Vietnam’s Ministry of Health also announced it was outlawing conversion therapy. “This announcement that being LGBT is not a disease and condemning the practice of conversion therapy is like a dream,” Vuong, director of the LGBTI rights program at the Institute for Studies in Society, Economy and Environment (iSEE), told Al . Jazira. “It’s something we never thought would happen, let alone coming from the most trusted source of medical information in Vietnam… I think the impact on queer youth is going to be very, very evident.” The health ministry’s Aug. 3 mission is being celebrated for protecting queer Vietnamese in medical settings and as fuel for an ongoing petition to legalize same-sex marriage. However, it is unclear how the decision will be implemented with many LGBTQ people still threatened with conversion therapy and often facing harsh treatment from family. The official notice, sent to provincial and municipal health departments across the country before being published on the government’s online information portal on August 8, said Vietnam’s health minister had received information that some health care institutions claim to offer “treatments” for homosexuality. Based on this, and citing the removal of homosexuality and transgenderism from the International Classification of Diseases by the World Health Organization (WHO), he goes on to outline five basic guidelines for the health system. Education needs to be strengthened so that all medical providers have proper knowledge about “lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people,” she says, and that queer people must be treated equally in medical settings. Additionally, LGBTQ identity cannot be treated as an illness, involuntary treatments are prohibited, and mental health services can only be provided by specialists in sexual orientation and gender identity. Finally, supervision and inspection of medical facilities should be increased. “This is important in the way that it confirms that being LGBT is not something you can fix,” Vuong said. “When a queer child is brought into a medical facility … if they know that, it can be used to defend themselves.” Linh Ngo, ICS director at the agency’s headquarters in Ho Chi Minh City’s Binh Thanh district [Photo by Govi Snell]
The fight for queer rights
Sustained advocacy for LGBTQ rights preceded the Department of Health’s announcement. “It’s not like one day the Ministry woke up and decided it was time to do it… It took years of effort,” Linh Ngo, director at the ICS Center, which advocates for LGBTQ rights, told Al Jazeera. The fight to de-medicalize queerness can be traced back to iSEE’s ‘Leave with Pride’ campaign, which launched in November last year. The campaign asked WHO Vietnam to officially confirm that LGBTQ identity is not a disease. iSEE and its partners created a stunt video to raise awareness for the campaign, which asked the question: If queerness is a disease, shouldn’t LGBTQ Vietnamese people be able to take sick leave? In the video, volunteers asked their superiors for permission for their “gay disease.” The volunteers were condemned, cursed and asked to leave without their request being granted. This April, WHO Vietnam Representative Kidong Park issued a statement to advocate for an end to the medicalization of queerness. “We received a statement from the WHO and with a lot of help from other civil society partners, we asked the Ministry of Health to respond as well,” Vuong said of the Ministry of Health’s recent mission. Together with the ICS Center, iSEE is now promoting the 2022 Tôi Đồng Ý, or I Agree, campaign, which works to secure support for the legalization of same-sex marriage. Just three days after its debut on August 10, the campaign had surpassed its goal of 250,000 signatures – more than a million people have signed the petition. “It was great to participate and see,” said Dieu Anh Nguyen, who works for ICS in Ho Chi Minh City. “I think we’re basically making history.” Participants hold rainbow flags while watching the annual LGBTQ parade in Hanoi, Vietnam, September 22, 2019 [REUTERS/Kham] The petition will continue until same-sex marriage is legalized, Ngo said. The country’s marriage and family law is expected to be considered for revision by the governing body of the Communist Party of Vietnam in 2024 or 2025. The country’s first campaign to accept same-sex marriage begins in nearly a decade. In 2012, the ceremonial wedding of two men in the Mekong Delta was broken up by the police. Same-sex marriage was banned in 2000 and grooms were fined for breaking the law and forced to leave their town. The incident, as well as the punishment of other same-sex marriages, led to the first Tôi Đồng Ý campaign in 2013. The “I Agree” campaign went viral on social media. Soon, many Facebook profile pictures in Vietnam featured equal signs painted on cheeks and foreheads or Tôi Đồng Ý posters. In the country’s capital, Hanoi, events were organized in support of the campaign ahead of the eighth session of the National Assembly in 2014. The movement successfully led to the decriminalization of same-sex marriage in 2015, but LGBTQ marriages are still not legally recognized. “Vietnam is very open right now and has a lot of potential for LGBTI rights, but there is still no civil protection,” Ngo said.
