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- Title
"Building a Person": Legal and Clinical Personhood for Autistic and Trans Children in Ontario.
- Authors
Pyne, Jake; Singer, Samuel; Katri, Ido
- Abstract
In the 1960s and 1970s, psychologists at the University of California, Los Angeles, operated two behaviour modification programs: one aiming to eliminate "feminine" behaviours in male-bodied children ("conversion therapy"), and one targeting autistic children's so-called problem behaviours (applied behavioural analysis or ABA). The head of the autism program referred to his work as "building a person." Decades later in Ontario, a radically incommensurate legal context sees conversion therapy banned while ABA receives millions of funding dollars. Drawing on legislation, case law, media, and clinical literature, I argue that the process of trans communities wresting themselves out from under conversion therapy involved discursively shifting from having a condition to being human—a process of "building a person"—still incomplete for autistic communities. While legal reforms protect some trans youth from harmful therapies, this does not extend to autistic trans youth, leading us to question at whose expense a rights-bearing trans person was built.
- Subjects
ONTARIO; TRANSGENDER youth; BEHAVIOR modification; UNIVERSITY of California, Los Angeles; BEHAVIORAL assessment; AUTISTIC children; LAW reform; TRANSGENDER rights; BODY-weight-supported treadmill training
- Publication
Canadian Journal of Law & Society/Revue Canadienne Droit et Societe (Cambridge University Press), 2020, Vol 35, Issue 2, p341
- ISSN
0829-3201
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1017/cls.2020.8