MADRID (LifeSiteNews) — A prominent criminal lawyer is speaking out on the ramifications of a new Spanish law that would effectively criminalize resisting the “gender transition” of a confused child.
Approved last month by the Spanish Congress of Deputies, the new Article 173 to the Penal Code would punish, potentially with jail time, any “acts, methods, programs, techniques, or procedures of aversion or conversion” intended to change another person’s “sexual orientation,” “identity,” or “gender expression,” for doctors and parents alike, including resistance to so-called “affirmative therapies,” even acts as mild as deciding to delay hormone use.
The legislation was proposed by the Socialist Party (PSOE) and “supported by all parliamentary groups except VOX (which voted against it) and the Navarrese People’s Union (UPN, which abstained),” according to the European Conservative.
On July 1, the European Conservative published an interview with Spanish criminal lawyer Paula Fraga, who concurred with critics’ worst fears about the new law.
“This means that if a minor claims to feel like the opposite sex, their subjective perception must be automatically accepted without any kind of prior psychological assessment. Any attempt at evaluation or delay without psychological support can be considered ‘conversion therapy’ and therefore punishable,” she explained. “The goal is not to imprison dozens of parents or doctors—such cases would provoke an immediate social backlash—but to spread fear. Psychologists have already contacted me saying they’ve stopped treating cases of dysphoria for fear of fines up to €150,000, even before imprisonment was an option.”
As a result, Fraga argued, Spain is “effectively institutionalizing child abuse. If a boy doesn’t fit gender stereotypes—prefers to play with girls—or a girl doesn’t identify with pink, they are automatically referred to trans activist groups that are not medical but political. It’s reactionary, not progressive: they are reviving the most outdated stereotypes to define what it means to be a man or a woman.”
Further, the law is part of a broader trend across the European Union, which Fraga is “not optimistic” about overcoming soon.
“I’m not calling for an EU exit, but we must adopt a much more critical stance. We cannot delegate our sovereignty to Brussels,” she said. “The solution begins with identifying the problems and awakening a cultural and political movement to defend the nation from within. Because if we don’t do it ourselves, no one else will do it for us.”
A large body of evidence shows that “affirming” gender confusion carries serious harms, especially when done with impressionable children who lack the mental development, emotional maturity, and life experience to consider the long-term ramifications of the decisions being pushed on them or full knowledge about the long-term effects of life-altering, physically transformative, and often irreversible surgical and chemical procedures.
Studies find that more than 80 percent of children suffering gender dysphoria outgrow it on their own by late adolescence and that “reassignment” procedures fail to resolve gender-confused individuals’ heightened tendency to engage in self-harm and suicide – and even exacerbate it, including by reinforcing their confusion and neglecting the actual root causes of their mental strife. 
Many oft-ignored detransitioners attest to the physical and mental harm of reinforcing gender confusion, as well as to the bias and negligence of the medical establishment on the subject, many of whom take an activist approach to their profession and begin cases with a predetermined conclusion in favor of “transitioning.”