The threat of conversion therapy
A, whose identity is being protected by Al Jazeera, is a transgender Vietnamese man living in the United States who was unable to see his parents for two years due to the coronavirus pandemic. “The announcement from the Ministry of Health is an important victory … but I will also say that this does not automatically mean that everything is fine,” A told Al Jazeera. Poses for a photo at a PFLAG event in downtown Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam [Photo by Govi Snell] When he finally returned home to Vietnam in July, his family tried to take him for conversion therapy. A was able to negotiate his way out of the situation, but said it is common for queer millennial and Gen Z Vietnamese to experience such treatment. “The specter of conversion therapy hangs in the house of every queer Vietnamese person,” said A. “It’s one of the most common things my friends and I have talked about in terms of why we choose to come out or not come out.” Arwen in Ho Chi Minh City agrees. The 36-year-old considers himself one of the “lucky ones”. Unlike many of his friends, his family accepts him. Some of his friends were removed from school and sent to work, others were given “voodoo treatments”, trapped in their homes or forced to have sex with someone of the opposite sex as “treatment”, he explained. A 2015 survey found that one in five queer Vietnamese had been forced to see a doctor to treat their “disease,” 9.7 percent of 2,363 respondents said their families had enlisted a shaman to “remove the spells,” while 60 percent had been forced. change their appearance and gestures, or reprimand them and exert psychological pressure on them. Mong Nguyen was a parent struggling to accept her gay son. “In 2011, I found out my son is gay,” he told Al Jazeera. “I argued with him every day. I blamed him and wanted him to stay away from his gay friends.” A year later, Nguyen discovered that her son had attempted suicide. “I wanted to change to save my child,” she said. Today, Nguyen is an active member of the Vietnam Parents and Relatives Association of the LGBT Community (PFLAG). On August 17, she stood wearing rainbow heart-shaped earrings and holding a Tôi Đồng Ý fan at a PFLAG event in Ho Chi Minh City. Mong Nguyen leads a PFLAG event at the American Center in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam [Photo by Govi Snell] The sight of so many parents showing their support for their LGBTQ children left a 32-year-old businesswoman in tears because it was so far removed from her own experience. “I was accidentally discovered by my mom when I was 14 years old. Since then I feel like no matter what I do, I’m not good enough,” she said, asking not to be named. “THE [Ministry of Health] The announcement clearly helped boost my confidence when I faced it,” he told Al Jazeera. “Mum is a pharmacist — a scientific person… So an official announcement from a legitimate scientific body clearly meant something to her.”
Enforcing queer rights
While encouraged, queer rights advocates say more needs to be done to ensure the Department of Health’s guidelines are implemented. And they note that the mission lacks a legal basis. “Too often effective enforcement fails in Vietnam,” Phil Robertson, Human Rights Watch’s deputy Asia director, told Al Jazeera. “Uprooting anti-LGBT beliefs in traditional Vietnamese society will require a concerted effort… It’s not like you just issue an order and everything changes overnight.” A in the US pointed out that despite the recent announcement, health care providers are still offering treatments that claim to “correct one’s gender.” In particular, Mai Huong Daycare Psychiatry Hospital in Hanoi and Vinmec International Hospital, which has seven locations across the country. Both hospitals offer treatments based on the idea that there are “real gays” and “fake gays”, the latter of which is considered “curable”. A links the popularity of this harmful idea to a health column by Dr Tran Bong Son. The column had “excessive influence” during the 1990s to early 2000s, when sources of information were limited and the government placed increased…
