24
Conversion Therapy Fantasies and Religious Opposition to
LGBTQ-inclusive Education
Catherine Taylor, University of Winnipeg
Each year on the 10 December we mark International Human Rights Day.277 I share the frustration of many students, parents, and educators that in our nation, we tend to stand timidly by while LGBTQ young people are being hurt in hostile school cultures, out of a reluctance to choose sides between religious rights to disapprove of homosexuality and gender variance on one hand, and the rights of all Canadians to a safe and respectful education, on the other hand. The issue is often framed in public discourse as a stalemate between the Charter right of freedom of conscience and religion, and the Charter rights of life, liberty, and security of the person. This representation of the situation is erroneous. I see nothing in LGBTQ-inclusive education that threatens anyone’s freedom to maintain LGBTQ-phobic beliefs if their conscience or religion requires it: Rather, I see much in LGBTQ-phobic school cultures that threatens the life, liberty, and security of many people – sexual and gender minority children and youth, children and youth with sexual and gender minority parents, and conventionally gendered heterosexual children youth who are sometimes targeted as well.
A claim frequently made by religious conservatives to justify maintaining LGBTQ-phobic school cultures is that LGBTQ-inclusive curriculum a (which they typically call ‘pro-homosexual curriculum’) can influence students to become gay or to stay gay when they could, with the right guidance, become heterosexual. For example, parents opposing Louis Riel School Division’s new policy are quoted in a November 2011 article in The Winnipeg Free Press as saying,
“They [the policies] were all geared toward the promotion of the homosexual or gay lifestyle. My question is, would you also want to present the resources for those people who seek counseling to remove themselves from that lifestyle? True education would give both, and let the student decide.” 278
Yet there is no evidence whatsoever that sexual orientation can be changed through curriculum or ‘counseling.’ If education worked this way, almost everyone would be heterosexual. What is true is that exposure to LGBTQ-inclusive education may influence some LGBTQ students to stop pretending to be heterosexual and/or conventionally gendered (the old ‘being/doing’ distinction), which is an entirely different question.
277 Human Rights Day. (2011). Home. Retrieved from http://www.un.org/en/events/humanrightsday/2011/
278 Godbout, A. (2011, November 9). Parents speak out on sexuality policy. Canstar. Retrieved from http:// www.winnipegfreepress.com/our-communities/lance/Parents-speak-out-on-sexuality– policy-133471938.html
Lay people might be confused about this, but the Vatican is not. In his lengthy 1986 “Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons,”279 Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (then Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith or ‘enforcer’ of Church law, now Pope) requires that people with the “homosexual condition” be counseled to resist their “urges.” At no point does he suggest that sexual orientation itself could be changed by such efforts. Ratzinger acknowledges that homosexuality is inborn, at least in some people, but nevertheless constitutes an inclination to ‘evil’ acts, and gay people are admonished to exercise self-control and strive for salvation through devotion to God. Within this system of rationality, it can make sense to maintain school cultures that encourage gay students to be ashamed of being gay and to pretend to be heterosexual.
Claims of enabling gay people to change their sexual orientation through conversion therapy usually turn out to be claims of enabling gay people to resist their homosexual desires and “remove themselves from the lifestyle,” which is a much more limited ambition. There have been many media reports refuting the success of so-called ‘conversion therapies’ in making homosexual people heterosexual, and the American Psychological Association (APA) renounced the practice as not only potentially damaging but bad science in its 2009 report, Appropriate Therapeutic Responses to Sexual Orientation:
“The American Psychological Association Task Force on Appropriate Therapeutic Responses to Sexual Orientation conducted a systematic review of the peer-reviewed journal literature on sexual orientation change efforts (SOCE) and concluded that efforts to change sexual orientation are unlikely to be successful and involve some risk of harm, contrary to the claims of SOCE practitioners and advocates. . . . [T]he task force concluded that the population that undergoes SOCE tends to have strongly conservative religious views that lead them to seek to change their sexual orientation. Thus, the appropriate application of affirmative interventions for those who seek SOCE involves therapist acceptance, support, and understanding of clients and the facilitation of clients’ active coping, social support, and identity exploration and development, without imposing a specific sexual orientation identity outcome.”280
That last phrase, ‘sexual orientation identity’ is an interesting one. What APA found was that a minority of people experienced short-term (six-month) reductions in same-sex attractions. Very few people experienced long-term ‘reductions.. A minority experienced short-term increases in opposite- sex attractions, but these were primarily people who had experienced opposite-sex attractions before conversion therapy. However, some people did experience an increased sense of entitlement to identify as heterosexual after SOCE, even though their sexual attractions remained homosexual.
This outcome, conceptualized as ‘heterosexual orientation identity’ in a number of studies, involves an individual working through SOCE to resignify the category ‘heterosexual’ from ‘attracted to the opposite sex’ to “supporting heterosexual values and resisting same-sex attractions.” The work is motivated by a strong need to see oneself as heterosexual in order to avoid dissonance with a cherished belief structure, usually religious, that condemns homosexuality. In recent years with the dramatic changes in attitudes to LGBTQ people in most parts of society, people entering SOCE are predominantly strongly religious White men who believe that their sexual orientation is irreconcilable with their religious beliefs.
