New Trudeau law could jail parents who oppose gender conversion

It is cruel to use law to force confused, dysphoric children and their parents to embrace a life of permanent hormone therapy, surgery and disillusion.

Under the guise of prohibiting “conversion therapy,” Bill C-8 would make it a criminal offence for parents to help their own gender-confused children find peace in accepting their biological gender. The Liberal government’s proposed legislation, introduced as a First Reading on March 9, defines “conversion therapy” as “a practice, treatment or service designed to change a person’s sexual orientation to heterosexual or gender identity to cisgender, or to repress or reduce non-heterosexual attraction or sexual behaviour.”

This proposed House of Commons legislation has the same major flaws that the Senate’s Bill S-202 had, as I argued in 2019. Under C-8, parents could spend up to five years in jail for trying to help their son accept himself as a boy, or for helping their daughter to accept herself as a girl. Bill C-8 also would impose prison terms up to five years for doctors, counsellors, psychiatrists, psychologists and other paid professionals whose treatment for gender confusion departs from politically correct orthodoxy. Parents would be punished if they do anything other than encourage a confused child to “transition” to the opposite gender. Transitioning is an extreme form of intervention that includes taking puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and undergoing permanent surgical sterilization, including the removal of healthy organs such as breasts and testicles.

Bill C-8’s preamble denounces as “myth” that a person’s “gender identity” can and ought to be changed. This ignores reality. Many people — especially some minors — do experience change in their gender identity. Confusion during puberty later resolves in favour of their biological sex. Bill C-8 ignores the leading work of Dr. Kenneth J. Zucker, who for many years was psychologist-in-chief at Toronto’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health and headed up its Gender Identity Service. An international authority on gender dysphoria in children and adolescents, he and Dr. Susan Bradley helped hundreds of children integrate their gender identity with their biological reality, saving them from a lifetime of dependency on cross-sex hormones. Their work demonstrates that with appropriate therapy and encouragement, the vast majority of gender-confused children come to accept their bodies by the time they reach the age of 18.

“Transitioning” is not the panacea Bill C-8 makes it out to be. For example, a 2011 comprehensive study shows that post-surgery transgender people in Sweden commit suicide at a rate 19 times higher than the national average. Bill C-8 further ignores the rapidly growing number of deeply unhappy and disillusioned people who have “transitioned” genders and are now “detransitioning” back to their biological sex.

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Source: John Carpay | The Post Millennial