Massachusetts Lawmakers to Vote on Bill Equating Counseling for Gender Confusion with Child Abuse

LGBTQ activists are attempting to push through the Massachusetts legislature Wednesday a bill that would make it a crime for children and their parents to obtain professional counseling for unwanted sexual attractions or gender confusion.

The legislation, if enacted, would equate mental health counseling for a young person’s unwanted same-sex attraction or gender confusion with child abuse.

“SB 70 AND HB 140 target parents simply trying to assist their gender confused children by requiring that any counseling (specifically talk therapy) that they receive affirm liberal gender ideology and sex changes,” says the Massachusetts Family Institute (MFI), which opposes the legislation.

“A well-meaning mental health provider would be handcuffed and not able to explore the source of a client’s feelings, and be required by law to affirm hormone therapy and sex change surgery, regardless of the views of parents or what is in the best interest of the child,” the group states, adding:

This legislation would empower courts to side with a parent demanding a child receive surgery and hormones over a parent looking to allow a child to develop naturally. This is despite the fact that many children out-grow gender confusion and could be permanently sterilized by surgery or hormone therapy.

The measures would place already licensed mental health providers in an ethical bind when young people are brought to them with unwanted same-sex attractions or gender confusion. Therapists would be forced to violate the law and risk loss of license if they attempt to treat these prospective patients.

MassEquality is pushing for the bills to become law:

Great news: the Conversion Therapy Ban bill was reported favorably out of committee this afternoon! Thank you to all the Reps and Senators, coalition partners, advocates and allies for showing up to support the bill at today's hearing! #mapoli pic.twitter.com/lz3gEeiP8F

— MassEquality (@massequality) March 5, 2019

LGBTQ activists are already lobbying the courts to have children removed from homes in which parents do not affirm their child’s self-proclaimed new gender identity.

In a column Sunday at the Daily Signal, Jamie Shupe, who, three years ago, was the first declared “nonbinary” person in America, announced he has returned to living his life as a man.

Claiming his transgender treatments were “all a sham,” Shupe wrote:

I’m one of the lucky ones. Despite participating in medical transgenderism for six years, my body is still intact. Most people who desist from transgender identities after gender changes can’t say the same.

But that’s not to say I got off scot-free. My psyche is eternally scarred, and I’ve got a host of health issues from the grand medical experiment.

Shupe said he should have stopped his hormone treatments, but “transgender activism had made the nurse practitioner too scared to say no.”

Regarding the one therapist who had tried to stop him from continuing with hormone treatments, Shupe said, “Professional stigmatisms against ‘conversion therapy’ had made it impossible for the therapist to question my motives for wanting to change my sex.”

HB 140 essentially makes legal only those mental health therapies that “provide acceptance, support, and understanding of an individual’s sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression.”

SB 70 states that mental health professionals who are already licensed by the state “shall not advertise for or engage in sexual orientation and gender identity change efforts with a patient less than 18 years of age.”

Should the bills become law, health care providers who violate it “shall be subject to discipline by the appropriate licensing board and such discipline may include suspension or revocation of license.”

“If a parent sends a child to counseling that disagrees with liberal ideology (like any parent, particularly religious parents might do), the counseling will be labeled as child abuse and the Department of Children and Families can take the child away,” MFI warns.