A court says being gay does not need to be cured

On 19 December 2014, a district court in Beijing delivered a ruling that made legal history in China. For the first time, a court in the country dealt with so-called conversion therapy. And it sided with the gay plaintiff.

At the beginning of 2014, Yang Teng had voluntarily gone to a private psychological clinic. Voluntarily, but not without pressure: his parents were urging him to finally marry and have a child. At the clinic, he was first hypnotised, then given electric shocks. They were supposed to drive out his feelings for men. According to him, they left physical and psychological injuries.

Yang decided not to stay silent. He sued the clinic and also the search engine Baidu, which had advertised the service. For a gay man in China, simply going public was a brave step.

The ruling of the Haidian District People's Court was mixed. The clinic had to refund Yang the treatment costs of 3,500 yuan, roughly 560 dollars. The court did not award him damages for pain and suffering, and the claim against Baidu was dismissed. What mattered was the reasoning. According to his lawyer, the court held that the electric shocks had been unnecessary because homosexuality does not require treatment.

For China, that was a remarkable sentence. Sex between men has not been a crime there since 1997, and since 2001 homosexuality has officially no longer been considered a mental disorder. Nevertheless, clinics continued to offer a supposed cure, often advertised online. The ruling did not ban this practice. But it showed that those affected can fight back. And for the first time, a feeling that many queer people in China knew found an echo in a courtroom: that there is nothing wrong with them.