The proposed legislation is not an ultimate solution for mental health care, it will become the ultimate problem. There are four backlash issues that inevitably must lead to professional condemnation of this fear-mongering. Can we already predict undesirable dramas stemming from this bill? Yes. And have they been taken into account? No. The Bill aims to induce a chilling effect on dissidence. To this end, the notion of thought crimes is introduced. More than 10.000 individuals in NZ have written a letter of protest. The professional mental health community is under siege.
1. Thought Crimes as of 2021
The Bill has serious side effects. It will automatically make therapists hesitant to take on any youngster who has doubts about sexual matters. Let us look at this bill from the point of view of a therapist who is under surveillance and will ultimately be imprisoned. A notion of thought crimes has come to hover menacingly overhead. The subject of sexual preferences was always a sensitive issue, but with this bill, it will become dynamite. The proposed law aims to make your listening to your client blow up in your face.
If you go with the flow while talking with a client, the law is no longer on your side. Imagine making casual remarks to a gay guy. Imagine saying something stupid like “chicks can be hot”. Even if you wink your eye to the client to convey that you are joking, your remark can or will be taken to heart as an offensively phobic remark, especially if the client is deeply heterophobic, meaning that the mere thought of sexual intimacy with, and/or emotional dependency on, the opposite sex provokes much fear and disgust.
Then, when the client proceeds on to feel that this fear was done to him as a passive victim in therapy, instead of being produced by himself during merely verbal exchanges during therapy, you have a problem. A big one.
These clients are volatile. Get rid of them. You must be insane to take on a client like this complainer in this day and age of Woke Awareness Of Harm And Discrimination And Harassment And Cruelty And (thank you, Nancy Pelosi, for the term that you used:) Barbarism. (The Barbarian would be you, of course, as a therapist). The slander against therapy by activists is revolting and the activists are tightening the noose. Why bother about sexology clients? Save your skin. Better safe than sorry.
Let them go to Hell with their sexual doubts, their sexual problems, their suicidal thoughts. After all, after 2021, there is only one suicide in the therapy room: to take on a client who may very well seek help outside your office to sue you, to imprison you, to remove you from the profession for evermore.
Ever thought of that, NZ?
Backlash #1: poor little gay guys are not getting more help, they are getting less. And, as a psychiatrist, I find that worrying.
2. Filing a complaint
We observe the activists behind this Bill (the US-based National Center of Lesbian Rights) asking youngsters to redirect complaints not to the Complaints Department (which seeks solutions) but to radical gay law firms who, like the NCLR, seek a legal battle.
It is becoming the client’s interest versus yours. The Bill is causing therapists to choose for their license and therefore to choose against those clients. In the USA, clients are increasingly being sent away with all sorts of excuses and that is the right thing to do if you, as a therapist, still want to keep your license next year. These gullible clients are dynamite under your ongoing enrollment in the professional register.
This means that the NZ government is helping to bypass the normal route through the regular Complaints Department with all its protections for clients and therapists alike. It is creating a new route directly to (gay) law firms who are not interested in (or earn money with) the rights of the therapists. The new route is also to the Public Prosecutor. This threat will ultimately cause the clamshell of psychotherapy to close even more on this client category due to fear.
Backlash #2: poor little gay guys are reaching out to prejudiced law firms instead of following the normal route for complaints like everybody else. This makes therapists even more hesitant, leading to less public mental health.
Here is our proof. On the NCLR website, we read:
“If you or someone you know is experiencing conversion therapy and are seeking legal support, please contact Born Perfect’s legal support line, the NCLR. All calls are welcome and confidentiality is guaranteed.”
By means of crowd-funding (“Donate now“), they can afford to lose an occasional legal battle. A therapist can not, with politically correct behavior as a result.
This very insinuative activist prose leads to two questions:
a) since when do clients in therapy seek legal support? Never heard of it. NCLR, please explain. If you need “legal support”, why not reach out to the official Complaints Department which has no private interest, as does Kate Kendall, the CEO of the NCLR, who needs to earn money for her sixty female lawyers, not to mention her multi-millionaire livelihood?
b) why do these San Francisco-based Harley-Davidson “Dykes-On-Bikes®” keep on saying that therapy is something you are “experiencing” (what a passive phrase) instead of saying that therapy is something you are “searching for” (an active phrase)?
3. Blackmail in organizations: the gay colleague
If you work as a therapist in an organization for public mental health care and if this law is passed in NZ, then inviting any LGBT colleague to join the ranks is making you a potential victim to blackmail, at least as of 2021.
