Edenbridge provides ongoing supports and services to children and adults with developmental disabilities, support for those who require assistance with their independence, and individuals with mental health challenges. Intriguingly, their mission statement includes this sentence:
Edenbridge Family Services Inc. is dedicated to providing services to those in need regardless of race, color, religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, income or disability.
But that’s kind of tangential.
Bill C-8, which held its first reading on 9 March 2020, will criminalize the following actions related to conversion therapy, once passed:
- Causing a person to undergo conversion therapy against the person’s will
- Causing a child to undergo conversion therapy
- Doing anything that removes a child from Canada to undergo conversion therapy outside Canada
- Advertising an offer to provide conversion therapy
- Receiving a financial or other material benefit from providing conversion therapy.
Conversion therapy is a collective term that refers to various practices aimed at changing a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity, including shaming, emotional trauma, and physical pain, by associating those negative experiences with their LGBTQ identities.
Fundamentally, Bill C-8 is about making conversion therapy illegal in Canada, recognizing that it harms LGBTQ people.
Sascha Kramps’s letter opposes the bill, at least from a trans treatment perspective. This isn’t surprising, as Sascha has a history of transphobic comments online.
For example, on 6 January 2020, she commented on a Change.or petition called “Stop RBC from supporting radical sex education in schools”.
Last year, she left a comment on a post called “Letter Sent to PFLAG Vancouver Regarding Their Trans Protest Against Feminist Meghan Murphy: Some LGBT Community Members Support Her Right to Speak” at the transphobic website The Homoarchy. The article has since been removed. Full disclosure: Colin McKenna, the chapter lead of PFLAG Vancouver is a friend of mine, and we went to high school together.
In a comment last May on a Patreon post entitled, “The Transgender Takeover of Female Sports”, she said, “This infuriates me.”
Her letter uses two common myths that transphobic people use to justify their transphobia and oppose initiatives that protect trans rights. As a parent of 3 trans youth—and as a queer man myself—I felt it important to dispel these two myths.
Myth 1: 85% of trans kids choose to be straight after therapy
The problem with desistance research is that it’s terribly flawed.
First, a diagnosis of gender identity disorder was less stringent than that of gender dysphoria in the DSM-V. This means that these desistance studies included large numbers of children who wouldn’t have met the more stringent criteria if they sought diagnosis today.
Second, these desistance studies weren’t studying gender identity. Some of the participants in the studies were children whose parents were worried about their gender expression (boys wearing dresses, for example).
Third, some studies classified all study dropouts as desisters, whether they actually desisted or not.
Finally, the more popular studies cited for desistance statistics never studied desistance, but rather predictors of persistence. Also, those who ended up labelled as desisters were more likely to indicate–when asked if they were a boy or a girl—that they wished they were the “opposite” sex. Those who indicated they were the other sex were less likely to desist.
Take a 2013 study by Thomas Steensma, a researcher and clinician at the Center of Expertise on Gender Dysphoria in Amsterdam. In this study, Steensma and his team examined 127 adolescents who had displayed various gender dysphoria as children. They found that 80 of the participants had desisted by 16 years old. That works out to 63% of kids who apparently stopped being transgender.
However, 28 of those 80 who had been classified as desisters simply had not sent back their questionnaires. 38 of the original participants didn’t meet all the criteria of an official diagnosis. And the desisters tended, when asked if they were or a boy or girl, to indicate that they wished that they were the “opposite” sex, while the persisters tended to indicate that they actually were the opposite sex.
As well, Steensma’s study was never designed to measure desistance; it was designed to measure persistence, which it did.
Myth 2: Hormone therapy leads to sterility
Sascha Kramps cites Michael Laidlaw—an endocrinologist who is no longer ABIM-certified but is certified with NBPAS—well-known for his own transphobia and his crusade to stop hormone therapy. According to Kramps, Laidlaw claims that hormone therapy leads to sterility.
I mean, that makes sense. If a trans male takes GnRH analogs, for example, then of course his body isn’t going to ovulate. That’s kind of the point. If a trans female is on estrogen therapy, then her testosterone levels will drop, potentially affecting sperm generation.
Like I said, that makes sense. But I anticipate most trans men don’t actually want to have their period every month, let alone get pregnant. Perhaps some do, but I imagine for others, this can accentuate gender dysphoria, which is why they’re using hormone therapy in the first place.
Granted, this seems to be reversible, at least for some people. A 2017 Belgian study, for instance, found that cortical follicle distribution in trans men, even after over a year of testosterone treatment, was normal.
Even so, fertility is not the only outcome of hormone therapy. It also alleviates gender dysphoria and improves psychological functioning (such as body image, global functioning, depression, anxiety, and emotional and behavioural problems). As well, it results in the well-being (social and professional functioning, quality of life, life satisfaction, and happiness) of trans people to be similar to or better than same age people from the general population.
In the second sentence of Kramps’ letter, she states, “Bill C-8, the Conversion Therapy Ban, limits opportunities for children to receive thorough psychological care.”
What Kramps fails to address in her letter is that there is little evidence that conversion therapy provides psychological care, let alone thorough care.
