Greetings my fellow Canadians. I need you to take action on the the bill that is before the Canadian Parliament :Bill C-8.
Why Bill C-8 will be harmful to children and parental rights –
“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.
If Bill C-8 becomes law, it appears that the only legal treatment available to Canadian youth who struggle with their gender identity will be “transitioning” toward the opposite gender: puberty blockers, opposite-sex hormone injections, and eventually gender-reassignment surgery. The law’s definition of “conversion therapy” still allows for “a practice, treatment or service that relates to a person’s exploration of their identity or to its development,” so there may be some wiggle room. But C-8’s clear prohibition on changing “gender identity” to conform to biological reality, combined with C-8’s preamble declaring that gender identity should never be changed, means that counselling to help a child accept biological reality becomes practically illegal.”
Contact your MP right away and outline your concerns. I’ve talked with my fellow blogger Tildeb and he has given me (and you permission) to use the form of his letter to raise your concerns to your MP. Thank you Tildeb for your contributions in the struggle for a rational approach to gender ideology and safeguarding female rights, boundaries, and safety.
“I am gravely concerned about the inclusion of gender in this proposed Bill [C-8] that criminalizes conversion therapy.
Gender-based scientific research is starkly insufficient and lacking biological knowledge compared to sex-based research. Sex-base research is currently under attack by gender identity ideologues driving researchers out of the field and closing facilities offered by universities. I have grounds to properly fear that this well-intended inclusion in this Bill will be successfully used by gender identity ideologues and activists to threaten those who criticize the role of gender identity as it now stands, criticism like questioning the safety of female inmates from sexual assault by fully intact male inmates – some who have killed children – identifying as women (a deplorable allowance that is currently in place by misguided federal policy), criticism of male encroachment into female spaces like rape centers and domestic abuse shelters whose public funding is stopped when they deny fully intact males from admission, criticism of the encroachment of fully intact males into dominating female sports and using a convenient switch in gender identity to gain the financial rewards and professional advancements from competition, criticism of fully intact males bullying and driving out of business those who provide female only services like waxing. And the list goes on and on and on. You’ve heard these cases. You stay silent in public but surely you must say something in caucus!
By inserting gender identity into outlawing conversion therapy – an unsuccessful therapy intended to alter biologically driven sexual preference for same sex to the opposite sex which sex-based research shows us is both harmful and ineffective – you are enabling ideologues of gender identity politics to not just displace females from female safe spaces with the permission of the legal code (gender advocates can threaten anyone who disagrees with legal censure under this proposed Bill) but gain special access to influence and direct prepubescent children to begin physiological and chemical therapy – in many jurisdictions without the consent or even knowledge of parents – whenever the child indicates any gender questioning – by threatening legal censure of anyone who dares to intervene… including parents!
This Bill is a green light for those who wish to advance gender identity over, and in place of, compelling sex-based scientific research and psychiatric best practices such as Watchful Waiting. The science is being driven underground while the ideology is becoming law!
Why so many politicians agree with these ideologues that biology magically ends at the neck and gender identity takes over, is a modern mystery but by enabling gender ideologues the legal power to suppress criticism in the name of either hate speech or partaking of illegal conversion therapy is a legal and ethical travesty waiting to happen, a travesty any academic who investigates this issue with an open mind and concern for what is true in reality should not endorse.
Please seriously reconsider the inclusion of gender in this Bill.”
6 comments
March 14, 2020 at 9:57 am
tildeb
And here’s the response I got from a previous concern I raised about male inmates claiming gender identity as a woman in order to be housed in the same prisons as their female victims:
” Thank you for the email. Please forgive us for the delay in responding.
Our government and Canadians are proud of our country’s diversity and inclusion. Peter (the MP I contacted) believes that all Canadians should be safe to be themselves. To this end, our government is proud to have passed legislation that adds gender identity and expression as prohibited grounds for discrimination under the Canadian Human Rights Act, and to the list of distinguishing characteristics of “identifiable group” protected by the hate speech provisions of the Criminal Code. We placed gender at the heart of our decisions so that our policies better reflect the needs of all Canadians. And, we apply a gender and diversity lens to all cabinet proposals and all budgets so we can assess and mitigate any differential impact.”
This is what happens when group-identity trumps individual rights: a legal framework for implementing real life discrimination against real people that causes real harm but couching this mandatory indifference in the woke terms of respect, tolerance, diversity, equality, and of course human rights. The legislation produces exactly the opposite meaning in real life.
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March 14, 2020 at 9:59 am
The Arbourist
Nice, they have a form letter to handwave away the erosion of female rights. :/
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March 14, 2020 at 10:02 am
tildeb
Most of us give up pablum when we become toddlers. Some people, however… especially when such pablum is widely regarded as a virtue…
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March 15, 2020 at 3:53 am
Notes To Ponder
Great post. This Canadian applauded announcement of banned conversion therapy. Never occured to me implications extended far beyond my initial impression.
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March 15, 2020 at 9:16 am
tildeb
We – and the politicians we elect – would be well served to remember what The Hitch said about Identity Politics and why he loathed it to such an extent:
“People who think with their epidermis or their genitalia or their clan are the problem to begin with. One does not banish this specter by invoking it. If I would not vote against someone on the grounds of ‘race’ or ‘gender’ alone, then by the exact same token I would not cast a vote in his or her favor for the identical reason.”
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March 15, 2020 at 9:18 am
The Arbourist
@ NtP
Starting with bill c-16 the Canadian record of gender legislation has been mostly by stealth. The wider population has serious objections to much of this legislative direction.
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