During his/her interview, the candidate who wants to work in your organization may show himself to be a most likable gay guy. But in four years, he could turn against you and report you to the authorities, especially with more legislation underway in the coming years.
This Bill is merely the writing on the wall. It is not ending here, not by a long shot. This Bill is not a Declaration of Peace. It is the next step in a “Declaration of War”, as radicalized activists cried out in 1973 at the National Convention in Washington of the American Psychiatric Association. Their radicalism has morphed into the Woke Movement as of 2020 that we see conquering the public space.
Who is this likable guy, seeking work? Surely the identity politics movement will get the better of him and surely he will be coming for you in the months to come. And if he/she feels so inclined, your life will be made hell. Proudly so.
In the USA, we hear that mental health institutes have become increasingly shy to choose for a gay colleague instead of a no-worries straight guy. Only fools hire gay guys these days in mental public health because they can blackmail you or come for you if you have a serious difference of opinion. Bottom line: the current political climate is no longer a safe work environment in mental health care. Be wary of a gay guy applying for a job, especially if he/she has cheered his head off at the local Gay Parade.
Remember that during the French Revolution in 1789, the crowd yelled equally loud as the Guillotine merrily chopped away. Those were the days, not for “Freedom, Brotherhood, and Equality”, but for “Freedom, Brotherhood, Equality, and the Guillotine”!
On the website Ultimate History Project, we read:
“Under this system, at least 40,000 people were killed. As many as 300,000 Frenchmen and women (1 in 50 Frenchmen and women) were arrested during a ten-month period between September 1793 and July 1794. Included in these numbers were, of course, the deaths of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. Although all social classes and professions were targeted, the death toll was especially high for both clergy and aristocrats. The numbers of those killed and taken into custody were probably even higher as the documented numbers don’t include people killed by vigilantes and other self-proclaimed representatives of the Republic.”
40.000? Genocide, anyone? Especially high for clergy? Any religious feelings, anyone? (And Job Berendsen is not even religious. But he is extremely worried).
Bottom-line: why take on an openly gay activist colleague? Why not think of a good excuse, especially to save your non-activist butt?
Backlash #3: Gay professionals are becoming increasingly marginalized. Take on a gay guy in your mental health institute and you are done for. These “gay” people are being encouraged to call you out and to end your professional life. They have the cops, public opinion, and prison cells on their side. Choose someone else!
To the legislators, we say: “Hullo, radicals, wake up, what are you doing? Give it some thought”.
4. The activist crusade against heterosexism
The fight of the radicals is against heterosexism, the notion that everybody is born straight and that it is every person’s ultimate destiny. To counteract this, our radicalized colleagues have installed their own notion.
They convey the message that indeed sexuality consists of immutable traits and that for many, the trait is non-heterosexuality, a supposedly immutable trait with which you were born and with which you will die.
This amounts to 2 or 3% of the population at the most. That is no big deal for the 97%. The louder that radical gay activists yell: “We were born that way”, the more that straight guys can feel justified to retort: “Yeah, and we were not!” This then strengthens their conviction that most people are spared the horror of being “one of those”. Fluidity goes down the drain. Heterosexism has been affirmed and strengthened. It will not disappear at this rate: to the contrary. It is growing stronger thanks to radical gay activism. The concept of a universal full-sexual potential is sinking to the ocean bed like the continent of Atlantis, a mirage.
More homosexism leads to more heterosexism. The movement has failed to deliver. Proud of what, may I ask?
5. Conclusion
The proposed legislation will lead to backlashes which the proponents have not considered. The Bill is deeply rooted in heterophobia which is then projected onto others, leading people to believe that society is saturated with phobia. After which a victim stance is promoted and taken to heart.
But science knows as of 2019 that anyone can experience same-sex feelings and indulge in same-sex behavior, but also that everyone can experience opposite-sex attractions and behavior. And those are not two separate groups, but one and the same. The boundaries are fluent, the behavior is fluid. We now know for sure.
We need to take it from there and move on.
In a frenzy of paranoia, however, the activists behind this Bill seek to punish. They seek to induce fear. Little do they realize that the proposed prison sentences in the AU state of Victoria, where ten years of preventive detention is currently being made to sound reasonable by radical activists, will create deep divisions in society. Little do they realize that therapists must choose for their license.
Given this Bill and the proposed gulags in the Outback, gay clients and gay colleagues are more of a menace than an asset in your department of mental health. Are backlashes really in the interest of poor little gay guys? Or should we, perhaps, start to trust one another and to marginalize, no, not therapists but the radicals? They are useless in the eyes of moderate people. There should be no room for heterophobia in our society.
To be continued
Job Berendsen, MD
