A Beijing court has heard the country’s first case against gay-straight “conversion therapy,” in what activists say could be a watershed case for the state’s stance on homosexuality.
The plaintiff, a man who goes by the pseudonym Xiao Zhen, filed the lawsuit in March against a Chongqing clinic which he said administered electroshock therapy to rid him of homosexual thoughts.
About five members from the non-profit Beijing LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender) Center staged a brief protest against conversion therapy outside the Haidian District People’s Court in northwestern Beijing on Thursday morning, before the case opened.
They dressed in white doctors’ and nurses’ uniforms and waved signs that read “homosexuals do not need treatment” and “support the Haidian court in fighting conversion therapy.”
“This is the first time that a Chinese court has seen a case against conversion therapy,” organization director Xin Ying said.
She said the clinics were widespread in China and the center had spoken to many Chinese LGBT people who had undergone the therapy. None had said it worked.
“In China, many people undergo conversion therapy because they experience pressure from their families,” Xin said. “They lie to their parents and their doctor, saying that they were cured. But it’s not because they were cured — it’s because they didn’t want to experience the pain of being treated.”
The government stopped classifying homosexuality as a mental illness in 2001, but the stigma remains — many families, institutions and even university psychology textbooks still treat it as a problem that needs to be fixed.
The one-child policy, economic hardship and traditional cultural mores contribute to a mainstream culture in which parents put enormous pressure on their children to marry and have families of their own.
Chinese authorities do not recognise same-sex marriages or civil unions. When one LGBT activist in central China attempted to register a non-profit LGBT rights organization last year, provincial authorities rejected the application on the grounds that homosexuality was “in violation of morals.”
Gay-straight conversion therapy also exists in the US and Europe despite warnings from medical experts that their procedures lack medical justification and are more likely to harm patients than help them.
Zhang Rui, the head of psychological testing services at the Beijing LGBT center, said she had undergone months of therapy as a first-year university student at the China Youth University for Political Sciences in Beijing before learning to embrace her sexuality.
Even one of her psychology professors tried to convince her that homosexuality was a disorder.
“One time after class, I showed him the DSM,” she said, referring to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, a standard psychology text in the US. “The teacher said: ‘It doesn’t matter what they teach you abroad — in China, homosexuality is an illness.’”
The court has yet to reach a verdict.
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