Criminalising parental love

Mums and dads in Canada who have gender-confused kids need to be careful what they say from now on. Because it is now potentially an offence to discourage your son or daughter from going down the transgender road. A new law, enacted this month, updates Canada’s criminal code to make it a crime to ‘repress a person’s non-cisgender gender identity’ or to ‘repress… a person’s gender expression that does not conform to the sex assigned to the person at birth’. You’re a dad who loves his son and refuses to let him wear a dress or adopt a female name or swallow some puberty-blockers? Well, you could be in trouble. That could count as ‘repression of gender identity’. You could be locked up for five years.

The new law means that Canada’s criminal code now outlaws ‘conversion therapy’. But this doesn’t only refer to the kind of conversion therapy that sends a shiver down the spine of most right-thinking people – for example, the forced, pseudo-psychological attempt to turn a gay man straight or to exorcise the demonic lusts from a sinful lesbian. No, conversion therapy now means any ‘practice, treatment or service’ that is deisgned to meddle in any way whatsoever with a person’s sexuality, gender identity or gender expression. So the ‘practice’ of seeking to ‘change a person’s gender identity to cisgender’ is now counted as conversion therapy in Canada and potentially carries a heavy punishment. Just think about what might fall under that category. The loving mum who flat-out refuses to let her young daughter shave her hair off and wear boy’s clothes and become a he / him – is that a ‘practice’, and is it a ‘practice’ designed to ‘change a person’s gender identity to cisgender’? Does mum deserve five years in the slammer?

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