Parents helping gender-confused children could face prison
State anti-conversion laws around Australia could lead parents to face up to 10 years in jail if they try to help their gender confused child or children with a homosexual inclination.
Australian States and Territories are cracking down on what they call ‘Conversion therapies’, casting a net so wide that they could threaten parents, priests and pastors trying to help gender-confused and homosexual children. There are many terms for gender confusion, and it is important to define what each term means to understand what these laws are actually doing.
The Phenomenon of Gender Confusion
There are people who self-identify as a ‘gender’ different to their biological sex. This difference is called gender incongruence and was previously known as Gender Identity Disorder. This incongruence or difference can cause the person to feel severe emotional and psychological discomfort. This discomfort is referred to as gender dysphoria. To solve this dysphoria, the medical community tries to tackle the incongruence or difference that is causing this emotional and psychological pain.
Hypothetically, there are two main approaches to resolve this difference. The first is to try to ‘change’ a person’s biological sex to be more in line with the self-identified gender. The second is to try to change their psychological identity to be in line with their biological sex. This second solution occurs naturally, with some contemporary reports indicating that around 67% of people naturally resolve their gender incongruence by identifying as their biological sex. [1]
However, despite this, the medical community has solely advocated for so-called treatments that try to bring the person’s biological sex to be in line with their ‘gender identity’, so they say. This includes puberty blockers to prevent a person from beginning puberty, hormone treatments which lead a person to develop the physical characteristics of the opposite sex, and, in extreme cases, gender reassignment surgery, where the person is mutilated to make them appear more like the opposite sex. However, none of these treatments can ever make the person the opposite biological sex. The difference will still remain no matter how much they try to change the appearance of their body, because men and women have different neurological structures in their brains, different skeletal structures, different muscle densities, and the DNA in every single cell in their body will have different sex selection chromosomes. So, the gender incongruence will never be resolved and thus the gender dysphoria that is causing so much distress will not go away.
If the goal is just to solve the gender incongruence, professionals should support treatments that change the gender identity, since changing one’s biological sex is impossible. This approach would treat this phenomenon as a psychological illness similar to Body Integrity Identity Disorder (BIID), the mental disorder where one identifies as a physically disabled person despite being physically healthy. If we shouldn’t treat a person with BIID by making them disabled to help their body be in line with their perceived identity, then we shouldn’t do the same with gender incongruence.
Common Sense treatments are Illegal
Surprisingly, any treatment that tries to bring a person’s ‘gender identity’ in line with their biological sex is illegal in many states. In Victoria, New South Wales, ACT, South Australia, and Queensland health practitioners are banned from trying any treatment that would not affirm a person in their self-identified gender. However, for families who don’t believe that you can become the opposite sex, there is no recourse to try and find help for their children. Even for most people who are sceptical of gender ideology, it seems absurd that even attempting to create a safe, medically tested treatment to help people desist from their gender incongruence is illegal. Current legislation creates a strong asymmetry in the kinds of treatments people can access.
These laws, which were designed to target very specific conversion treatments that caused real harm, have now become blanket bans that, in certain states, can extend to parents helping their children naturally desist from their gender confusion or priests and pastors from counselling someone with gender confusion to help them desist. In states like Victoria, a parent, priest, or pastor who engages in ‘conduct directed at a person on the basis of the person's sexual orientation or gender identity and directed to changing or suppressing it’ could face up to 10 years in prison. [2] In New South Wales and South Australia, it’s 5 years in prison. [3] Queensland, Western Australia, Tasmania and the Northern Territory are the only states where parents are safe, although even this is under threat with newly proposed laws in Western Australia and Tasmania.
Also read: How the LGBT-lobby tries to influence your children
Parents wanting treatment for homosexual children are also at risk
While helping people desist from their gender confusion may still need the development of new treatments, plenty of scientifically researched and supported treatments for helping people with their sexual orientation have already found large amounts of success. [4] Dr Joseph Nicolosi, a licensed clinical psychologist, found a large amount of success with his reparative therapy in treating homosexuality both in children and self-referred cases of homosexuals who wanted to change their sexual orientation. This research was also backed up by pro-homosexual therapists like Dr Robert Spitzer, who found that changes in a person’s sexual orientation from homosexual to heterosexual did happen in hundreds of cases from reparative therapy. [5]
However, Christian families who want to seek the support of these well-founded and tested therapies, along with the therapists themselves, would also be under threat of criminal prosecution. Even the case of a homosexual who wanted to self-refer for one of these treatments won’t be able to in Victoria, New South Wales, South Australia, and Queensland because these laws don’t allow homosexuals to make that choice. Unfortunately, these state and territory laws mandate a certain view of sexuality and gender identity completely at odds with many Australians, and prevent parents being able to seek help for their children according to their own beliefs.
Western Australia and Tasmania Are Next
Both Western Australia and Tasmania are planning to introduce these same anti-conversion therapy laws this year. The assault on common sense, and the law mandating that everyone act according to the views of LGBT activists will only continue if we don’t do something about it. If you want to protect a parent’s right to seek medical treatment for their children, and allow medical professionals to have the freedom to develop safe and scientifically supported treatments, sign the petition to ask these governments to change the laws! You can sign the petition here.
References
- Kenneth J. Zucker, The myth of persistence: Response to “A critical commentary on follow-up studies and ‘desistance’ theories about transgender and gender non-conforming children” by Temple Newhook et al. (2018)
- https://legislation.nsw.gov.au/view/whole/html/inforce/current/act-2024-019, https://www.legislation.sa.gov.au/_legislation-documents/lz/c/a/conversion-practices-prohibition-act-2024/current/2024.39.auth.pdf
- A. Dean Byrd, A meta-analytic review of treatment of homosexuality, Psychological Reports 90(3):1139 (2002).
- Robert L Spitzer, Can some gay men and lesbians change their sexual orientation? 200 participants reporting a change from homosexual to heterosexual orientation (2003).