The Government has done yet another U-turn on banning conversion therapy, and will unveil plans today to bring in a full spectrum ban. That will include any attempt to persuade trans teens from taking puberty blockers or undergoing irreversible medical procedures. The Telegraph has more on the likely backlash Rishi Sunak will face from free speech campaigners and Conservative MPs.
Rishi Sunak faces a “big backlash” if he presses ahead with a ban on trans conversion therapy which campaigners and Tory MPs say could criminalise parents, teachers and doctors.
The Government has already committed to ban therapists from pressurising gay people to be straight – a move which is entirely uncontroversial.
But over the weekend, Whitehall sources indicated that the Prime Minister wants to extend the law in order to ban the use of conversion therapy around gender transitions – where an attempt is made to persuade children who want to change their gender that they should stay as they are.
Boris Johnson rejected extending the law to cover gender identity in this way, and – on Monday night – critics said that if Mr Sunak presses ahead, it could be used to criminalise those who question children who want to change gender.
Tim Loughton, the former children’s minister, said he was concerned doctors, teachers and parents could fall foul of any new law unless it were very carefully worded.
“It certainly needs to include some dispensation when discussing transition treatment with minors or there will be a big backlash,” he said.
Maya Forstater, the co-founder of Sex Matters, said banning conversion therapy could see teachers and parents in the dock if they question a child’s desire to change gender.
The group says it means teachers could find themselves in court if they tell children they cannot use opposite-sex toilets or prevent a boy from competing in girls’ sports.
And it says parents could fall foul of the law for refusing to use the correct pronoun or for taking children abroad to avoid people pressuring them into transitioning.
Ms Forstater said: “Proponents of the plan to outlaw conversion therapy in the UK have never been able to come up with evidence that there is a contemporary practice that can and should be banned.
“Already therapists who help people work through gender issues and not become fixed on the idea that they need to alter their body to be their true self are being accused of practising ‘conversion’.
“Any proposed legislation should be subject to pre-legislative scrutiny to make sure that it does not risk criminalising thoughtful therapists, and parents and teachers who don’t believe children can be ‘born in the wrong body’, or people practising their religion.”
Damian Green, the former deputy prime minister to Theresa May, urged Mr. Sunak to be careful.
“The key is the definition of what should be outlawed,” he said. “Clearly any coercive or bullying interventions are completely unacceptable, but the definition should not be so wide that it excludes proper conversations with clinicians.
“This is an especially sensitive area when it involves children.”
In an article for the Telegraph, Kathleen Stock, a British philosopher who had to leave her university position after being targeted by trans activists, said: “Under the proposed legislation, doctors, counsellors and therapists could be forced to simply affirm any child who claimed to be trans, or face potential prosecution for attempting to change the child’s identity.”
Worth reading in full – and you can read Kathleen Stock’s comment piece about the proposed bill here.
Stop Press: Kemi Badenoch, who in her capacity as Minister for Women and Equalities will be tasked with introducing the Bill, is planning to write a letter setting our her reservations about a blanket ban on conversion therapy. According to the Telegraph, “She will warn that legitimate conversations between parents and trans children must not be outlawed and that freedom of religion must be protected.”
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A “government” of genuinely evil idiots.
This is evil in a very practical sense.
Anyone who works with children, especially teenagers, knows very well that the main thing the promotion of transsexualism is achieving is confusing the hell out of children at a time when they are easily confused. Adolescent girls especially are very vulnerable to interpreting the discomfort and awkwardness of their changing bodies as being “the wrong gender’.
All this stuff is doing is hurting many children under the pretext of making life a bit easier for the minuscule number of people who actually have some real form of gender dysphoria.
Evil doesn’t even begin to explain it.
Oh the unelected WEF puppet PM wants to push through the transhumanist agenda?
Divide, distract and dehumanise the populace.
Political Shock and Awe of the Plandemic now moves into psychological and legalistic control.
