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“Transition” victims decry conversion therapy law
In early May, seven people hosted a press conference in Ottawa to express their concerns with Canada’s conversion therapy law. This law bans any practice, treatment, or service designed to help someone identify with the sex that God gave them – if, for example, a man feels effeminate, but wants help aligning his feelings with his male reality, this law bans professionals (including pastors) from helping him.
But the group’s unspoken petition was to ban sex-denying medical interventions like puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries.
Each of the seven took their turn at the microphone. Jeff Evely, a military veteran, shared how an Ontario hospital tried to surgically “transition” his teenage daughter without his consent. Scott Newgent shared her testimony of how these sex-denying interventions led to lifelong health challenges. Mia Hughes, a senior fellow at the McDonald-Laurier Institute and the Director of Genspect Canada, described the lack of evidence to support these medical practices. Kellie-Lynn Pirie, a detransitioner and founder of the Detrans Alliance Canada, Dr. Ann Gilles, a former therapist, and Barry Neufeld, the former Chilliwack school trustee who was fined $750,000 by the BC Human Rights Tribunal for speaking out against gender ideology, also offered brief remarks.
But perhaps the most moving comments were offered by Faith Groleau, who shared her personal story of the dangers of ideological gender medicine. She described being born with a hole in her diaphragm that required extensive surgery as a newborn to fix. At the age of two, she was sexually assaulted. That assault broke her collarbone, reopened that diaphragmatic hole, and rammed much of her intestines further up into her chest cavity. These internal wounds, misdiagnosed as mere asthma, also left her in poor emotional and mental health.
Eventually, the same hospital that provided the life-saving surgery as a baby suggested sex-denying interventions as the fix. “A pediatrician overrode a psychiatric diagnosis – several of them,” she explained, to clear her for sex-denying hormones and surgeries.
“Instead of assessing my mental health thoroughly, they decided to assume in the emergency room that my suicidal ideation came from the gender confusion. It did not. It was already there long before.”
And yet, the medical professionals used this fiction to fast-track sex-denying interventions, giving her cross-sex hormones at the age of 16 and approving her for top surgery at 18.
“Everything that had happened to me was wrong and had nothing to do with evidence-based medicine,” she accused. (You can hear both fury and sorrow in her voice during the entirety of her remarks.)
“I was experimented on. I was not told they were experimental. I was told it was medicine and that it would help. And it did none of that. It gave me complications that the doctors ignored or would treat as separate illnesses. It made my already pre-existing mental health worse. And my physical health continued to deteriorate.”
“These people do not know what they are signing up for because they are children,” she continued.
“I was a child. I wanted help. That’s all I wanted. I did not need to be medicalized. I did not need to be cut up. I did not need to be drugged. I just wanted to be loved the way I was.”
Faith didn’t further explain what she meant by “the way I was.” But for orthodox Christians, her identity is obvious. God created her as a female, just as He creates every person to be a member of one of two sexes. Whenever someone is confused about their identity as a man or a woman, they don’t need to be “medicalized,” “cut up,” or “drugged.” They need to be counselled that they are wonderfully made in the image of God and to embrace their God-given identity as male and female.
Yet these are truths denied by conversion therapy bans across the country and the practice of sex-denying medical interventions. While no explicitly Christian perspective was offered at this press conference, all seven took a stand against harmful conversion therapy bans and sex-denying medical interventions.
