In the LGBT activist calendar, Wednesday was reportedly the “International Day Against Homophobia, Biphobia, Interphobia, and Transphobia,” when celebrants reiterate their opposition to traditional views on sexuality.
Various elements of the Biden administration paid homage, including Secretary of State Antony Blinken. However, with his supportive statement, Blinken appears to have unwittingly prompted debate on whether sex-change mutilations and puberty blockers fall into the camp of the “harmful conversion therapies” leftists are otherwise keen to denounce.
Blinked shared an image of the LGBT activists’ latest kaleidoscopic flag to Twitter with the message, “On International Day Against Homophobia, Biphobia, Interphobia, and Transphobia we call for an end to harmful conversion therapy practices, including those that attempt to change a person’s sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or sex characteristics.”
A version of this message appeared, albeit with additional context, on the State Department website, noting that “In keeping with the WHO’s determination, last year, President Biden directed the U.S. government to promote an end to so-called ‘conversion therapy practices’ around the world.”
The statement stressed that “conversion therapy is a scientifically discredited practice that can cause significant physical and psychiatric harm, and in certain circumstances may amount to torture.”
The State Department concluded, “We confirm that conversion therapy practices are inconsistent with U.S. nondiscrimination policies and ineligible for support through taxpayer-funded foreign assistance grants and contracts.”
Critics highlighted the apparent inconsistency in the Biden administration’s communications, noting that Blinken and other statist exponents of gender ideology saw fit to condemn efforts to transition individuals from one sexual orientation to another as well as efforts to change their “sex characteristics” and “gender identity” apparently only so long as the outcome of the therapies is more transsexuals, gays, or other rainbow-coalition constituents.
Mark Ousley, host of the “UnWokable Podcast” and gender ideology critic, highlighted Blinken’s call for an “end to harmful conversion therapy practices, including those that attempt to change a person’s … sex characteristics,” and wrote, “Who’s gonna tell him?
Ousley said in a subsequent tweet that the level of “cognitive dissonance is actually impressive. Thanks for finally coming out against child mutilations and trans conversion therapy.”
Rhyen Staley, who runs the Substack “The Reconnaissance,” responded to Blinken’s remarks with a question: “Does that mean the NIH will be ending its experimentation on children through chemical sterilization?”
Civil liberties attorney Jenin Younes wrote, “Wait, so conversion therapy- which uses just words- is bad because it attempts to change sexual orientation, gender identity and sex characteristics— but hormones and surgery are good? Make it make sense.”
One Twitter user was similarly taken aback and wondering, “So, you’re against ‘gender transition’?”
Jay Richards, director of the Richard and Helen DeVos Center for Life, Religion, and Family, wrote, “What about efforts to convert someone’s body to match a made up thing called a gender identity? What about that? Or are bodies not real?”
Biden’s transvestic assistant secretary of health R. Levine thanked Blinken for his post, sharing a Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration document containing the claim at the center of the administration’s illogic.
The document states that sexual orientation and gender identity change efforts “commonly referred to as ‘conversion therapy’ or ‘reparative therapy,’ are practices that aim to suppress or alter an individual’s sexual orientation or gender to align with heterosexual orientation, cisgender identity, and/or stereotypical gender expression.”
“SOGI change efforts do not include gender-affirming care. They do not include counseling that facilitates acceptance, social support, or open and affirming exploration and development of one’s sexual or gender identity, including navigating sexual orientation and/or gender identity within the context of intersecting identities,” adds the document, without providing a detailed justification the distinction.
In other words, it’s only conversion therapy if normalcy is the aim.
Andrea Ens confirmed this understanding Monday in the Washington Post, noting that the unacceptable form of conversion therapy is that used as a “tool to eradicate LGBTQ activism.”
Ostensibly without a sense of irony, in her brief history of unacceptable forms of conversion therapy, Ens wrote, “Medical practitioners thus recommended conversion therapies involving hormonal injections, surgery or intensive psychotherapy. Such interventions carried significant risks for patients.”
This is the reasoning by which the Biden administration has come to simultaneously hold that detransitioning efforts (i.e., by transsexuals) amount to conversion therapy, but transitioning efforts do not.
Accordingly, the puberty blockers proven to have devastating, irreversible effects on children, sex-change genital mutilations, and other LGBT activist-supported conversion therapies, while harmful and, per Blinken’s suggestion, a means to “change a person’s sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or sex characteristics,” are not among those the Biden administration intended to condemn Wednesday.
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