Floor speech by Rep. Lawrence Lockman in opposition to LD 1025, An Act To Prohibit the Provision of Conversion Therapy to Minors by Certain Licensed Professionals, May 8, 2019
Thank you Madam Speaker.
Madame Speaker, Ladies and Gentlemen of the House…
LD 1025 is one of the most dangerous pieces of legislation I have seen since I was first elected. The bill has been kicking around this building for the past two years, it’s been amended over and over again, and it’s still not ready for prime time. Or perhaps it is ready for prime time after all. Perhaps the bill’s lack of a clear definition of terms is no accident.
Currently, transgender activists are celebrating their success in pressing lawmakers in 16 states and the District of Columbia to ban what they call “conversion therapy.” The high priests of gender ideology insist that licensed therapists who do not immediately affirm the perception of a minor child claiming to be a gender that is incompatible with their biological sex are heretics who must be excommunicated and stripped of their ability to make a living.
The bill before us is drafted so poorly that nobody in this room can tell us what the definitions mean. It says that “sexual orientation or gender identity has the same meaning as “sexual orientation” in Title 5, Section 4553. When you turn to that section of the Maine Revised Statutes, you find that “Sexual orientation” means a person’s actual or perceived heterosexuality, bisexuality, homosexuality or gender identity or expression.”
Is that clear, everyone? What’s clear is that this sort of circular definition would earn you a failing grade in English class. As a Bangor-based licensed professional counselor who submitted testimony in opposition to LD 1025 put it:
“How is that a sufficiently clear and specific definition that a mental health professional can sit in his office and know whether or not he is obeying the law? Most of us learned as kids that it is not legitimate to use a term to define the same term. Has the Legislature not learned this? How are professionals to be expected in practice to decipher this double talk well enough to know whether or not they are in violation or not?”
How indeed? Perhaps the safest course of action for licensed professionals will be to stop treating minor children suffering from gender dysphoria. And that’s exactly what’s happening in states where this kind of legislation has been passed.
Walt Heyer also submitted testimony to the committee. Heyer is a biological male who lived as a transgender woman for eight years and underwent surgery in 1983. He labeled what transgender activists are doing to young people today – controlling mental health therapy and pushing hormonal treatments and surgical interventions – as “abuse.”
“That is child abuse,” Heyer said. “We need to be calling it what it is. It’s not affirming a child. It’s causing them to be depressed and anxious about who they are.”
“The only reason I am able to speak to you today is because after 46 years dealing with this issue, I was able to de-transition in 1990 after I had psychotherapy”, the very same psychotherapy that LD 1025 would outlaw.
Heyer said the current situation amounts to: “We are manufacturing transgender kids.”
“We are manufacturing their depression, their anxiety, and it has turned into a huge industry that people are profiting from after kids’ lives are completely torn apart”.
Here’s how the new statute will work in practice:
The following conversation between a therapist and a minor child would be against the law if LD 1025 is enacted.
Here’s the hypothetical: an 8 year old boy has become convinced that he is a girl trapped in a boy’s body. The 8 year old dresses as a girl and wants to start hormone therapy and eventually undergo sex-change surgery. His parents take him to a licensed therapist for treatment.
At the first appointment, the therapist says to the 8 year old: “I have helped many kids your age, and if you work with me, I believe I can help you. By the time you’re in your late teens or early twenties, chances are you will look back to this time as a time of confusion. Most of the kids I’ve counseled are glad that they didn’t go ahead with hormone treatment and surgery.”
That conversation would be enough to get the therapist busted for violating the new statute.
Licensed counselors will have to keep their professional opinions to themselves if they are even mildly skeptical of the notion that an 8 year old or a 12 year old is capable of making informed decisions about transgender issues.
LD 1025 is sweeping and precise in identifying who would be subject to the proposed gag order:
Certified school psychologists and guidance counselors, nurses, doctors, physician assistants, psychologists, psychological examiners, alcohol and drug counselors and aides, social workers, pharmacists and pharmacy technicians, professional counselors, marriage and family therapists, pastoral counselors, speech-language pathologists and assistants and audiologists.
That’s right, audiologists are on the list of professionals who can have their license to practice revoked if they say the wrong thing. I wonder why dental hygienists aren’t on the list? You never know when a hygienist might say something politically incorrect about gender reassignment surgery.
Seriously, if the parents of a 12-year old boy who wants to start taking puberty-blocking drugs made an appointment with the family doctor to counsel their son, the doc would have to be very, very careful. If the physician warned the youngster that puberty-blocking drugs have potentially harmful side effects, that would be enough to get the doc busted if LD 1025 is enacted.
If the doctor advised the 12 year old to wait a few years before making a final decision on sex-change surgery, rest assured the doc’s career would be over, and the transgender activists would declare another victory in their long march to stamp out heretics.
In closing, I want to share with my colleagues an excerpt from testimony submitted to the committee by Janet Wilson of Rangeley:
“I would argue that sex change operations performed on minors do a great deal more harm than good. l believe that one day people will look at these procedures in the same way that we now look at lobotomies: as something terribly harmful to individuals. People will wonder how intelligent, well-meaning people could have done this to children. Lobotomies were accepted by the medical community up until about 1950. In fact, neurologist Antonio Egas Moniz, who is credited with inventing the lobotomy, was given the Nobel Peace Prize in 1949 for this invention. The lobotomy was accepted and even celebrated as a medical breakthrough. What if, by law, all people who wanted to counsel against lobotomies had been silenced? We may have seen this practice continue for much longer, with many more victims left with diminished mental capacities.”
Thank you, Madame Speaker.