Canada’s Proposed Ban on Conversion Therapy Falls Short
On March 9, 2020, the Canadian federal government introduced Bill C-8, An Act to amend the Criminal Code (conversion therapy) into the House of Commons. Later that same week, most of Canada, including the House, went into lockdown or was suspended due COVID-19. Since then I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this newly proposed law—the product of years of advocacy by many people, myself included, calling on all levels of government to ban what the United Nations recently called “violence and discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity”: conversion therapy.
The fact that Bill C-8 exists at all is, of course, cause for celebration; if passed, Canada would become only the sixth country globally to ban conversion therapy. Especially at this crucial precipice, I think it is reasonable to examine some of the shortcomings, and problematic language, contained within this draft legislation. Most prominent of these, in my estimation, is that as it’s currently written, the law would ban conversion therapy for adults only in cases of “coercion,” or when it is used against a person’s “will.”
Earlier this year I explained why I believe conversion therapy should be banned across Canada for everyone, including for adults. Since I was not a minor when I went through my own six years of conversion therapy with a licensed psychiatrist, I am left to wonder if this new law could have prevented my own conversion experience, or at least held my former psychiatrist accountable for his actions, had my treatment occurred more recently. For that matter, I wonder if the new law could at all help other adults who might find themselves in a situation now that is similar to mine some two decades ago.
First, a bit of a disclaimer: though it may be obvious to most, I am not a lawyer or any kind of legal expert. I am a gay man who experienced a form of conversion therapy. Since then I’ve advocated for stronger regulations, and eventually, legal bans, surrounding conversion therapy. I started advocating for these changes long before I even knew the words “conversion therapy,” because I don’t think it matters so much what this practice is called as what it has the potential to do: kill. I’ve learned over the years that my position as a gay man and survivor may not always align with what government can, or will, do in passing legislation, but I remain committed to speaking on behalf of myself as a gay person and a survivor.
As it stands, the proposed Criminal Code amendment would define “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. For greater certainty, this definition does not include a practice, treatment or service that relates (a) to a person’s gender transition; or (b) to a person’s exploration of their identity or to its development.”
Five offences would then be added to the Code: a) causing a person to undergo conversion therapy against their will; (b) causing a child to undergo conversion therapy; (c) doing anything for the purpose of removing a child from Canada with the intention that they would undergo conversion therapy outside Canada; (d) advertising an offer to provide conversion therapy; and (e) receiving financial or other material benefit from the provision of conversion therapy. Courts would also be authorized to order that advertisements for conversion therapy be disposed of or deleted.
In terms of prohibiting conversion therapy for adults, the only part of the new law that would apply is the first offence, delineated under the heading “Forced conversion therapy”:
“Everyone who knowingly causes a person to undergo conversion therapy against the person’s will is (a) guilty of an indictable offence and liable to imprisonment for a term of not more than five years; or (b) guilty of an offence punishable on summary conviction.”
During a presser also on March 9, Justice Minister David Lametti further explained:
“With respect to adults, we are criminalizing where there has been coercion, so the person is not making the decision necessarily of their own free will . . . We felt that a competent adult could conceivably defend the right in a court to consent to this kind of activity and we felt that we couldn’t move ahead in that case scenario simply because of the Charter of Rights.”
Generally speaking, I have grave concerns with the idea of dividing a ban on conversion therapy up by age—prohibiting it for minors, not prohibiting it explicitly for adults—since it implies that a criminal offence is warranted because of the harm conversion therapy causes to some (minors), but that there may still be something about conversion therapy that is useful or at least not as harmful to others (adults). Rather than focusing on the fact that conversion therapy is a fraudulent practice (it does not work, and any claim to the contrary is fraudulent) and causes harm for all (as agreed by virtually every valid health regulator globally), it refocuses on the issues of “choice” and “coercion”—that an adult could conceivably still “choose” one of these treatments “of their own free will.”
Issues of choice and coercion deflect attention away from what, I believe, should be the primary concern: fraudulence and harm.
Either conversion therapy is fraudulent and harmful, in which case it would be true for all and a ban should apply to everyone, or else conversion therapy is not fraudulent and harmful, in which case there is no need for a ban for anyone. Besides, at what point can it be said that an LGBT person is coerced into trying to “change” their sexuality or gender? Under what circumstances do they potentially “choose” a form of conversion therapy “of their own free will”? How is a person’s “will” even gauged?
