“Conversion therapy” is one of the favourite bugbears of the “rainbow” lobby. Not entirely without justification – forcing plainly homosexual people, youngsters especially, to live in denial can be enormously psychologically damaging. Even more so, if the denial is reinforced with threats of eternal damnation.
But, with their characteristic tolerance and nuance, the rainbow progressives can’t leave it at that. Like “racism”, “conversion therapy” has become an all-purpose ideological sledgehammer used to enforce a dogma every bit as rigid as that which it claims to oppose.
Because not everyone, the young especially, is unequivocally homosexual. Many, if not most, inhabit a slippery sexual no-mans-land of doubt and experiment. Many naturally seek counselling to deal with their doubts and fears.
The rainbow dogmatists cannot allow this. There is no room for doubt. Seeking counselling to reckon with uncertain sexuality is damned as “conversion therapy”. Many governments, in thrall to (or terror of) the Gaystapo, are moving to outlaw anything other than uncritical “affirmation”. If you think you might be gay, you are, forever. No doubt allowed.
This mindset resembles another ideology which similarly forbids apostasy. As it happens, one of the world’s most fundamentalist practitioners of that ideology is very big on conversion therapy of the worst possible kind.
Iran is forcing gay men to undergo sex reassignment surgery on threat of imprisonment or even execution, an LGBT activist has said.
Shadi Amin, an Iranian exile living in Germany, told The Sun last month that the Islamic Republic views homosexuality is an “illness” that can only be cured by the surgery[…]
“The government believes that if you are a gay man your soul is that of a woman and you should change your body,” said Amin, who is a lesbian and runs the Iranian LGBT advocacy group 6Rang. “We think this is a way to fight the existence of homosexual people because you change their body and you solve the problem.”
In a 2007 forum at Columbia University in New York City, then-Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad famously claimed: “In Iran, we don’t have homosexuals like in your country. In Iran, we do not have this phenomenon.”
According to Amin, coerced sex reassignment surgery enables that to be true.
“The regime gives gay people two choices — to be arrested as a homosexual and being punished even executed or change your body,” Amin said. “They are trying to cleanse the country of homosexuals.”
Wow. You’d think the LGBTQwerty lobby would be all over this. But, no. At best, they’re completely silent about this brutal, mass mutilation of gay men. At worst, they actually celebrate it for being “liberal” and state-funded. No matter the grim reality.
“There is nothing which criminalizes attacks against trans people,” she said. “After the surgery, they have no rights anymore. There is no physiological support after the surgery.”
It’s not as if Iran actually gives a damn about trans people. It’s simply a convenient way of obliterating gays without actually killing them.
It’s conversion therapy of the worst possible kind, but the rainbow lobby won’t say a word against it. Instead, they’ll endlessly regurgitate long-debunked lies that US vice-president Mike Pence supposedly supports conversion therapy (he doesn’t).
Just as the Nazis and Soviets signed a non-aggression pact because, despite their mutual antagonism, they were two dogs sniffing after the same bone, the rainbow lobby give the gay-hatin’ Mullahs a free pass. Because, deep at heart, they’re both intolerant, fundamentalist ideologues who cannot, will not, allow the slightest deviation from their dogmas.
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