Even Israel Conference On How To Help LGBTQ Change Gender Inclinations Decries LGBTQ Groups Hypocrisy

JERUSALEM (VINnews)  — A conference for educators that featured supporters of LGBTQ conversion therapy went ahead at a hall in Jerusalem on Tuesday after two other locales declined to host the event.

The conference, organized by the Even Yisrael organization, was disavowed by the Education Ministry, which said it would not recognize attendance at the event as part of any supplementary teacher training.

The conference, titled “Jewish Education in the Postmodern Era,” featured panels on gender identity, including those titled “Attraction or Choice?” “Identity Politics” and “The Cultural Background to LGBTQ Movements.”

Rabbi Tzvika Dentalski, head of the Hosen organization which helps people with LGBTQ inclinations regain control of their gender identity, spoke about the current forms of conversion therapy. He said that previously this involved behavioral treatments including medicines, electric shocks and many other harmful treatments which did not include listening to a person’s soul and aspirations.

Currently however “We offer a meeting between therapist and patient as in any other discipline, with the patient deciding the way in which the treatment will go. The therapist doesn’t set a goal to change the person into a heterosexual and then do everything to reach this goal. The patient comes with his own will, the therapist listens and goes step by step with him and if he wishes to stop the therapist accepts that as well.

Rabbi Dentalski said that in order to prevent such beneficial treatments protesters label them all with the pejorative ‘conversion therapy’, while at the same time these people hypocritically support transgender operations, which are far more dangerous than talking to a therapist and involve taking medicines which prevent puberty development, as well as painful operations which cause irreparable damage to very young children. He added that the head social worker in the Welfare Ministry is now working to remove children from their parents if the parents refuse a 14-year-old child’s request for a gender-change operation.

“As opposed to this, we just talk person to person, up to 18 with parental consent and after 18 with patient consent, without compulsion. The LGBTQ groups are afraid that people will hear that this is regular psychological treatment.”

Rabbi Dentalski added that there are already hundreds of people who have successfully changed their gender identity and established families, although few people have documented the matter academically. “Psychologists know that sexual identity is fluid, there are lots of research proofs but they don’t fit ‘the agenda’. Those who wish to come to us are those who are perturbed by their inclinations. Whoever is not perturbed can go on with his life, I never called anyone to come. If you aren’t OK with your inclination, there is what to do.”

Noam party MK Avi Maoz was recently granted a return to his role overseeing educational vendors in public schools, with a NIS 285 million ($76 million) budget in funding for his Jewish National Identity Office.

United Torah Judaism’s Yitzchak Pindrus last week called the LGBTQ movement “the biggest threat to the State of Israel, ‘more than Islamic State, more than Hezbollah, more than Hamas.”