Guest post: Like a see-saw

Originally a comment by Artymorty on There are none.

By gluing the LGB to the T, especially in the context of conversion therapy, PBS has done serious damage to gay rights.

Conversion therapy practices against same-sex attracted people don’t work: sexual orientation is fixed and inborn. Not only do such practices not work, we know that they’re also extremely harmful to patients’ mental health. Obviously, the old-school electroshock-treatment kind was barbaric. But the supposedly “milder” talk-therapy kind is also harmful — extremely so. It’s effectively psychological torture to be told by a supposed professional authority figure that there’s something wrong with you that you need to keep trying to fix, when the cards are stacked against you because in reality, it’s not in your control to change it, and that thing (sexual orientation) is not actually wrong in the first place.

In the field of secular professional therapy, this is all well-established, and the practice of trying to change someone’s sexual orientation is long gone.

But of course, with respect to “gender identity”, the exact opposite is true: in reality, it’s not in your control to change your biological sex or to radically change how others observe and detect your sex, and that thing — your sex — is not actually “wrong” in the first place.

So it very much should be the standard in secular professional therapy to steer kids away from pseudoscientific beliefs about having “wrong” bodies and mismatched “gender identities”. And we know from years of data that such therapy does, in fact, work a lot of the time, and as the therapeutic approaches improve, the rates of effectiveness do, too.

Unlike gay, you can, in fact, therapeutically “cure” trans.

People are right to both push to preserve clinicians’ rights to talk kids out of toxic “gender identities” and simultaneously push to restrict clinicians’ rights to try and talk kids out of their natural sexual orientations or gender-nonconforming expressions of personality.

Like a see-saw, when one side goes up, the other must go down. Problem is, when they get merged together, most people only see one side of the see-saw — the one they’re most preoccupied with — and the effects on the other side are out of view.

When the editors at PBS merge “gender identity” therapy with sexual orientation therapy, the readers who are (rightly) appalled at the thought of gay conversion therapy fail to see the other side of the see-saw, that rightful treatment for “gender”-confused kids is also in play.

But readers who are (also rightly) appalled by the extremism of gender ideology are so eager to see a stop to that, they fail to see the damage done to LGB people when the courts roll back prohibitions on attempted conversion against us.

I ran into this problem early on in my gay rights campaigning on this issue, and I have to confess: I, too, didn’t fully grasp the other side of the see-saw.

A few years ago when Canada’s Parliament was debating a conversion-therapy bill, I was actively involved, and I came close to testifying before the House about it. (I didn’t testify in the end, but I submitted a well-received Brief to the House, and someone who did testify addressed my brief during her testimony and urged the Members to read it.)

At that time, I was in many discussions and meetings with people about the Bill. What I had failed to grasp was that many of my supposed allies in opposing the ban on “trans conversion therapy” were also advocates for gay conversion therapy on religious freedom grounds. They and I were allies on one side of the see-saw — the one about gender identity — but I failed to immediately detect how hostile many of them were to the other side of the equation, how callous they were about the harms conversion therapy does to LGB people.

Over time, I began to see how people’s growing preoccupations with the ban on trans conversion therapy were blinding them to the dangers of re-introducing gay conversion therapy. I’d see people argue, for example, that maybe the “talk therapy” kind of gay conversion therapy isn’t really such a big concession, because it’s not like the bad old days of electroshock treatment and physical torture. That kind of Overton-window shifting, of rationalizing away the erosion of important protections that are vital to young gays and lesbians.

It’s not a coincidence that Colorado’s court case was brought forward by a Christian counselor backed by the Alliance Defending Freedom. Their end-goal is not merely to preserve therapists’ rights to treat “trans” ideation, but to criminalize homosexuality. The ADF are, as far as I’m concerned, the closest analog to the Klan or the Nazis with respect to gays and lesbians. They truly do hate us and they genuinely want homosexuality eradicated.

But it won’t surprise me if I come across a bunch of “gender critical” types celebrating the ADF’s victory, and leaving the LGB side of the see-saw largely out of sight. This may be a victory for the fight against gender ideology, but for gays and lesbians, our rights and protections in Colorado have just swung way, way down.

The blame for this predicament, as I see it, falls on PBS and other media outlets who did the dirty deed of lumping us in with the T in the first place. It was they who muddied the message. They’re the ones who tied our fates together like this.

I hate it so much.