The APA established a task force in 2007 to review all the research to date on conversion therapy’s efficacy. The task force concluded that there was very little methodologically sound research on the effects of conversion therapy, and the scientifically valid research that did exist indicated “that it is unlikely that individuals will be able to reduce same-sex attractions or increase other-sex sexual attractions through” conversion therapy.
On the other hand, not participating in conversion therapy means someone doesn’t have to endure being told that they’re not actually gay, that they can be the sexual orientation their parents assigned to them at birth. It means someone doesn’t have to endure being told that they’re not actually the gender they identify with, that they can be the gender their parents assigned to them at birth. That alone can improve one’s mental health.
I never had to undergo conversion therapy, thankfully. However, I have had, as a queer man, my sexual orientation repressed. All my life, I’ve been told I was straight: by my family, by my church, by the society I live in. I accepted it, and for decades repressed my queerness. I’m only starting to come to terms with it now.
Luckily for me, I’m in a relationship with someone I’m sexually attracted to, so my mental health hasn’t suffered greatly. I can only imagine what it must be like for someone who is completely gay to have to live as straight or someone who is trans having to live as cis.
How anyone could defend the forcing of those scenarios as beneficial, especially someone who herself is lesbian and who thinks “praying the gay away is garbage”, dumbfounds me.
Update (21 April 2020): The Lethbridge Herald removed the letter to the editor from their website. Here is a copy:
I still am straight. Well, kind of straight. Mostly straight. On the Kinsey scale, I’m probably a 1, or possibly a 2. But for most of my life, I thought I was a 0.
For most of my life, I thought I was the default. I was what everyone told me I was: straight and cisgender. I liked girls, I was teased about girls, I talked about girls with my friends, and most of my sexual/physical/romantic experiences were with girls.
But not all of them.
I had a handful of sexual/physical/romantic experiences that didn’t involve girls. They involved boys.
But I never saw myself as gay. After all, I liked girls. A lot. There was no mistaking that. Heck, I’m not sure, looking back now, that I really understood what “gay” even meant. I don’t think I knew any gay people. I mean, I had gay classmates in high school, but I was so oblivious to what “gayness” was that I had no idea they were gay until several years after graduation.
As time went on and I grasped what “gay” meant, I still never saw myself as gay—as I said—because I was still very much attracted to women. But those experiences—as memories—occasionally surfaced, requiring me to rationalize them somehow, while still being true to the performance society, religion, and family expected of me. And the only explanation I could ever concoct was that they were nothing more than experimentation: youthful frolicking, uninhibited by mores. Each time the memories returned, I swept them under the rug, justifying them as undefining experiments.
Yet I never gave thought to why I thought that the experiences I had with boys were experiments but not the ones I had with girls.
I was 21 when I got married, so I never had same-sex experiences as an adult. My sexual experiences as an adult have been almost exclusively with Mary, and so heterosexual. Which made it easy to continue to dismiss some of the experiences of my youth. I’ve been in a straight relationship for over 25 years, and that relationship has defined my own sexuality significantly. Who I am sexually today is so intertwined with my relationship with Mary. After all, I’ve been married to her for most of my life. And what awareness I had of my own sexuality prior to my marriage was only a few short years. Less than a decade, really.
Today, I try to exercise fidelity to Mary. As part of that, I try to control how I look at other women, trying to avoid seeing them as someone to be attracted to. And while occasionally, I’ve had to do the same thing with men, it was never the same. If attractive men crossed my path, I never found their presence a threat to my fidelity to Mary, but rather a threat to my sexuality. I shook off the attractions not to protect my devotion to my marriage, but to protect the sexual role I had been assigned by my society, church, and family.
And since they rarely occurred, I rarely thought much about them.
As someone who’s interested in strength training, I’ve watched a tonne (get it?) of weight lifting videos. And plenty of times, I looked longingly at the bodies of the men in those videos. But I always thought it was admiration I felt. Their bodies were what I wanted mine to be like, how I wanted to look. But now, I wonder if that admiration wasn’t actually admiration after all, but something more.
Recently, for some reason, all of this has been on my mind. The experiences of my youth, the occasional attractive man, the weightlifting videos, and all the other ways—as infrequent as they are—that men have interacted with my sexual self. All of it.
For some reason, I finally realized that the experiences of my youth weren’t fleeting experiments. They were foundational experiences. Both experiences I had with girls and experiences I had with boys. I finally realized that these weren’t experiments; they were expressions. In all cases, I was expressing my sexuality.
So where does this realization leave me now?
Well, I’m not straight. But I’m not gay. And I don’t really see myself as bisexual.
So, I guess, like I said at the outset, I’m kind of straight. Mostly straight. But not just straight.
Since I’m still very much attracted to women, nothing changes for my marriage. I’m still attracted to Mary physically, romantically, sexually. Like I said, so much of my sexual self is intertwined with my life with her. I’m more attracted to her today than I was 25 years ago. So functionally, not much changes.
Except I guess I have some things to work through.
Like how do I, as a queer person, confront the homophobia of my past? How do I deal with the ways I internally dismissed attraction to other men with disgust rather than fears of infidelity? Now that I finally acknowledge my complex sexuality, how do I accept it? How do I embrace it? And how much does it ultimately matter?