The conversion law means the end of gender transition

The new conversion law seeks to regulate one thing: no one may move another person towards a sexual orientation or a gender identity other than their own. The legislator calls such attempts harmful, irreversible in their effects, and therefore punishable. That sounds careful. But anyone who reads the law as it stands sees something the sponsors themselves seem unwilling to see: the same text that protects the gay person against reorientation forbids, in passing, the whole of gender transition.

The law, taken literally

The law speaks of acts aimed at changing a person’s orientation or identity. The old church route falls under it. The “talking circuit” falls under it. But so does every medical route whose aim is to have a girl live as a boy or a boy as a girl. For what is a puberty blocker other than the halting of the identity the body is becoming? What is cross-sex hormone treatment other than the active pushing of that identity to the opposite? What is a mastectomy on a healthy sixteen-year-old girl’s body other than the most definitive act of conversion that medicine knows?

The legislator wanted to protect the gay person against the pastor. With the same words he protects the child against the endocrinologist.

Two things cannot be true at once

The current defence is that medical transition is not conversion, because the body is adapted to the inner identity, not the reverse. That sounds airtight until you probe further. Who decides which of the two — body or feeling — carries the real identity? The law before us has already answered that question. It holds that a person’s orientation and identity cannot be bent by pressure, conversation or treatment. Whoever accepts that cannot at the same time maintain that a fourteen-year-old’s body does point the “wrong” way and may be “brought into line” with blockers and hormones. Either identity is fixed and inviolable — then every medical intervention is superfluous and harmful. Or identity is malleable — then the entire justification for the conversion law falls away.

Two things cannot be true at once. The law chooses, whether it wants to or not.

Who is really being converted

Among the young people now presenting for treatment, a disproportionately large share is homosexual. Girls who are attracted to girls. Boys who are attracted to boys. Without treatment they would grow up to be lesbian women and homosexual men. With treatment their breasts are cut off, their voices lowered, their wombs removed, their penises rebuilt — and at the end of that journey they are called heterosexual men and heterosexual women. That is no linguistic invention of mine. That is what happens.

The pastor who once tried to pray a lesbian girl into a heterosexual woman did, in essence, the same as the care worker who now guides that same girl towards testosterone, beard growth and men's clothing. The endpoint is identical: a woman attracted to women is made heterosexual on paper. The pastor failed, because his means were weak. The care worker succeeds, because his means are irreversible. That does not make him more innocent. It makes him more dangerous.

What the law, once passed, sets in motion

Once the conversion law is in place, a lawyer can argue on behalf of a detransitioner that her doctors, school, care workers and online environment pressured her into rejecting her body and her sexual orientation. She comes with scars and with files. The law says: that is punishable. The judge will not be able to explain why the same set of facts falls under the law in a gay-to-straight route but not in a lesbian-girl-to-trans-man route. The reasoning does not hold up the moment it is spoken aloud in a courtroom.

The first verdicts will follow. The WPATH guideline will have to give way. Gender transition as we have watched it grow over the past fifteen years — as a roadmap, as a care pathway, as a youth product — will not be able to continue in its present form.

In closing

I do not think the sponsors had this in mind. They wanted to make a gesture towards one target group and did not know what came attached to the other. But laws do not operate on intentions, they operate on text. And the text before us closes, honestly read, the gate of transition care. Not by a ban from above, but through the very logic the legislator himself has written.

The conversion law protects the gay person against the pastor. It protects, whether it wants to or not, the child against the surgeon. From that, if we mean what we say, there is no escape.