Canada Frog-Marches on to Progressive Hell

Call me Ishmael.

My gauche columnist pal Xerxes is currently celebrating Canadian Bill C-6, “An Act to Amend the Criminal Code (conversion therapy).” He endorses it as a breakthrough in recognizing human rights, and titles his column “Conversion therapy is criminal coercion.”

In charity, I can only say that he has been misinformed. Bill C-6 is not about therapy done, in Xerxes’s words, “against a person’s will.” That would already be a serious crime: kidnapping. No need for any new law.

Rather, the law bans conversion therapy as such: defined as “a practice that seeks to change an individual's sexual orientation to heterosexual, to repress or reduce non-heterosexual attraction or sexual behaviours, or to change an individual's gender identity to match the sex they were assigned at birth.” It prohibits advertising or profiting from such a service.

This is discriminatory: it bars homosexuals from a treatment they might desire. And not only for religious or ethical reasons. Think about it from their perspective. Imagine the situation if perhaps 98% of those to whom you are physically attracted are uninterested in a relationship at best. And you usually do not know which ones. Only once you get past those overwhelming odds do you begin to encounter the level of failure in love that makes all the rest of us suffer so much; that caused the suicide of sorrowful young Werther. The constant rejection, the constant unrequited eros, must be crippling to one’s self-image and emotional well-being.

But now any escape from this situation, if possible, is prohibited.

It also opens any religious group to prosecution and suppression. For all major established religions preach that homosexual sex is sinful, and that one should resist such temptations. Doesn’t this make religion per se a “service that seeks to change an individual’s sexual orientation”?

Far from advancing human rights, this directly violates the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Article 18: “Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.”

This is without getting in to the issue of seeking to realign one’s “gender identity” with one’s biology, one’s actual sex. If we accept this logic, we would have to make all psychiatry illegal as discriminatory: its entire purpose is to align our thoughts with external, physical reality.

Perhaps there is an argument to be made, that psychiatry in all cases violates our freedom of thought. Perhaps we want to argue, too, that psychiatry must never be permitted, as it is now, to impose treatments against a patient’s will. But that is another discussion.

Merriam-Webster defines “delusion” in its psychological sense as: “a persistent false psychotic belief regarding the self or persons or objects outside the self that is maintained despite indisputable evidence to the contrary.”

To prohibit care to anyone with this particular delusion, that although they are biologically male, they are “really” a woman, or vice versa, is discriminatory; we would not refuse treatment for any other psychosis. And the suicide rate for those with this condition is extremely high.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30009750/

Not to mention that this delusion, or belief, regularly leads to self-mutilation and other behaviours dangerous to health: hormone treatments and cutting off portions of one’s anatomy.

Your response, gentle reader, might be that such therapies do not work, and so, like fortune-telling, they can be prohibited as a form of fraud. However, Canada’s criminal code needs to be consistent: the laws against witchcraft and fortune-telling have been removed. Nor do we ban chiropractic, or herbalism, or any number of medical and psychiatric practices that have no scientific proof of efficacy.

Does conversion therapy work? While any given approach might or might not, the proposition that one’s ideas cannot be changed with regard to either one’s perceived gender or one’s sexual orientation is obviously untrue. We are not robots; we can change our minds, and it is dehumanizing to suggest we cannot. Many people do attest to having changed their minds about either their sexuality or their gender. We hear frequently enough of people who have been living as a heterosexual declaring themselves homosexual, or as a man declaring themselves a woman. It is inconsistent to assume that all such transitions can only be in one direction, away from biological reality. And probably you, like I, know some personally whose convictions have indeed moved in the opposite direction. Although such contrary movements are never reported in the media.

Human rights are now subverted wholesale.