This proposed bill has a long history. This is a blog, so you aren’t going to get the full history of it. What I intend to do is to give some indication of why I think this is a very dangerous bill which should be blocked.
The bill appears to have been inspired or, more accurately, provoked by the gender identity debate. I was first aware of it when a psychodynamic therapy colleague published a letter inviting psychoanalytic organisations to sign up to this proposed bill. The argument was that its aim was to prevent patients coming to therapy with a gender identity issue from being “converted” to a different identity than the one that they were espousing.
Historically the psychoanalytic community, to its shame, had identified, homosexuality as an illness that required a therapeutic intervention but, even more appallingly, disqualified the individual from training in a psychoanalytic model. When I started training in 1990 my fellow “candidates” and I was surprised and shocked that there were still people, senior people, within the society still holding such views. I am pleased to say that the psychoanalytic profession in this country has rejected the idea that gay and lesbian people are perverted.
Those of us who work with adolescents, as I had since October 1975, recognising that adolescence itself is a process that takes many years to complete, saw that the main threat to achieving proper adult sexual identity was to be drawn into some kind of premature certainty. This was often offered to adolescents by fundamentalist religions. The state of not knowing, in this case not knowing who I am, can be very uncomfortable and even agonising. It is not going to surprise us therefore, that all adolescents at some level and some adolescents as an imperative seek certainty as a welcome rescue from not knowing.
Then came the Internet and as has widely been commented, generation Z – those who have always had the Internet in their lives – who grew up in a world in which the smart phone could answer any of their questions. This, as we all know, was reinforced by the experience of Covid and the loss of direct contact with friends. I have written at some length in other papers about how important friends are during the adolescent process because they provide a space that enables experimentation to take place over time so that, gradually, the exploration of one’s adult sexual identity can be pursued. Thus, the removal of an environment of enquiry supported by friends made turning to the Internet an obvious alternative. However, the Internet does not encourage the enquirer to continue enquiring, it provides certainty and then feeds that certainty with an endless supply of “evidence”.
Meanwhile, at a different level of human development, something that I consider to represent a serious challenge to Western thought, post modernism, began to take a much firmer hold of intellectual academia. If it wasn’t so serious, it would be hilarious the way that, because the post modernist principle is that nothing can be “known”, every statement that is made by academics basing their own enquiry on post modernism, has to be restated a little further down the line. I suppose this is because of the nagging feeling that whatever has just been claimed cannot, of itself, be true. Because nothing can really be known. Tempting though it is to give examples from papers that I have had to listen to, it is important to return to my theme and demonstrate the extra problem for adolescents provided through post modernist thinking.
Gender.
Or, rather, the idea that gender belongs to an identity that has become free from the original biology that led to the development of the conscious cognitive mind. Once again, I have written a lot about the development of the conscious mind, so I won’t go on about it here. All I want to say is that it is very clearly our biological uniqueness that leads to the development of consciousness and it is very easy to demonstrate that the identity we create for ourselves within that consciousness remains completely dependent upon our biology. The test is very simple; when our conscious mind collapses in the face, for example, of dementia, we continue to live in an otherwise perfectly normal way. On the other hand, when the body dies, even the mind that believes that it has transcended biology dies.
The reason that I am so disturbed by this bill is that it suggests that to provide a space for an adolescent who has made a premature conclusion about their sexual identity, so that they can continue to experiment and learn from experience, is an activity that can be described as conversion. That is because, embedded in the bill is an extraordinary idea, namely that not affirming the adolescent’s claim about their identity is the act of conversion. Everyone who comes to a therapist to get help with a psychological or emotional problem brings a belief system that will be found to maintain the source of pain. If the therapist says, “this is the way you are, and I respect it and will not enquire into it.” Where does that leave the patient?
I have, primarily, a duty of care. That means that I recognise that everybody who comes to see me brings some psychological/emotional pain. If they could see the source of this pain they would already have resolved it so we both know that it is something unconscious. My job is to discover what that might be and find a way to help them to address it. That means that the most helpful thing I can do is to listen to my patient from a position of benign enquiry until I become aware of something that does not quite fit. This allows me purchase on a perspective that is not available to the patient. This conversion bill might easily allow somebody to accuse me of converting them from a belief that they brought with them into therapy; my view is that beliefs, which are often unconscious, will be discovered to be at the centre of the emotional and psychological pain. My practice is not to challenge this belief but to bring it to the patient’s attention along with an idea of what it is doing to that patient’s experience of life.
I shall continue to do this, by the way.