The Victorian Liberals have managed to crawl up to the barest minimum level of human decency after this morning deciding to nix a proposal for a policy that would allow doctors to offer gay conversion therapy to children.
According to Sky News, Michael Kroger, president of the Victorian Liberal Party, “stepped in to stop [the] bill from being debated at the state council“. As The Age reported on Saturday, the motion, if passed, would urge opposition leader Matthew Guy to push for laws allowing doctors to “offer counselling out of same sex attraction or gender transitioning to patients who request it“.
The very optimistically named ‘gay conversion’ therapy, as you’re probably aware, is the conservative reactionary art of using pseudoscience and soft torture techniques to try and force the gay out of your child’s brain – because obviously it’s better to have a heavily traumatised son that hates you than it is to have a son that is same-sex attracted.
The process has been roundly rejected by major medical bodies like the Australian Medical Association, the American Psychiatric Association, and the Australian Psychological Association on the grounds that homosexuality in itself is not a disorder, that the ‘treatment’ itself is a form of discrimination, and that there is evidence indicating that attempts to forcibly change sexuality are potentially harmful.
If that’s not shitful enough, the desired laws in the proposal would require doctors to essentially try to scare trans kids out of transitioning by ensuring “parents and young people are all given full information about the psychological harms of social, medical and surgical gender transitioning“.
There were also proposals to remove the words “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” from the Commonwealth Discrimination Act and have them replaced with “man” and “woman“. If this culture war bullshit sounds at all familiar, you will not, I imagine, be surprised to learn that a further proposal pushed for the removal of Safe Schools in Victoria – clearly having kids be taught that it’s ok not to be straight or cis would be one step too far.
As has been pointed out on Twitter, this is not particularly out of step with the positions of other Liberal state branches:
https://twitter.com/chrisjoregan/status/985716302370127878
These fuckin’ people, man.