While a helping professional could, conceivably, act in a way that is considered coercive, what I know to be true is that LGBT clients will also, always, bring to the helping relationship their own history of having had already been coerced by a lifetime of messages, not all of them explicit, that said they would never be able to be themselves but would need to “change” in order to be accepted, even loved. Conversion therapy is not just any kind of therapy; in fact, it is not any kind of real therapy at all, and so the world in which these people exist, prior to seeking help, must also be considered. In its current wording, the proposed ban would be akin to banning slavery for minors but not explicitly for adults because some “could conceivably defend the right in a court to consent to this kind of activity.” Like slavery, the LGBT adult could only ever defend the right to consent to this kind of activity because of society’s earlier oppression over them. The fact that anyone, including adults, would seek out or fall prey to conversion therapy today speaks to society’s pressure of conformity over LGBT people—they have internalized their oppressors’ messages and now go about the business of oppressing themselves. Bill C-8’s focus on “consent” and “coercion” instead of on conversion therapy’s fraudulence and harm, is misdirected and fails to recognize the antecedent impact of homophobia and transphobia on the lives of all LGBT people everywhere.
★★
Over the years, many people have asked me how I could have sued my former psychiatrist for a therapy that I, myself, presumably consented to, especially as I was 24 years old, a legal adult, when I first met him. This issue of “consent” was one of the first questions my lawyer asked me when we initially discussed a possible medical malpractice suit: Did I “consent” to the therapy? Did I “choose“ it?
For those who have the time, reading my book, The Inheritance of Shame: A Memoir, may answer this question. I’d by lying if I said I didn’t write my book, at least in part, to try and answer it even to myself.
Now that I am a good many years on the other side of the trauma of that experience, I can safely say that even the suggestion that I may have ever consented to or chosen, of my own free will, the kind of treatment that the doctor ended up using on me is completely blind to the potential practices of trying to change a person’s sexual orientation (as, I think, it would also be for others, trying to change their gender), the vulnerability of anyone who seeks therapy, for whatever reason, and the power differential implicit to all therapeutic relationships.
People typically reach out to a helping professional during a time of crisis. In a best case scenario, clients are able to explain their life situation and the reasons for seeking help; in a worse case scenario, which is far more common, they are too emotionally distraught to articulate much of anything. Maybe they know enough to say they need some guidance; maybe they’ve been forced into treatment by life circumstance beyond their control—a breakdown, a divorce, etc. It would not be uncommon for the deeper issues that drove the person to seek help to take months, even years, before unfolding.
For myself, I had not approached my psychiatrist in order to change my sexuality. During our first meeting, I told the doctor I was gay but that my parents had rejected me because of my sexuality. I also explained that I’d been sexually abused as a child but had never dealt with the abuse. Depressed, suicidal, anxious and with persistent insomnia, it is no exaggeration to say that I was in the “worse case scenario”—too emotionally distraught to articulate much of anything, except to say that I needed help. If my “will” desired anything, early on, it was simply to feel better; the rest I left up to the doctor, the medical professional.
I began the psychiatrist’s treatment model, a form of primal scream therapy. One by one, over a period of months and then years, the doctor introduced various practices into my therapy: a sedative and an antidepressant for insomnia and depression; various causation theories, including the explanation that my history of sexual abuse had created the false identity of homosexual. My treatment’s goal, the doctor explained, would be to face that trauma through repeated “primal” regressions in order to heal and thereby revert to what I was prior to the abuse: a heterosexual. This one tactic alone, the doctor’s ideological interpretation of what he thought it meant for me to be gay, redirected my treatment on a trajectory that I could never have anticipated or fully understood at the time.
Eventually, the doctor explained that everything we were doing in my therapy—primal regressions, near-fatal doses of various prescription medications, weekly injections of ketamine hydrochloride, reparenting techniques, aversion therapy—would all help “correct the error” of my homosexuality.
One main question I’ve been asked over the years is why I stayed in this “therapy.” The question itself seems to lack any great insight, or empathy, into what could possibly compel a person to remain in an abusive relationship, a dynamic that is not, of course, restricted to domestic partnerships. Conversion therapy is an abusive relationship: its perpetrator is the person in authority; the victim is the vulnerable person seeking help. While minors may be forced by a parent or guardian into one of these treatments, the kind of “force” that compels an adult into, or to stay in, this kind of situation is often related far more to their own internal belief in the lie that their sexual orientation or gender identity is somehow “broken,” and needs to be healed. Their own apparent “choice to stay,” however, does not make the subsequent treatment any less coercive, or dangerous. In my case, the doctor introduced all of his practices into my therapy over a period of years. The last thing I thought about was whether or not we were engaging in a form of conversion therapy; instead, we focused on healing past trauma. Long before I met the doctor I had been raised to believe the lie that sexual abuse could make a person gay, and so by the time I was deep into treatment I accepted as truth what turned out to be the false promise of “correction.”
