Campaign against Proposed NSW ‘Conversion Practices Prohibition Bill’

Email CoAL sent to NSW ALP Parliamentarians

Subject:  Stop gender affirmation—it’s a gay conversion practice

Email text:

We write to express our concerns on behalf of lesbians in NSW (as for throughout Australia) regarding some of the Labor Government’s proposed bill prohibiting LGBTQI+ conversion practices. Unless the gender components of this bill are removed, its support of the gender industry would have harmful repercussions for lesbians (and other women and girls as well as gays and other men and boys).

CoAL is a United Nations accredited non-government organisation that advocates for the rights of lesbians in Australia. We fully support a ban on *gay* conversion practices, as a sex-based right for lesbians (and gay men) to express their sexual orientation. Many still bear the scars of past medical conversion scandals; do you want to be identified with a scandal of even greater proportions?

We understand that the NSW Minister for Health announced in July an inquiry into gender services for this state and we call for a transparent and unbiased inquiry to be held as soon as possible. We urge NSW Labor not to make the fatal mistake of including ‘gender’ and ‘gender’ conversion in legislation that will come back to haunt them. Gender is *not* the same as sex or sexual orientation. This confusion has led to the ‘affirmation model’ in Australian gender clinics becoming, itself, an irreversibly harmful gay conversion practice. Children, who might otherwise develop into happy and healthy adults enjoying fulfilling relationships, many of whom would otherwise be lesbian or gay, instead are becoming trapped in a poor imitation of heterosexual relations. 

Enormous increases in numbers of troubled children and young people—many of whom are lesbian and gay—are presenting at gender clinics in Australia and elsewhere, only to be over-diagnosed, over-treated or subjected to iatrogenic harm. A large number also have other underlying, and often disregarded, problems, such as autism, eating disorders, a history of trauma, or mental health issues. Distressingly, researchers have found that such issues for the children presenting at Westmead Children’s Hospital with gender dysphoria were being ignored.

Conflation of sex with gender leads to the same laws that ban ‘conversion’ of ‘transgender identity’ making it legal to use experimental medical and psychological practices on children who mistakenly believe they were ‘born in the wrong body’, while biopsychosocial in-depth psychotherapy, usually recommended for trauma, etc would be banned. In other words, a ban on gender identity conversion would lead to a process of ‘medicalised dehumanisation’ to convert healthy sexed bodies into ‘trans’ bodies.

Make NSW the first place in Australia to put a pause to harmful gender medicine. We understand that the NSW government is finding an inquiry into gender medicine politically difficult, and we call for an urgent re-assessment of that mistaken indecision. Most recently, another political outsider has asked for an inquiry, this time in the South Australian parliament. Do not be tempted to dismiss all this questioning as ‘non-progressive’; there are genuine concerns about safeguarding the health of vulnerable children and young people confused by gender ideology. This is a controversy that must not be avoided any further by institutional capture, which has led to the adoption of gender ideology within Australian policy and law biased towards QT+ pressure groups’ rhetoric and myths (AF4WR 2023), rather than reasoned argument and material evidence, producing significant injustices to lesbians.

And we point out that questioning has been leading to governments and health professionals challenging gender dogma. The UK NHS has recently stopped the routine offer of puberty-blocking drugs to children at gender identity clinics because of the lack of evidence about their benefits and harms. Clinicians in Denmark, Finland and Sweden have significantly restricted access to puberty blockers, hormones and surgery, while promoting therapeutic counselling and emotional support. Furthermore, Dutch experts have recently criticised the Dutch protocol of “gender affirming care” as unsound. The head of WPATH (World Professional Association for Transgender Health) has even admitted that early intervention with puberty blockers leads to permanent sexual dysfunction. Robert Wintemute, Professor of Human Rights Law at Kings College London, an expert on anti-discrimination law and sexual orientation law and one of the co-authors of the influential “Yogyakarta Principles,” has stated the ‘international human rights community got it wrong in merging lesbian and gay rights with the idea of a right to have “gender identity” replace sex because women’s rights were not considered and the authors “failed to consider” that fully intact males would seek to access female-only spaces.

In Australia, gender medicine’s methods and poor evidence base are being questioned by experts (eg, in NSW, Western Australia and Queensland, and by the National Association of Practising Psychiatrists). The Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists (RANZCP) stands out for its recommendation that assessment and treatment of gender dysphoria be based on the best available evidence and fully explore the person’s gender identity and the biopsychosocial context (italics added) from which this has emerged. While their position statement is currently under review, psychiatry’s cautious response to the gender controversy can be best understood in terms of its stigmatised history in the medicalisation of same-sex attraction. We point out that genetic counselling health professionals, stigmatised by their historical role in eugenics, adopted a non-directive model for their practice, a model that belies (unintended) outcomes. The affirmative model used in the gender clinic is not appropriate either because it, also, neglects the harmful impact on the individuals ‘making their choices’ as well as the societal norms, corporate and professional interests, and government policies that shape those individual choices.

Scientific evidence must be placed before cultish dogma. The Dutch Protocol of affirmation is being exposed as poor science. Parents who are your constituents are most alarmed at harm to their children by gender medicine, by legal ‘solutions’ and by teaching of gender ideology in schools De-transitioners in Australia and internationally (eg, Bell 2021, Cole 2023, tell of being rapidly processed onto a medicalised path of prescribed puberty blockers and/or cross-sex hormones despite little evidence of research on harms and benefits. They are beginning to litigate and family law barrister Belle Lane has warned the Australian judiciary on the risks of the “gender-affirming” treatment approach (Lane 2023a, 2023b), while medical insurers in Australia are withdrawing protection to frontier gender medicine.

CoAL urges the government to listen to those of us outside the TQ+ party line–the ‘silenced majority,’ largely silenced by the political and economic power of gender ideologues, such as ACON, and resulting neglect by media schooled by TQ interest groups. LGBTQ+ umbrella groups do not speak for most of us. Lesbians and gays are a heterogeneous mix of different cultures with different and, sometimes, conflicting life experiences and therefore unmet rights and needs. We emphasise that our aim is not to harm those who identify as transgender; rather, it is one of harm reduction and prevention, and we do not accept that speaking about biological facts is harmful. Attached is a selection of leaflets we have been distributing, including an invitation to a Speak Out to be held tomorrow that has been organised by a consortium of concerned lesbian, gay and feminist organisations

We therefore request an urgent meeting with you to discuss these issues raised by the bill.

Virginia Mansel Lees
Convenor
Phone: xxx
Email: admin@coal.org.au

NSW contact
Dr Viviane Morrigan
Phone: xxx
Email: admin@coal.org.au