The harm caused by a therapy ban in NZ, part 1 of 8: “A biased bill”

In August 2021, a Labour Party member of New Zealand’s parliament introduced a bill proposal called “Conversion Practices Prohibition Legislation Bill”. He is hoping to have it passed in 2022. But the resistance in New Zealand is great.

He seeks to secure five years imprisonment for professionals and lay persons who would seek to “change or suppress the sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression”. The bill is meant to apply to persons of all ages, irrespective of their own wish. The Bill is now open to criticism from the general public before moving on in the bureaucratic process. As of October 2021, more than 100.000 New Zealanders have submitted written protests to this outrageous proposal.

In this series, we examine many of the arguments that are being brought forward. In each article, we will tackle the bill from the angle of content, rather than the angle of civil freedoms (freedom of thought, expression, religion, speech, etc.). After all, we observe that in the USA the defending of freedoms (based on constitutional amendments) does not ring a bill with radical left-wingers, neither does it worry them.

So, we need to bring forward secular and sound scientific material about the fluidity of human sexuality itself in order to promote and protect ongoing discussion in this realm.

1. A heavily biased bill
The Bill presumes beforehand that any form of questioning homosexual feelings needs to be removed from society. The bill does not stem from New Zealand.

It is an export product from downtown San Francisco, USA. These radicalized Americans have, on the other hand, no problem with questioning the existence of heterosexual feelings. They assume that a binary exists making you either one of “these” or one of “those”, states of mind which would cancel each other out. Nothing could be less true. Fluidity is the rule, not the exception.

The proposal is heavily biased in the way that the case is presented beforehand. A strange expression is used: “conversion therapy”. This is not a fair description of the way sexual fluidity is examined. State force is called in to end all discussion about worldviews.

These radicalized activists have come to believe that, on the one hand, sexual feelings are fixed and that on the other hand, being male or female is fluid. So, your state of mind (feelings) are immutable but your body is fluid and can be converted from one sex to the other. Challenging feelings is therefore out of the question, so they feel, but challenging, and using medical and social procedures on the body (gender) is the modern way to go.

It will be clear that we moderate activists or professionals are fundamentally opposed to the worldview which lies at the heart of this bill.

In our view, psychotherapy does not convert something but merely explores something: your past and your current feelings. The true “conversion therapy” in our view is the surgeon and internist who endeavor to convert a male or female body to look like its opposite.

Therefore, it is not psychiatry or psychotherapy which indulges in “conversion therapy” but the people behind this bill. Never have opposing worldviews been so at odds with each other as in this radical-activist campaign. And the truth, mind you, is not in the middle.

2. Where does this ridiculous term “conversion therapy” come from?
Radicalism uses a catch-all phrase to embrace psychotherapy. Recently fabricated, this term does not exist as such in any professional field.

The lay terminology has been conceived a decade ago by a fringe of radical lesbian-feminist activists. They are united in the National Center of Lesbian Rights in the USA, a highly successful law firm specialized in suing dissident thought since 1976.

In their spare time, they dress up in leather outfits. Their motor club is called Dykes on Bikes. Harley-Davidson is the preferred vehicle of choice. The competing motor-club Hell’s Angels refers to them as the Bitches From Hell. The NCLR loves the compliment.

In Wikipedia, we read:

“In keeping with the tradition of motorcyclists’ rejection of norms, the Dykes on Bikes teach that women can be masculine and challenge the dominant sexual and cultural expectations of what a woman is. They are highly visible icons who refuse to assimilate and conform to mainstream society gender roles“.

As a law firm, they are always fighting other people in order to win, to ram their worldview down other people’s throats, to make them choke in it, and this incessant daily practice has influenced the mind-frame of recruits in the office. “We fight to survive and need to do so”, so is their professional mantra; this is then internalized as a basic human condition, which it isn’t.

A paranoid bubble has been created and grievance-hunting is called in to take away all doubts. Taking offense at other people becomes a daily habit, and is psychologically necessary to soothe the doubting intellectual mind. The NCLR has become a sect. “Shields up, on guard”, so the CEO repeats in her endless array of email battle-cries to her flock. “We are in the trenches”.

It is heartbreaking to see how radicalism is vanquishing kind and generous moderatism in the social dispute. A subdued tone of voice is shoved aside by flamboyant and often obscene marches with an intimidatingly long rainbow-colored flag (1 kilometer as of 2020). Onlookers are made to feel “you better wave that flag, boy, or you have a problem”.