Over the years, my psychiatrist produced various forms that he told me to sign and so I did—through the haze of my medicated stupor—and he later then used as evidence during my malpractice suit against him several years after leaving treatment. On paper, I had “consented”—not to the practice of conversion therapy, words never mentioned on the forms, but to his use of some of the medications and the re-parenting techniques in order to treat my “official” diagnosis and reason for therapy: depression. Consent was definitely lost along the way, but even at the start of that relationship it is difficult to know how true consent could have ever been given while under the influence of medication and such distress.
To this day I still believe the only thing I had consented to was the doctor’s invitation of trust—his claim that he knew the best way out of my misery. The level of betrayal I experienced after leaving his care, withdrawing from the last of the medications, gaining back some semblance of sanity and realizing the full extent of our malevolent pact, left me shell-shocked.
In 2020, the most publicly known “change“ treatments are through faith-based or religious organizations, which often describe their practices as “helping” homosexual or transgender people. Many times the goals are overt, as in the memoir Boy Erased, when a young person knows beforehand that the treatment’s aim will be to change their sexuality—indeed, the client (often, but not always, a minor) or their guardian seeks out treatment for this purpose. Other times, as in my case, and, I believe, probably the case of many other adults, the ultimate plan of the therapy can remain covert—clients may be lead down a path not of their own, initial, intent, or else a history of trauma is erroneously conflated with their struggle over sexual orientation or gender and the therapy becomes implicitly homophobic or transphobic but remains opaque to the client, who remains trusting that the helper has their best interest at heart.
In these cases in particular it is important to remember that conversion therapy is ideology—it is a belief in the brokenness of people by virtue of their homosexuality or trans identity, and speaks to the intent of the practitioner in their goal that the sexuality or gender of the client can then be “cured,” “corrected,” or “healed” through various therapeutic or religious interventions. Practitioners never refer to themselves as practicing anything remotely called ”conversion therapy”; not all who end up going through one of these treatments always understands that they are undergoing something called conversion therapy; they certainly don’t always label it that way. What is true for us all is that when we feel bad and seek help, we trust that our helper will not hurt us even more.
Adults are even more likely than minors to initiate a helping relationship, both secular and faith-based, but that does not prevent them from becoming susceptible to the influence of the practitioner. “The patient enters therapy in need of help and care,” writes author Judith Herman, M.D., in her book Trauma and Recovery.
“By virtue of this fact, she voluntarily submits herself to an unequal relationship in which the therapist has superior status and power. Feelings related to the universal childhood experience of dependence on a parent are inevitably aroused. These feelings, known as transference, further exaggerate the power imbalance in the therapeutic relationship and render all patients vulnerable to exploitation. It is the therapist’s responsibility to use the power that has been conferred upon her only to foster the recovery of the patient, resisting all temptations to abuse. This promise, which is central to the integrity of any therapeutic relationship, is of special importance to patients who are already suffering as a result of another’s arbitrary and exploitative exercise of power” (1992, p. 134-35).
Indeed, implicit in all of these relationships is the fact that the client is vulnerable to the innate power differential of that relationship. For this reason alone, the proposed legislation’s use of the word “will” seems entirely redundant—as a client in one of these relationships our will is already broken, or at least we experience it that way, which is why we have sought help, although our perceived “brokenness” can also be worsened significantly or taken advantage of by the tactics of the practitioner.
Another way of looking at it is that the new law’s reference to the word “will” makes it sound as if there will be times in these relationships when the client is not vulnerable; when they are not consenting to whatever treatment the practitioner enforces; when in fact they have complete and autonomous agency—control over their “free will”—while also under the influence of whatever messages from their history may have groomed their belief systems, and then, of course, other powerful dynamics that will arise in the course of treatment (e.g., the medications, in my case)—a suggestion that is entirely false and does not adequately reflect the reality of the helping relationship.
Similarly, Justice Minister Lametti’s reference to the word “coercion” makes it sound as if the act of conversion therapy could be anything other than coercive—that there may be some forms of conversion therapy that could be considered non-coercive—and of course that also is not true. All forms of conversion therapy—all treatments aimed at changing or suppressing a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity—are inherently coercive in that they exist solely because of some LGBT people’s pre-existing confusion and vulnerability around their sexual orientation and gender identity, which is directly attributable to society’s earlier coercion over them. This is true regardless of whether or not the client seemingly “consents” to treatment, and it is disingenuous to imply that in certain cases it could be otherwise.
