Bill C-6's next step is on to the Senate once the House of Commons holds a third reading vote. I expect the usual suspects like Senator Plett will do their level best to muddy the waters and confuse things. Let's take a closer look at what the uproar is really about.
What Is Conversion Therapy?
320.101 In sections 320.102 to 320.106, conversion therapy means a practice, treatment or service designed to change a person’s sexual orientation to heterosexual, to change a person’s gender identity or gender expression to cisgender or to repress or reduce non-heterosexual attraction or sexual behaviour or non-cisgender gender expression. For greater certainty, this definition does not include a practice, treatment or service that relates to the exploration and development of an integrated personal identity without favouring any particular sexual orientation, gender identity or gender expression.
I'm going to dive a bit into the world of "therapist speak" here, so please bear with me. In short, this is any therapy that is intended to coercively persuade a client to change their sexual orientation or gender identity. The key word here is coercive - such treatments are designed to "change" the client rather than help them come to terms with their feelings.
Attempting to "fix" people by changing how they feel about something is both very dangerous from a therapeutic perspective (you can cause much deeper damage resulting in psychological trauma), as well as deeply unethical practice.
Conversion therapy is not new - it has masqueraded under a variety of guises over the years, perhaps most infamously as "Reparative Therapy" coming out of the ex-Gay movement in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Organizations like National Association for Research and Treatment of Homosexuality (NARTH *they have since rebranded themselves) attempted to wrap some kind of clinical / academic validity around the idea that you could "change someone's sexual orientation", but at the end of the day their work barely rises to the level of junk science. The studies are profoundly flawed, and we have more than a few examples of people who claimed to have been "cured" by these treatments, only to find that they were covertly still quite clearly homosexual. I have written extensively on this blog in the past about both NARTH and the ex-Gay movement on this blog.
So What's The Issue?
Why is Bill C-6 important? Fundamentally, in spite of most major therapeutic regulatory bodies coming out and declaring such therapies to be both dangerous and unethical, we still have a significant number of people who are in practice engaging in providing these therapies. Usually they lurk just under the surface, working as unregulated "counsellors" or "pastoral counsellors". It also shows up in the form of a number of "spiritual programs" offered by various churches.
The issue arises in that the use of these treatments continues to exist in spite of documented evidence of causing harm.
Why do these issues continue to exist? Mostly because many religious communities insist that homosexuality and gender dysphoria are moral failures rather than reflections of a core identity. They also often argue that such identities are corrosive to the fabric of society, and therefore must be addressed.
Claims About Bill C-6
Numerous claims about bill C-6 have been made, most of them ranging into the ridiculous or outright misinterpretations of the legislation.
A common claim is that this bill criminalizes routine conversations about sexuality and gender. This is, of course, utter nonsense unless your idea of a routine conversation about such topics includes trying to change the person's identity. Frankly, if that's the nature of your conversations about gender and sexuality, you have the strangest conversations I've ever heard of outside a therapist's office. Of course, the definition of conversion therapy used in the bill clearly does not include what I would call routine conversations about sex and gender.
Another common claim is that we "need" conversion therapies for transgender youth. Again, if this type of treatment is damaging to adults, it's probably going to be at least as damaging or worse for children and youth. Further, there is no credible evidence that supports the idea that children benefit from such therapies.
Other arguments tend to revolve around either parsing it as an attack on either freedom of expression, or freedom of religion. I'm not at all clear on how that argument would hold up in the absence of any robust clinical evidence that conversion therapy is effective. I'm pretty sure that neither freedom of expression nor freedom of religion grant one a license to engage in harming others.
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