Supreme Court seems skeptical of state bans on ‘conversion therapy’
“The court’s conservative majority didn’t seem convinced that states can restrict talk therapy aimed at changing feelings or behavior while allowing counseling that affirms kids identifying as gay or transgender. Justice Samuel Alito said the law ‘looks like blatant viewpoint discrimination.’” - Baptist Press
One of the key contentions in those states which ban "conversion therapy" is that persuading someone to identify as another gender--really identify as their birth/biological gender--is intrinsically harmful. That brings to mind previous data which indicates that for juveniles with gender disphoria, it resolved 80% of the time, and that a Johns Hopkins review of their gender transition group found no mental health benefit of transitioning--a result largely repeated with a landmark Swedish study that found that the long term (>10 years) "benefit" of transitioning 19 men to "women" was that only six of them, instead of the expected seven, needed ongoing mental health care.
On the planet I inhabit, castrating nineteen men to eliminate one man's mental health care bill seems to have the ROI calculation backwards, to put it mildly.
So while there is an apparent "consensus" among many medical organizations that therapy to reconcile someone with their birth gender is harmful, the actual data do not appear to show this.
To be fair, some forms of "conversion therapy" do not amount to therapy as much as they do to torture--aversion therapy I believe is the medical, more polite term for it. That probably has some side effects. But what is being asked here is that therapists be allowed to pursue talk therapy, not aversion therapy.
Aspiring to be a stick in the mud.
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