China’s traditionalist approach to LGBT citizens
China’s outlook on raising children is different from much of the western world’s in many ways. The most prominent of these reasons is the grandparents’ level of involvement in the process. When walking down the sidewalk, more times than not I see babies cradled by grandparents without their immediate family in sight. Whether a baby’s parents both must work during the day or not, grandparents in China look forward to caring for their grandchildren. Furthermore, to deprive your older family members of grandchildren is not an issue taken lightly at all.
For Chinese adults, pressure from family units is incomparable to pressure most westerners ever experience. Especially for the LGBT contingent, not marrying a member of the opposite sex and subsequently having children is a massive slight against the whole family. CNN reports that this pressure oftentimes makes Chinese citizens enter heterosexual marriages unhappily, or else get forced into conversion therapy.
Conversion therapy is quite illegal in China. But, then again, China constantly struggles with law enforcement corruption and ineptness, so it comes as no surprise that this practice continues. Yet where the country fails to enforce regulations that aim to decrease anti-LGBT policies, it certainly pays attention to policies that forbid two members of the same sex from adopting a child. This makes China’s legal attitude toward LGBT citizens rather ambiguous. On paper, homosexuality is not a criminal offense, nor is it classified as a mental disorder. Same-sex marriage is not recognized in the mainland, but that is not entirely atypical of countries that decriminalize homosexual acts.
The Beijing government makes a reassuring case in its public policy that it does not find fault with homosexuality, but the actions occurring behind not-so-tightly closed doors sing a different tune. A report from Human Rights Watch (HRW) this year included testimonies from LGBT Chinese citizens wishing to remain unnamed who underwent illegal conversion therapy procedures in public hospitals.
Reports identify four main forms of conversion tactics: forming platonic relationships in the hopes of romantic feelings arising, inducing vomiting and fear of pain when thinking about relations with the same sex, abruptly uprooting one’s life in order to “shock” the patient out of their current mindset, and attempting to “channel” feelings of affection for the same sex toward members of the opposite sex. The second point has attracted attention in areas that can access information from HRW, such as Hong Kong. This is because Chinese doctors reportedly use shock therapy to achieve this goal. One patient described the situation as troubling because no prior explanation of the treatment was given, and only after the painful event did he realize he had been electrocuted.
Oftentimes, patients are held against their will during their treatment. Yet neither doctors nor the government initially institutionalize them. Most of the time, the patient’s families either guilt or force them into treatment. Regardless of conversion therapy’s illegality, the price a family is willing to pay for conversion treatments apparently is enough to convince doctors to carry out the procedures anyway.
It is not clear whether patients’ families completely understand what conversion therapy entails, but my impression from living in China is that they likely do not know what happens at all. Chinese traditional medicine is largely based in supplementing the body with certain minerals and vitamins, or reconditioning the mind through repetitive actions. Onlookers often joke that these sorts of treatments are highly immune to double blind tests. In a society as rooted in tradition and faith in other people as China’s, odds are nobody is paying attention to what conversion therapists are doing. More than likely, they are just setting their sights on the prospect of eventually receiving coveted grandchildren.
By Blake Garron
Edited by Maryam Elahi