It may come as a surprise to know that radical activists are merely a small minority in the broad field of emancipation efforts. But they have cash and have come to orchestrate the mob. With legislation, all discussion will end for evermore. So they implement a short burst of lies, deceit, and the manipulation of feelings in parliament in order to sit back for decades and lock up the unbelievers. Sounds like the Muslim Brotherhood to me. Taliban, anyone?

3. The Bill is unacceptable
No professional can be demanded by law to go with this collection of pseudo-scientific untruths, twists, and heterophobia. The bill even promotes the glorification of gender confusion, the hatred of your own body, a phobia against your own normality. We call it normophobia. And yes, it is a deep emotional turmoil of auto-aggressive distress. There is nothing there to celebrate from a public health point of view.

Neither do we celebrate Anorexia Nervosa, a severe eating disorder, no matter how pleased afflicted individuals feel about themselves in their self-loathing.

It is a mental disorder where the own body-image is not accepted either: death rate 20%. Gender confusion death rate: 33%. Average number of suicide attempts in Anorexia: 50. Number on average in Gender Confusion: 100 to 150. And don’t tell me the shrink is to blame. Please! Many, or most, victims of this mental disorder don’t even see a shrink before dying!

The term ‘conversion therapy’ does not stem from the professional community itself and is not recognized as a legitimate description of anything. It fails to distinguish between the sound exploration of sexual attraction fluidity in professional settings and perhaps poor therapy.

The work which is done by counselors in the area of sexology does not match the alleged practices in this bill. There is no case on record in New Zealand of people being found guilty of emotional and physical abuse in therapy in this realm. And neither in NZ, AU, or the EU are legal complaints even to be found. There is no historical base for insisting that the law should step in. We are looking at a genuine case of a ‘non-problem’.

It is a deliberately organized international campaign called “BornPerfect” (by the National Centre of Lesbian Rights, Kate Kendall CEO, San Francisco, 2014). Deadline: 2019, as Kate’s retirement present to the world, a self-erected monument. Deadline for the UN: 2020. New Zealand apparently needs to hurry up. ‘We have removed the whole bloody lot’, so she appears to say. It does not stem from native soil.

If the proponents of this bill believe by definition that contesting therapy involves this level of action, the removal of therapists and science from Western thought (10 years of incarceration in Victoria, AU, for a start), they are misguided. History is repeating itself: the Cultural Revolution in China, the Cultural Revolution down under. Gulags in Siberia, gulags in the Outback. A reign of terror.

If one searches hard enough, there will be stories of individuals who have had bad experiences in their youth whilst struggling with their feelings. But this also applies to a great array of other events in youth and this bill seeks to isolate one aspect and to drag alleged perpetrators to court. All other youth issues like unplanned pregnancy, melancholy, STD’s, low self-esteem, juvenile delinquency, etc, are left out of the equation. The bill exhumes a bad breath of blindfolded narrow-mindedness.

The Bill is banning all efforts to discuss the nature of the innate bisexual predicament or potential of all mankind and to replace it with an innate homosexual predicament. As of 2019, we now know there is no proof of the latter. Separate sexualities do not exist. All human beings share a common humanity. This is bad news for radicalized elements. “Never has our social condition been so bad”, Kate Kendall’s Christmas crowd-funding message to her flock, 2019. The truth, in our view, is however: ‘never has the social condition been so good’.

Narrow-minded negativism will not stand. It is called homosexism: “crush an omnipresent bisexuality and replace it with a separate homosexuality”. In this series, we will demonstrate how harmful homosexism really is.

Conclusion

The wholesale banning of non-affirming counseling is not just heavy-handed but totalitarian. It rules out scientific findings as they continuously unfold themselves into the public debate. Labour Party refrigerators morph ripples of reflection into ice cubes for evermore. Permafrost, anyone?

Once this bill is engraved in stone, the world-view will never change. All dissidence will be outlawed for evermore. And during this short-lived debate in parliament, radicalized activists have nothing to lose: just yell your head off and play the victim card. After all, only professionals have to live up to professional norms, activists don’t. No one can ever put them out of business in the way that professionals have to watch their each and every step.

To be continued.

Job Berendsen, MD.