As lesbians, we don’t want to see organized attempts to coerce or force lesbian women and gay men to alter their sexual orientation. However, we don’t support Bill C-4 for the following reasons:

Bill C4 links sexual orientation to gender identity and expression.

Sexual orientation and gender identity and expression are fundamentally different. Sexual orientation is premised on biological sex whereas gender identity and expression is premised on gender (social role + sex stereotypes) regardless of biological sex. Conflating sexual orientation and gender identity leads to the erasure of lesbian and gay reality and the undermining of women’s sex-based rights. As a result of this ideology, lesbians experience increased societal pressure to give over our sexual and political boundaries in favour of men who refer to themselves as women/lesbians.

Girls and women, many of them actual or future lesbians, are also increasingly pressured to redefine themselves as men/trans if they do not conform to feminine stereotypes. There is a kind of “cultural conversion therapy” going on as these pressures interfere with our right to self-determination, individually and politically, as same-sex attracted women. The Vancouver Lesbian Collective has experienced this pressure at the Vancouver Dyke March, at Vancouver Pride, and in our personal lives.

Institutions, organizations, and events that previously supported same-sex attracted people to be out, demonstrate our pride, and protest discrimination now treat us as though being exclusively an organization for same sex attracted natal women is a form of bigotry. This makes it difficult to express pride in our lesbianism and is contributing to a culture in which lesbians in general find it harder to assert our sexual and political boundaries.

The wording of Bill C-4 is over-broad and acts as though matters of open public debate are settled when they are not.

For example, in Bill C-4, conversion therapy means a practice, treatment or service designed to change a person’s sexual orientation to heterosexual, to change a person’s gender identity or gender expression to cisgender or to repress or reduce non-heterosexual attraction or sexual behaviour or non-cisgender gender expression. Such a definition supposes that the existence of a category of people called “cis-gender” is widely accepted and its definition fixed when feminists, lesbians, and others reject the imposition of this ill-defined category. The Vancouver Lesbian Collective does not accept the label “cis”, and we do not accept that gender is inborn. We follow a long herstory of lesbians and feminists who both take pride in our womanhood and challenge the imposition of femininity on women.

Bill C-4 sets aside evidence of increasing resistance to and desistence from affirmative gender transition services.

In Canada, there is broad institutional support for an approach to treating gender dysphoria and associated mental health issues as though the patient’s self-perception is always realistic and positive, regardless of any evidence to the contrary. This mode of treating gender dysphoria is harmful to girls, women, and lesbians (along with gay men) on a personal and political level as is evidenced by the growing number of women who are detransitioning.

As Keira Bell, a detransitioned lesbian in the UK, said “We are told these days that when someone presents with gender dysphoria, this reflects a person’s “real” or “true” self, that the desire to change genders is set. But this was not the case for me. As I matured, I recognized that gender dysphoria was a symptom of my overall misery, not its cause.” Challenging the affirmation-only approach neither prevents us from caring for gender dysphoric individuals nor from treating adults who feel that transition is the best option for them supportively and without discrimination.

As Detrans Canada notes, passing Bill C-4 may worsen care for gender dysphoric individuals by criminalizing therapists and other carers who use their professional judgment to treat gender dysphoria as the complex mental health issue it is, including providing care for detransitioners.

The Vancouver Lesbian Collective supports all people to live their best lives, including those lesbians and others who have come forward publicly to describe and protest the lack of care they received within gender affirming transition services. 

Bill C-4 risks criminalizing feminists and limiting our political speech

By criminalizing an individual or group for “promoting or advertising an offer to provide conversion therapy” this Bill C-4 leaves open the possibility that pro-lesbian and other feminist political organizations challenging gender identity ideology will be criminalized.

Coercing or forcing feminists to change their political mandates, alter their group membership, redefine foundational concepts (such as the definitions of woman and lesbian), and limit their political speech to the point where it does not accurately or fully reflect the lived experience of women, girls, and lesbians in Canada undermines our fundamental freedoms as protected in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The proposed Bill C-4 also undermines our ability to defend the equality of girls, women, and lesbians guaranteed in the Charter on the basis of sex.

No law in Canada should undermine these rights.