Thread by @LaurenGNC_Butch

Conversion Therapy

I don’t do threads very often but the last one went alright, so I’m having another go. This one is about the conversion therapy bill in Ireland.

As you may guess, I support a ban on conversion therapy on lesbians and gay men.

oireachtas.ie/en/bills/bill/…

There is no way to turn a lesbian or a gay man into a heterosexual. All attempts are cruel and futile. I have, amongst my friends, people who have survived conversion therapy.

It leaves deep scars that can last a lifetime.

The bill, however, defines conversion therapy as:

“any practice or treatment by any person that seeks to change, suppress and, or eliminate a person’s sexual orientation, gender identity and, or gender expression.”

Protecting gender identity and expression in law is a very strange move.

I shop in the men’s department, I work in a warehouse, I have a wife and children who I work to support. I am regularly “misgendered,” taken for a youngish man.

Does that make my “gender” male?

No, that would just be retrograde, sexist rubbish.

Moving on from “women can’t drive a forklift” to “if you are driving a forklift you must be a man.” No. Just, no.

People like me don't pay to go to a therapists for any of those reasons.

In our modern society, you can wear what you want, work where you want and refer to yourself pretty much how you want. That’s a good thing.

The reason people go to a therapist about their “gender” is that they have gender dysphoria. Like me.

Usually, they go because they have dysphoria and want to treat it by taking cross sex hormones and cosmetic surgeries.

Notice, I don’t say “trans people.” I prefer to talk about people with dysphoria, as there are many ways to treat dysphoria.

We don't need to rush people to the nuclear option of hormones and surgeries.

That said, dysphoria is a bear. I know. I live with it.

It is an obsessive, and destructive fixation on the aspects of my female body that I do not like.

I am acutely aware of my breasts, stuck on the front of me, like lumps. I’m aware of my womb, of my period, of my discomfort, of my vulnerability.

I can obsess about it.

But it is a disorder that I live with, not a fact about my identity which defines who I am.

Not everybody with dysphoria chooses to treat it with hormones and cosmetic surgeries to look more like the opposite sex.

Instead of making myself a life long medical patient, in an attempt to become something I know I cannot be, I am choosing to learn to love the skin I’m in.

I see a therapist regularly. We work on various techniques around self-acceptance and CBT. We explore my feelings, and she helps me to question and reframe things.

For example, instead of focusing on the female parts of my body, I focus on the positive things I can use my body to do – turn wood, mend things, carry and lift heavy weights, hug my wife and children.

The therapy I seek is emphatically NOT conversion therapy.

However, under the wording of the new bill, it could be taken as read that my therapist is not “affirming” my “gender identity,” and is using therapeutic techniques to “convert” me away from “being” trans.

Consider what would happen if I went to an affirmative therapist instead. I would describe my dysphoria. My therapist would, from the start, “affirm” me as "male gendered". They would ask me my preferred pronouns at the first session and refer to me by them throughout.

For somebody who was just coming to terms with their dysphoria, this could run the risk of solidifying a trans identification where there may have been none before/otherwise, and it could put people on a path towards unnecessary drugs, surgeries and life-long medicalisation.

Imagine, for instance, that I chose that path even after years of being lesbian. I could instantly be “converted” into a heterosexual man, my wife would be “converted” into a heterosexual woman, and two lesbians would disappear forever.

So which approach is the real “conversion therapy” here? The gentle and open exploration of feelings and options?

Or the rush to “affirm” the client as something which they can never truly be?

I submit that when it comes to trans health care, affirmation is the real conversion therapy. And yet the bill, as stands, will ban any type of therapy than the type of affirmation therapy I've described above.

This would actively limit the options of dysphoric people like me.

The only help we would have access to would be from individuals who actively wish to “affirm” me as something I am not, and cannot be.

Any other type of help for people like me would not only be unavailable, but criminalised.

Legitimate therapists, with qualifications from internationally respected organisations, who are taking a gentle, questioning approach to their client’s difficulties, would be put on the wrong side of the law.

This cannot be right!