Despite a federal ban on conversion therapy being in place for more than a year, advocates fear the broader ideologies underpinning the practice continue to have a strong foothold in Canada.
Florence Ashley, an incoming assistant professor at the University of Alberta’s law faculty, said it’s common for organizations to use broader terms, such as: “We’re not actually changing sexual orientation. We’re kind of healing and repairing the underlying trauma that makes people gay, or we’re just letting them truly explore who they are.”When conversion therapy was banned in Canada, there were some immediate effects.
Nor would “interventions that support an individual’s exploration and development of their own identity” be prohibited, as long as “they are not based on an assumption that a particular sexual orientation, gender identity or gender expression is to be preferred over another.”“That’s where the practitioners have figured out how are they going to operate, by avoiding the language that’s in the state laws in the U.S.,” said Travis Salway, a professor at Simon Fraser University.
The Institute of Biblical Counselling International, which has operations in British Columbia, Ontario and Manitoba, including within several First Nations communities, offers what it calls a biblically based counselling program. “That’s not our role or a practice within our program at all. That would be an individual’s choice. That’s not something that we’re oriented towards,” he said.
Clarke said the Institute of Biblical Counselling doesn’t have a position on conversion therapy because it’s not something it deals with. “When I think about conversion therapy, I think about it being kind of a tip of an iceberg, or tip of a pyramid.”
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