Banning Conversion Therapy

 

Ex-gay Milo Yiannopoulis

Friend Xerxes has written a column opposing “conversion therapy,” which seeks to shift preferences among those with homosexual attractions in the heterosexual direction. Justin Trudeau has said that, if elected, a ban is an “absolute priority.” The Conservatives and NDP have also promised a ban.

Xerxes’s first argument against conversion therapy is that nobody ever convinced anyone of anything.

Our parliamentary system would not work if this were true.

People on the right, at least, enjoy exchanging accounts of their “red-pill” moments. The religious similarly exchange their conversion stories, most often due to a particular sermon, or a talk with a Christian friend.

Some people, it is true, cannot be persuaded by evidence or argument. These people are the insane. There are a lot of them, the number is growing, and it is not always obvious that they are insane. We tend to see it only when their core beliefs are challenged. They may then become violent or abusive, or they may just ignore what was said and repeat their point. Or they may begin speaking obvious nonsense.

Alcoholics, for example, are insane. It is never rationally coherent to be an alcoholic. 

Are homosexuals insane? That’s a harsh claim. If so, even so, we do not simply give up on other mental illnesses. We do try to offer therapy.

Xerxes’s second argument is that conversion therapy is coercive. 

“You set up a situation where the victim desperately wants a break from the constant barrage of pressure to change. Sleep deprivation. Tag-team arguments. Aversion training. Noise. Pain. Never left alone.”

No existing conversion therapy does any of this, because itr is already illegal. It would be the crime of coercion, or duress. Conversion therapy is necessarily far more like going to a diet centre, or a psychotherapy session, or an AA meeting. Should they be banned?

Another argument that might be made is that conversion therapy does not work: people are born homosexual, we are told, so how could it? Yet I know personally of former homosexuals who have switched; perhaps you do too. There are public examples. And there are many public examples of people who switch from a heterosexual lifestyle, suddenly divorcing and running off with a gay lover. How can we assume it only works one way?

There may be no solid scientific proof that conversion therapy works. There is no solid scientific proof that psychiatry works either, or psychiatric medicines, or AA.

The final argument that might be made is that nobody could possibly have a reason not to want to be gay. But this is obviously false as well. Leave aside for now all possible moral objections to homosexuality. Being homosexual makes it much more difficult, at best, to have a family, to have children and to pass on your genes. It severely limits your choice of partners, and sets you up for a lifetime of mostly unrequited love.

It is unjust and cruel discrimination against homosexuals to ban such therapies. If some homosexuals do not themselves understand this, and actually want such therapies to be made illegal, they are indeed insane.

Not-Gay Milo

 

Milo Yiannopoulos has come out as straight.

Of course this is heresy. We are supposed to believe that homosexuality is a permanent part of a person. Gender may be fluid, but for some reason, not sexual preference.

I know at least one former gay personally who has gone straight. Kathy Shaidle claimed that every homosexual she knew back in high school later went straight. Perhaps your experience is similar. But, as in so many things these days, we must remain silent and deny our doubts. Public people keep telling us that, after living most of their lives as “straight,” they have decided they are really gay. It is absurd to think the transformation can only work one way.

No previous generation supposed there was such a thing as a “homosexual.” There were only urges for homosexual sex, perhaps indulgence, and perhaps addiction to it. Some prefer redheads. 

Were our ancestors, who did not suppose homosexuality was an inborn thing, all fools and idiots? What is the statistical probability of that? 

How does innate homosexuality survive the mechanism of Darwinian evolution? Wouldn’t a genetic condition that prevents reproduction be promptly bred out?

The ancient Greeks assumed that men would practice homosexual sex, at least until marriage. So were all Greeks “born that way”?

Yiannopoulis speaks of it now as an addiction: like alcohol. I think this is exactly right. 

I had always presumed it comes from some early sexual experience with an older homosexual. Yiannopoulis has suggested this was true for him in the past. But in a recent interview with LifeSite News, he gives a possible second factor:

“When I used to kid that I only became gay to torment my mother, I wasn’t entirely joking.”

Perhaps some young men are attracted to homosexual sex because they are repulsed by heterosexual sex. And they may be repulsed because they have suffered sexual abuse.

Allen Ginsberg rather hints as much in his case, remembering his mother in his poem “Kaddish”:

Serving me meanwhile, a plate of cold fish—chopped raw cabbage dript with tapwater—smelly tomatoes—week-old health food—grated beets & carrots with leaky juice, warm—more and more disconsolate food—I can’t eat it for nausea sometimes—the Charity of her hands stinking with Manhattan, madness, desire to please me, cold undercooked fish—pale red near the bones. Her smells—and oft naked in the room, so that I stare ahead, or turn a book ignoring her.

       One time I thought she was trying to make me come lay her—flirting to herself at sink—lay back on huge bed that filled most of the room, dress up round her hips, big slash of hair, scars of operations, pancreas, belly wounds, abortions, appendix, stitching of incisions pulling down in the fat like hideous thick zippers—ragged long lips between her legs—What, even, smell of asshole? I was cold—later revolted a little, not much—seemed perhaps a good idea to try—know the Monster of the Beginning Womb—Perhaps—that way. Would she care? She needs a lover.

I have another acquaintance who became a lesbian seemingly because she was sexually abused by her father.

Yiannopoulis now plans to advocate for “conversion therapy”—officially now illegal in Canada.

It works, he maintains, so long as it has a religious basis.

“Secular attempts at recovery from sin are either temporary or completely ineffective. Salvation can only be achieved through devotion to Christ and the works of the Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church.”

He surely goes too far in saying this is possible only through Catholicism; but Alcoholics Anonymous too maintains that overcoming addiction is only possible through appealing to a “higher power.”

This is why psychiatry and psychology cannot cure mental illness. All they can do is drug down the symptoms. In former days, mental illnesses were regularly cured. They still are in less developed countries, where they still resort to religious methods.

This is not to say that mental illness is caused by personal sin, or by anything justly referred to as addiction—in most cases. But, like addictions, it involves settled habits of thought.

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.