“Gender-Affirming Care” Is the New Conversion Therapy

Science as Superstition

In today's featured essay, Donovan Cleckley joins a rising chorus of voices decrying "modern conversion therapy." Today's "gender-affirming care," Cleckley argues, repeats a historical pattern, in which gender nonconformity and homosexuality are understood as a pathology that should be cured through chemical and/or surgical castration. In articulating a humanizing solution, Cleckley draws on the work of featured author Abigail Favale.

Fairer Disputations
 

"Gender-Affirming Care" Is the New Conversion Therapy

DONOVAN CLECKLEY

Medical interventions have long been used to suppress homosexuality. Psychosurgery, testicle implants, aversion therapy, electroconvulsive therapy, and—yes—hormone therapy: medical authorities have presented all of these as legitimate “treatments” for homosexuality.

We should not be seduced by the new “affirmative” trappings of today’s conversion therapy. A look back at the history of these hormonal and surgical treatments reveals how these practices fed upon and exacerbated the self-hatred of lesbians and gay men.

This Week's Links:

First, featured author Eliza Mondegreen details her experiences attending transgender "healthcare" conferences, where she learns what gender clinicians talk about "behind closed doors."

UnHerd
 

The Secret Life of Gender Clinicians

ELIZA MONDEGREEN

This was no ordinary medical conference. Over the course of three days, I learned a great many things. That eunuchs are one of the world’s oldest gender identities and that doctors should not judge their strange desires for castration but fulfil them. That, “ideally, patients wouldn’t be actively psychotic” when they initiated testosterone, but that psychotic patients consent to take medication like stool softeners and statins all the time and “people don’t pay that much attention”. That it would be “ableist” to question an autistic girl’s insistence on a double mastectomy. That patients who claim to have multiple personalities that disagree about which irreversible steps to take toward transition can find consensus — or at least obtain a quorum — using a smartphone app.

Next, at COMPACT, Carmel Richardson provides a detailed treatment of the booming industry of commercial. Highlighting the work of featured author Jennifer Lahl, Richardson explores what makes surrogacy an appealing option for women who serve as "carriers"--and the legal distinctions that paper over serious moral and philosophical questions.

COMPACT
 

The Joy—And Horror—of Surrogacy

CARMEL RICHARDSON

Theresa Erickson, then 43, was a high-profile California surrogacy attorney and the author of a book on assisted reproduction when she was convicted, together with two accomplices, of illegal baby selling in 2012. Erickson, who herself had served as a surrogate and egg donor, had been sending would-be surrogate mothers overseas to Ukraine, having them implanted with donor embryos, and then connecting them with would-be parents Stateside under the auspices of a previous surrogacy agreement having fallen through. In the United States, at least on paper, a surrogate couldn’t be implanted without the IVF doctor first consulting the lawyers, but Ukraine’s surrogacy laws are among the most lax in the world.

These three female lawyers were in breach of numerous ethical guidelines and also committed wire fraud, but that wasn’t what landed Erickson in federal prison for five months. She was caught, and ultimately sentenced, because her contracts for the sale of a dozen babies had been put into place after each child was conceived. Had they taken place before conception, no bust would have occurred.

Finally, Josephine Bartosch discusses recently leaked comments by senior employees of Pornhub's parent company, who admitted that queer themes had been strategically inserted into porn videos to "see if you can convert somebody... who's never looked for anything like that." This "conversion" is the point, she argues: those who encounter porn online are "inexorably sucked onto a downward conveyor belt of increasingly depraved and extreme content."

For more color on this topic, don't miss featured author Mary Harrington's insight on porn's formative influence on kids.

The Critic

The Price of Porn

JOSEPHINE BARTOSCH

Mounting evidence shows consumers of pornography become numb to what once aroused them. By slipping in taboo-busting content, or in Rice’s words, pushing stuff that’s “less accepted”, pornographers can hack the sexual interests of consumers. If this simply led to straight men spaffing off to gay pornography that in itself might not be any more morally dubious than watching heterosexual scenes. The problem is what this says about the malleable tastes of male pornography consumers; the extra clicks come from the breaking down of social norms of what is “acceptable”. This clearly does not always stop with seeking out “trans” or “gay” categories.

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