from our church that I babysat for, and was passing them around to my friends.

Driving home after our meeting with the principal, my father, rarely at a loss for words, said: “I don’t understand. You’re pretty and boys like you.”

My grandmother, mother, and sister all graduated from Girls’ High. When I was expelled, I became a family scandal. My mother and father — socialist civil rights workers and graduates of Seven Sisters and Ivy League colleges, respectively — were educated leftists, not religious fanatics. Yet they decided the best course of action to deal with this familial crisis was to have me involuntarily committed to a nearby mental institution for conversion therapy to “de-gay” me, a popular treatment for adolescents in the 1970s.

Conversion therapy is the now largely discredited, pseudoscientific practice of attempting to change a person’s sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression.

The adolescent unit of the Eastern Pennsylvania Psychiatric Institute was not unlike scenes from the film Girl Interrupted or even One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. It was a psychiatric hospital, stripped bare of warmth and niceties. Daylight filtered through windows covered in chicken wire. Patients in various states of zombified medicalization meandered around or just sat, staring blankly. You are not there to be comforted — you are there to get better from your illness and, with luck, leave.

» READ MORE: I’m a trans teen in Central Bucks. Here, it doesn’t ‘get better.’

My illness was lesbianism and I was told every day in myriad increasingly more brutal and soul-crushing ways that I was not a lesbian. I was not who I thought I was. I did not love my girlfriend. I was not attracted to other girls.

One day I was told that my “obsession” with other girls was “not normal.” I was told that this was a phase that some girls go through. I was told that I would naturally outgrow it but that this therapy would speed up the process. There were a dozen other girls undergoing this “therapy” with me.

We were medicalized, we were traumatized, we were lied to and berated and mimicked and brutalized. We were made to cry and vomit and want to peel our own skin off. Yet we were meant to leave the “program” fully de-gayed and ready to embrace the heterosexual selves we were told we were — and who our parents had paid for us to become.

After several weeks, I left the hospital sick, despondent, rageful, and just as lesbian as when I went in. I started cutting myself soon after — something I did for more than a dozen years, a packet of razor blades in my pocket or purse. Decades later, the fine scars are still there on my inner arms and thighs. I ran away from home several times, once landing in Philadelphia’s juvenile justice center. I attempted suicide and was forced back into therapy.

At no point did I stop being lesbian.

Psychiatric conversion therapy is still legal everywhere in the United States for adults and only banned in fewer than half the states for minors. (Not Pennsylvania, which has only banned the use of taxpayer funds for conversion therapy, a measure that doesn’t cover private and faith-based providers.) At least 700,000 adults living in the United States have undergone conversion therapy.

I left the hospital sick, despondent, rageful, and just as lesbian as when I went in.

In the 1980s, I became an activist against conversion therapy, appearing frequently on local and national television and radio programs to challenge these programs and their deleterious impact.

I never thought, when conversion therapy radicalized me as a queer activist at 16, that decades later I would still be fighting this dangerous practice, that it would still be legal everywhere, or that a major political party would be incorporating it into its platform under the guise of “parental rights.”

Yet here we are.

The Republican Party now believes gay and trans people like me can be legislated out of existence. Since Donald Trump took office in 2017, there has been an escalating movement toward legislation that restricts LGBTQ civil rights and civil liberties. Along with the various “don’t say gay” bills that prevent teachers from discussing sexual orientation, at the recent Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) there were calls to eradicate “transgenderism.” Make no mistake: That’s a call for a mass conversion-therapy event.

For non-queer people, it may be hard to imagine what it is like to be under constant threat because of your sexual orientation or gender identity. It’s likely impossible to envision being told as a teenager that you are not who you know yourself to be — that you, the real you, doesn’t exist and shouldn’t exist. Yet this has been happening for decades, long before I was kicked out of Girls’ High, and it’s still happening everywhere in this country, as legislation tries to eradicate gender-affirming care for trans teens and end any discourse about sexual orientation that is not strictly heterosexual for LGBTQ kids.

And that discrimination doesn’t end in adulthood — far from it. LGBTQ elders face ongoing barriers, with a significant percentage of queer and trans seniors facing homelessness and food insecurity. I’m a recent widow. Along with mourning the death of the woman I first dated when we were students at Girls’ High, I am fighting for spousal benefits, which would be less of a struggle if we had been straight. And if some of the Supreme Court’s conservative justices have their way, Obergefell v. Hodges — the 2015 ruling that legalized gay marriage — will be overturned.

The teenage lesbian that I was never fully recovered from the trauma of conversion therapy. It didn’t — couldn’t — “cure” me. But conversion therapy left me with literal scars. It’s unconscionable that, after that experience turned me into a queer activist so many years ago, I’m still fighting to protect another generation of kids from the same attempts to deny them their identity.

Yet here we are. Still.

Victoria A. Brownworth is a Philadelphia writer and author of nearly 20 books, including the award-winning “Too Queer: Essays From a Radical Life” and “Coming Out of Cancer: Writings From the Lesbian Cancer Epidemic.” @VABVOX