279 Ratzinger, Joseph. (1986). Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Pastoral Care of Homosexuals Persons. In The Vatican Official Website. Retrieved from http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/ documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_19861001_homosexual-persons_en.html
280 American Psychological Association Task Force. (2009). Report of the Task Force on Appropriate Therapeutic Responses to Sexual Orientation. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Retrieved from http:// www.apa.org/pi/lgbt/resources/therapeutic-response.pdf
Some parents however seem genuinely to believe that sexual orientation itself can be changed, and that the school system’s time-honoured combination of tolerating homophobia and enforcing heterosexism will help their gay children become happy heterosexuals. It will not. So-called conversion therapies ranging from prayer, compassionate counseling and ex-gay support groups to aversion training involving electroshock, maggots and pornography, have all failed to turn homosexual people into heterosexual people. Likewise the completely heterosexual curricula to which students have been exposed throughout Canadian history have been unsuccessful in making gay students heterosexual. Parents should be aware that such measures, whether they are faith-based, home-based, or school-based, will at best serve only to reconcile their gay child to a lifetime of feeling ashamed of their ‘condition’ and pretending to be heterosexual.
As Canadians we have seen an analogous example of conversion therapies applied to ‘race’ and ethnicity in the residential school system, where children were taught to be ashamed of being Aboriginal and to identify with Britishness. If parents have received the message that conversion therapies can actually kill the homosexual in their child, they should be aware that there is no scientifically rigorous evidence to support this claim. Perhaps religious conservatives would be prepared to rethink their support for conversion therapy and curricular silence if they only would accept that the most likely outcome of these efforts is not a heterosexual child but an unhappy one.
There always will be some parents who opt for conversion therapy from fear that should their gay or lesbian child not pretend to be heterosexual, a lonely life at the margins of society and terrible discrimination will be their fate. While that fear may have been well-founded in earlier Canadian history, and may still be valid in some aggressively LGBTQ-phobic pockets of Canadian society, it is by no means generally true of Canada today. Polls, including one by Angus Reid in September 2009, 281 show that Canadians are generally not homophobic. They understand that being gay or lesbian or transgender is what one is, not a choice one makes, like being Ukrainian or Ojibway or female. Canadian law has been overhauled to remove discriminatory measures, and employers routinely offer same-sex pension, health, and other benefits.
Our school systems remain frozen in time largely because officials fear complaints from socially conservative parents, and thus, wave after wave of LGBTQ youth endure fear, anxiety, depression, isolation, and bodily harm caused by homophobic harassment and exclusion. Occasionally the inevitable outcomes of this recipe for disaster makes the news, and people across the country briefly rally in protest against yet another LGBTQ youth suicide, aghast at the cruelty of children who bullied282 him.
281 Angus Reid Public Opinion (2009). Canada more Open to Same-Sex Marriage than U.S., UK. Retrieved from http:// www.angus-reid.com/polls/37148/canada_more_open_to_same_sex_marriage_than_us_uk/
282 Fedcan Blog. (2012). Archive for ‘Bullying.’ Retrieved from http://blog.fedcan.ca/?s=bullying
There are signs of hope: Courageous students and teachers and school officials are working hard to bring school culture into the 21st century. The National Climate Survey283 found that 58 percent of heterosexual students report that they are distressed to some degree when they hear homophobic language. We know that LGBTQ students are stepping up to demand that educators be more proactive on this issue; that 58 per cent suggests that heterosexual students, too, would welcome some help from the adult world in this regard. And in some parts of Canada, adults are responding. Many school divisions and several Ministries of Education are speaking out on the issue of LGBTQ-phobic bullying, and some seem to recognize that harassment will not stop in the hallways until LGBTQ people are treated respectfully in curricula.
Teachers’ associations, some of which have been working on LGBTQ education for years, have also stepped up their efforts. Manitoba Teachers’ Society284 is partnering with my Social Science and Humanities Research Council-funded research team on a project designed to unearth the wealth of expertise and experience in LGBTQ-inclusive education that exists in teachers across the country who have worked on these issues for years in isolation or in small clusters, with little institutional support, sometimes within socially conservative faith communities that have actively opposed these efforts. As long as we fantasize that harassment policies are enough and that LGBTQ-inclusive curriculum is not needed, students will continue to learn what our silence teaches them: that human rights do not apply to LGBTQ people, and that there is no requirement to treat them respectfully if you’d rather not.
For religious conservatives, the crux of the issue seems to be their mistaken belief that a heterosexist curriculum coupled with conversion therapy can transform gay children into heterosexuals. I am grateful to the APA for clarifying that it cannot. But the clash between socially conservative religious rights and LGBTQ rights continues to play out at the cost of needless misery for LGBTQ students. I hope that researchers in a range of disciplines will turn their attention to opposing religious conservative campaigns against the life, liberty, and security of LGBTQ children and youth. In their very useful analysis of Canadian jurisprudence concerning “Religion-based Claims for Impinging on Queer Citizenship,” Bruce MacDonald and Donn Short argue that, “[a] person ought not to be permitted to make his or her inclusion dependent on the exclusion of another.” 285
283 Taylor, C. & Peter, T., with McMinn, T.L., Elliott, T., Beldom, S., Ferry, A., Gross, Z., Paquin, S., & Schachter, K. (2011). Every class in every school: The first national climate survey on homophobia, biphobia, and transphobia in Canadian schools. Final report. Toronto, ON: Egale Canada Human Rights Trust.
284 The Manitoba Teacher’s Society. (2012). Home. Retrieved from http://www.mbteach.org/
285 MacDougall, B. (2010). Religion-Based Claims for Impinging on Queer Citizenship. Dalhousie Law Journal, 32 (2). Retrieved from http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1939235