Morena urges to sanction sexual conversion therapies

Andrea Becerril

Newspaper La Jornada
Monday, June 27, 2022, p. fifteen

Pressure from the Catholic hierarchy and the PAN have succeeded in stopping in the Senate, for almost two years, reforms to the Federal Penal Code and the General Health Law to penalize so-called conversion therapies, with which it is intended correct some sexual orientation of people.

In September 2020, the opinion of the initiative on this matter was presented at first reading, presented by the brunette Citlalli Hernández and other senators. It was about to pass, but was stopped and returned to the Senate board.

Under the presidency of Olga Sánchez Cordero, an attempt was made to schedule the opinion, but without success.

The president of the Commission for Gender Equality, Malú Mícher, said that it is an issue that cannot be frozen and must be approved in the next session in September, as organizations in the lesbian-gay community have demanded.

Morena has the simple majority necessary to approve this initiative, explained Senator Antares Vázquez.

In the opinion, endorsed in commissions, it is highlighted that throughout history, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual, transgender and intersex (LGBT+) people have been subjected to intense forms of marginalization and social and political exclusiona situation that has been justified based on conceptions according to which people with a sexual orientation or gender identity different from the conventional one should be considered abnormal, sick or immoral”.

Currently, despite all the recommendations, international pronouncements, treaties and laws that speak about the danger of conversion therapies, and the guarantee of human rights, “these types of practices continue to exist whose purpose is to repress free development of the personality of the individual under the assumption that there is a cure for something that is not a disease.

In the case of our country, since 2014 the Council to Prevent and Eliminate Discrimination of Mexico City issued an advisory opinion in which it declared that homosexuality is not a health disorder and cannot be amenable to treatment for healing, change, healing or disease.

However, these conversion therapies are still applied, which means real torture, such as the application of electroshocks and illegal deprivation of liberty.

In the proposal to reform the Federal Penal Code, it would be established a criminal sanction of up to three years in prison for anyone who practices therapies that seek to correct people’s sexual orientation. The sanction is doubled if the victims are minors or do not have the capacity to understand the act..

It is also proposed to modify the General Health Law to suspend professional practice for up to three years or definitively in case of recidivism to personnel who promote the application of treatment or any service that seeks to annul or modify sexual orientation.