I’ve not asked for a law to be repealed. I’m pointing out a situation where the wording of a proposed legal change is likely to be abused. A point which you agree with.
Democracy gets abused all the time, but in countries that at least kind of have their act together, the pros outweigh the cons, so I still vote for it rather than all the other options.
(I mean, since a takeover by aliens is unfeasible, at least for now…)
I also like democracy.
A simple addition to the wording such as “excluding licensed psychological counselling”, or some legalese equivalent, would remove any risk of trans rights activists who are opposed to any link between gender dysphoria and mental health abusing S-202. They’ve included something similar regarding surgery. I think it’s not there for a reason.
For greater certainty, this definition does not include a surgical sex change or any related service.
The only thing she says about S-202 is about children and their parents, not anyone, as far as I could hear. Also, many (if not all?) of such cases would not involve surgery.
Assuming she’s read it (she seems like the person who would), and assuming she’s not being disingenuous, that doesn’t make sense. The bill only criminalizes advertising and/or profiting from conversion therapy, but parents would be the customers, not the advertisers or financial beneficiaries. Ergo, I take her words as a broader insinuation.
The reason being that the Senate is secretly controlled by the Marxist-Leninist Party? 
I’m still skeptical. Wake me up when the next acorn falls. 
That a militant trans rights agenda is pushing all these changes. An agenda in which trans rights trump the rights of everyone else.
I’ll wake you up when the law gets abused and then you can tell me that it’s no big deal because laws get abused all the time and we need to think about the big picture.
Yet, that is what she said in the video, in a short and explicitly clear statement about children and children only beginning at 13:00.
It seems edited, but I don’t see how one could read any more into it.
That’s weird. The very first thing I see in the bill is:
This enactment amends the Criminal Code to make it an offence to advertise conversion therapy services for consideration and to obtain a financial or other material benefit for the provision of conversion therapy to a person under the age of eighteen.
So, I’m not even sure what you’re talking about.
It doesn’t make it illegal for parents to try to obtain whatever kind of therapy for their children (or to perform it themselves). It makes it illegal to advertise and/or profit from conversion therapy.
An organization could still perform conversion therapy, if using volunteers and finding clients by word of mouth. Nice loophole, eh? Hmm, I wonder why they wrote it that way – must be a Christian Conservative Conspiracy! 
(ETA: That last part was sarcasm. A more logical explanation is that the provinces have jurisdiction over health care, so an outright ban at the federal level would be difficult.)
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I thought the main driver for this bill was concern about the harmful effects of conversion therapy on (cisgender) homosexuals and bisexuals, and gender identity was added as an afterthought. Please correct me if I’ve missed something.
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Are we still talking about Canadian law? I don’t have time for epidemiological and social trends in Sweden or wherever (not that they’re not worth discussing).
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I don’t know about the history of the bill. Perhaps you are correct and gender identity was just thrown in as a random afterthought. I included Sweden as a real-world example of a possible outcome, rather than a theoretical discussion such as this.
We’ll see what happens over time. Fingers crossed it will all just be a tempest in a teacup. It’s not an emotional issue for me, but I can understand how it could be for others. Hopefully the legal system can bypass that.
I’ve just watched that part again. It’s actually the interviewer who says (without really explaining it) that parents won’t have any say in their kids’ gender identities and won’t be able to get “time-based psychological counseling” for their kids, but then the interviewee firmly agrees with him. He also makes it sound like S-202 is going to permit children to choose surgical sex changes that the government will pay for, which doesn’t make sense because (1) that’s not what the bill says, and (2) which surgical and related procedures the government pays for and which ones it doesn’t are determined by the provinces, whereas this is a federal bill to amend the Criminal Code. Either he doesn’t really know what he’s talking about, or he’s intentionally scaremongering. Either way, she’s going along with it.
Fwiw, sex changes have already been covered by public health care for decades in some provinces (and now in all of them iirc), and some provinces have already banned conversion therapy in the last few years. These are not the same as the proposed federal ban.
In Ontario (since 2015), conversion therapy itself is a violation of the Regulated Health Professions Act, but only when the patient is under 18 and either doesn’t consent or is deemed incapable of consent in accordance with the Act.
The definition used is different from the one in the federal bill:
Manitoba apparently bans conversion therapy for everyone (not just minors), while Nova Scotia bans it for minors but with a different system of exceptions.
Vancouver is the first city in Canada (or the world?) to ban conversion therapy, for all ages, apparently by denying business licenses to organizations offering the service.
It’s an outcome of something, but people have whatever conditions they have anyway, whether or not it’s illegal to deny them housing, employment, protection from hate speech etc., and whether or not it’s illegal to use harmful and/or pseudoscientific methods to try to cure them of their conditions. Ergo, it’s not the result of the type of legal measures that we’ve been discussing.
If someone presents as a case of gender dysphoria for reasons along the lines of “all my friends are doing it”, hopefully psychological counseling will be enough to fix it. That counseling doesn’t need to involve ECT, threatening the patient with eternal damnation in the depths of Hell, or anything else like that.
Sweden is an example of the outcome of not providing adequate psychological counselling to vulnerable young people.
The legal line drawn between what constitutes psychological counselling and pseudoscience may become an issue which previously didn’t exist in this context. Whether psychological counselling is potentially harmful could also be open to debate or legal action.
As I said, we’ll see what happens.
Re-listened to that part as well, starting about 14:04. I don’t understand what they’re talking about either. I’ll have to read the whole bill, when I get time, not today I think.
Article on Peterson’s treatment:
The author’s clearly not a fan.
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Didn’t tell us anything we didn’t already know, as far as I could see.
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JP plagiarizes Hitler and Aleister Crowley. Not even making it up.
Troy Parfitt! He’s written some stuff about Taiwan/China. I liked his Taiwan travel book. Will have a listen later
I’ve managed to get to 2.25 where they’re pulled out a picture of Peterson doing a sieg heil. I’ll give it a miss for the time being. Might continue listening after a large one.
Actually, I won’t bother.
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I disliked his China one. I’m no fan of China, but his relentless “Chinese people are idiots” theme got a bit much. What really put me off was an anecdote about a Chinese girl he met, and had some sort of short relationship with (no sordid details, but one assumes they didn’t just go for chaste walks in the park). He then describes getting on a train, popping open a beer, and dismissing her from his mind. I may have misinterpreted him, but at that point I thought “what a total cnut” and took the rest of his observations with a pinch of salt.
Doesn’t really surprise me he’s produced a “JP is a student of Hitler” video.
I never read it.