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DiNovo’s bill has all-party support and Liberal leader Kathleen Wynne, the country’s first openly gay premier, has expressed her backing as well.

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Dr. Ken Zucker, Clinical Lead at the GIS, and acknowledged as one of the world’s foremost authorities in this domain, supervised and participated in Carter’s therapy, which was intense and protracted. But by age 11 Carter voluntarily identified as female, grew out her cropped hair and asked for girl clothes. Now 19, her mind and body remain in sync.

Carter’s parents feel immense gratitude to Dr. Zucker for sparing their daughter a lifetime of hormone treatments, and possibly major surgery. They also feel lucky in their timing.

For Ontario’s Bill 77, now on the cusp of passage, known as the Affirming Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Act 2015, will ban funding for “any services rendered that seek to change or direct the sexual orientation or gender identity of a patient, including efforts to change or direct the patient’s behaviour or gender expression,” and will ban health professionals like Dr. Zucker from “carry[ing] out any practice that seeks to change or direct the sexual orientation or gender identity of a patient under 18 years of age.”

For trans activists this is a victory. Over the past decade, the trans rights movement has successfully promoted the alignment of gender dysphoria (the DSM-5 terminology for Gender Identity Disorder) with sexual orientation, advancing the false idea that therapy for the former — which, if undertaken in childhood, has a solid record of success in re-connecting gender identity with biological reality — is comparable to “conversion therapy” for gays, acknowledged by most mental-health professionals, including those at the GIS, to be ineffective and unethical.