LGBTQ Activists Seek Control of Maine Mental Health Professionals

by Dr. Susan Berry

LGBTQ lobbyists are working to achieve control of mental health professionals in Maine as a means to crush the notion that children who claim to be a gender that is incompatible with their biological sex are psychologically impaired.

The activists are hoping Maine will be the 16th legislature to succumb to their gender ideology, which requires the government to acknowledge biological status as male or female is subservient to gender identity.

As the Journal Tribune reported, Maine state Rep. Ryan Fecteau and state Sen. Linda Sanborn, both Democrats, introduced a bill that aims to control what mental health professionals say to their child clients who express unwanted sexual attractions or gender confusion in their private sessions with them.

The legislation, if signed into law, would make it illegal for any mental health professional to respond to children who express unwanted sexual attractions or gender confusion by helping them to explore these conflicted feelings or perceptions.

“The ‘conversion therapy’ bill is a proposed gag order on counselors and therapists who treat minor children for mental health issues related to gender identity and sexual orientation,” Maine Rep. Lawrence Lockman, a Republican, told Breitbart News. “Under the proposed statute, therapists would not be allowed to offer any counseling that deviates from the prevailing progressive orthodoxy on these matters.”

The intent of the legislation is based on what LGBTQ activists claim to be “social science consensus” that individuals who, through counseling, have discovered they are not gay, or that their gender is, after all, compatible with their biological sex, have been “harmed.”

“A wide range of major health and mental health organizations in the United States recognize being [LGBT] and having same-sex sexual attractions as normal variants of human sexuality and gender identity, rather than an illness or a developmental disorder,” states the bill.

In Massachusetts, where a similar bill has been approved by the state legislature and sent to Republican Gov. Charlie Baker’s desk, lobbyist Arline Isaacson, co-chair of the Massachusetts Gay & Lesbian Political Caucus, said she is “100 percent confident” such legislation is constitutional.

“We’re banning a therapy that essentially says being LGBTQ is sick, it’s an illness, and it needs to be cured,” she said, according to the Boston Globe. “And that’s baloney.”

However, a review of the issue of gender dysphoria in young people in 2018 in the Atlantic highlighted the problem that arises when legislative “bans” on mental health treatment are lobbied by LGBTQ rights organizations that seem to know little about the psychological development of children:

 

full story at https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2019/04/05/lgbtq-activists-seek-control-of-maine-mental-health-professionals/

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