Sunday, September 30, 2012
CAMH-style “therapy” for trans youth now illegal in California |
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California governor Jerry Brown has just signed SB 1172, protecting LGBT youth from therapy to change their sexual orientation or gender expression.
Although reparative therapy to change sexual orientation is widely discredited, there are a few adherents using similar techniques to “cure” gender non-conforming children. These methods, primarily developed by Kenneth Zucker and Susan Bradley at Toronto’s notorious Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH), have come under fire in recent years. Zucker claims we must rely on his “clinical wisdom” tand force these children to conform to society’s views about gender roles. To date, there have been no peer-reviewed papers using controlled longitudinal studies and long-term follow-up.
Last year the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) announced that Zucker’s techniques are “no longer considered ethical.” Despite Zucker’s techniques being declared unethical and illegal, the American Psychiatric Association continues to allow Zucker and his team from Archives of Sexual Behavior to control the content of the 2013 DSM-V. That edition is likely to codify many of Zucker and his CAMH cronies’ problematic ideas about sex and gender minorities. Those ideas will be in place for many years to come if Zucker and his team are allowed to continue.
Full text of the law:
http://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml
(b) (1) “Sexual orientation change efforts” means any practices by mental health providers that seek to change an individual’s sexual orientation. This includes efforts to change behaviors or gender expressions, or to eliminate or reduce sexual or romantic attractions or feelings toward individuals of the same sex.
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