One argument against any kind of legal ban on conversion therapy today is that some who oppose these bans state that in a free and democratic society adults should retain the right to “choose” these treatments, if that is what they want. What I find most troubling about this argument in particular, and by government’s apparent concession to it, is that these adults’ “right to choose” to live any way they please, even to think anything they want, does not mean that practitioners should be given free reign to reinforce these treatments through their own programs or tax exempt organizations. Adults have the right to think and do as they please, even to discuss those thoughts in the privacy of their own lives—a person who is attracted to members of the same sex can “choose” to live a celibate life or to marry a person of the opposite sex, for instance, if that is what they want. Helping professionals, conversely, absolutely do not have the right to practice, advertise or charge a fee to anyone, regardless of that person’s age, for a kind of treatment that is proven to be fraudulent and can cause harm. Consenting adults can think and do as they please, so long as they do not cause harm to others. Helping professionals—and in this definition I include all faith leaders—are bound by a code of ethics that says, “First do no harm.” I think someone named Christ even went so far as to say: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”
★★
For years I had hoped that a federal ban on conversion therapy would be an answer to what I experienced 25 years ago. On some level, I suppose all of my advocacy has been like a fight to win back the life that was stolen from me—that if I could use my own past to help prevent the recurrence of similar forms of abuse on others today, then all of my experiences would not have been for nothing.
But the way it’s written now, this new ban is not any kind of answer, at least not a helpful one, to what I experienced: it would not have prevented the kind of treatment that I went through before; it would not have held my former psychiatrist accountable for his efforts to try to change my homosexuality; and I doubt very much that it will help protect others from going through anything similar today.
For years I had thought that any federal ban on conversion therapy would be better than no federal ban on conversion therapy, but now I’m not so sure. The way it’s written now, this new law sends the message that some forms of conversion therapy are coercive, while others aren’t; that conversion therapy is both a dangerous practice for some, but not for others—it sends the message that conversion therapy could be anything other than inherently coercive, or dangerous.
The way it’s written now, this new law sends the message that there are situations under which an adult could reasonably “consent” to enter into a form of conversion therapy; that there will necessarily be a moment in the helping relationship when the adult client has enough clarity of mind or prescience to consent to what may later turn out to be a form of conversion therapy; that it is even possible to consent to what has been shown and proven to be a fraudulent and harmful practice; that it will ever, ultimately, even be helpful for an adult to consent to more of the same kind of coercive practice over their sexuality or gender that led them to seek out the professional or spiritual intervention in the first place, not to mention that it could ever be morally or ethically appropriate for that professional to then perpetuate the same kind of coercion over their client that brought them into treatment initially.
The way it’s written now, this new law sends the message that the “force” that may drive a client into one of these treatments will always be from another person—rather than from the lies around their sexuality or gender that they’ve been taught for years, probably their whole lives, to believe as true.
The way it’s written now, this new law sends the message that the adult client will always even know that what is happening to them through the course of their emotionally-charged, mentally-fatiguing, and spiritually eviscerating treatment is conversion therapy—and that is just not true. None of this is necessarily true. None of it was true for me, so by the law of averages I know it will not always be true for others.
The fact is, the way it’s written now, this new law will not protect all LGBT people from the experience of conversion therapy; the way it’s written now, this new law will actually embolden, if only inadvertently, so-called conversion therapy as a valid form of treatment that would be both outlawed and allowed—and that message alone will make these forms of hatred and ignorance prevail.
Conversion therapy is an expression of homophobia and transphobia from within a helping professional environment, it is institutionalized torture, and so the aim with a ban should be to break down and obliterate systems of prejudice and injustice that have targeted and caused undue suffering to countless individuals—not simply to win incremental gains from within the structures of oppression. Conversion therapy is a lie that those who practice, perpetuate, and those who fall prey, forget, and so the aim with a ban should be to firmly and resolutely destabilize and eradicate orders of hatred and intolerance—not simply to pick and choose which kinds of bigotry may be less harmful than others or under what circumstances some people could reasonably “consent” to bigotry. That some adults could still “defend the right in a court to consent to this kind of activity” is not the point; the point is that the very thing these adults would consent to is what a ban on conversion therapy should seek to abolish.