Who do you think will win this battle Toby? I can’t say I hold out much hope for any real opposition.
I’m put in mind of yesterday’s piece on Schwab. There were some words about the WEF “helping national governments to address issues of global concern”. Why is our government, presiding over a dire economic and political situation, feeling the need to expend energy defending chemical mutilation of children?
I completely disagree with that statement.
There has been an interesting obscuring of the inexorable trajectory of moral revisionism in the West, hasn’t there? I’ve only recently remembered that, within my lifetime, the big issue in personal morality for progressives was “sex before marriage.”
I just missed the burning libertarian issue of my parents’ generation – but remember my mother telling me that one reason she went to see a Hollywood star’s personal appearance in London in the 1930s was to see a divorced person!
This is not a law to fix a problem. There is no problem of transsexuals being psychologically tortured by people trying to stop them from changing gender.
This is a law to advance an insane ideology. A radical left wing ideology, advanced by the Conservative party.
The Conservative Party is a disgrace. Even the likes of Steve Baker tripping up over himself trying to genuflect before the woke fundamentalists.
My god what a spectacle.
Yes, a law to advance an insane ideology, and it will be used against parents to shut them up.
And this is a party that seeks to destroy one of their own who dare to suggest the Covid “vaccines” may not be completely “safe and effective”.
This law makes perfect sense if you understand that the primary objective of our government is the destruction of the indigenous population and their culture.
If a few non-indigenous children are sterilised the children they don’t have are very easily replaced with immigrants.
It was far simpler when we just had straight or gay – which by extension you could at least explain in basics to a child. I’m struggling to keep up with all these identifications, which are growing by the day, how the already confused young are supposed to make sense of it I’ve no idea – sense that genuinely helps them decide upon a complete biological transition in some. Without the intention to offend, I don’t understand why we need such a complicated array given they all generally come under those main two (and there I’ve probably committed the cardinal sin). But branding each and all with their intersectional differences, with what seems like a fellow army with allies and affirmers? (again, a bunch of yes-people who will agree with anything they’re presented with to affirm and be your ally – forgive me but we’ve seen the damage that can potentially lead to). Perhaps I’m too oldschool but I’ve no idea how to make sense of it, let alone our young ones and we’re proposing writing legislation to make sense of it? Where’s the scientific critique? Is it even allowed?
Sorry, but the Right lost the argument on this when they accepted that sexual orientation was an immutable characteristic without any empirical basis. Even though it’s not a disability, it’s not a heritable characteristic and there are no physical differences between so-called homosexuals and so-called heterosexuals. It’s an entirely self-asserted disposition that once asserted provides a person with political protection and the privileges of victimhood.
My stance (and it’s the stance of every other culture throughout history including this one up to a hundred or so years ago) is that people using other people of the same sex for sexual gratification is an act of volition, not an innate and immutable characteristic. On the face of it, it’s obvious that it is a use of the body’s essential functions (reproduction), for the purposes of gratification. It should therefore be characterised as something “you do” with those bodily functions, like drinking alcohol (digestive) or smoking (respiratory) that isn’t essential to those bodily functions themselves, so it’s not something “you are”. Therefore, it’s entirely appropriate for a 12 step program for those that want to stop engaging in such behaviour. It’s not converting you from something you are into something you’re not. So-called homosexual behaviour also cuts many more years off of a person’s life than drinking or smoking, so there is a clear health benefit in this therapy, aside from the public health benefit in the prevention of the spread of infectious diseases.
Once you conceded that the government could ban “conversion therapy”, they were able to take complete control over your child’s sexuality. It’s now up to public institutions whether your kid is gay or not. It’s a very small step from there to allowing them to decide on your kid’s “gender”. It also won’t be long before they decide whether your kid’s teachers can have sex with them, because they wanted them to – if they’re not doing so already. All they’ll have to do is say that your kid has a sexual orientation towards older people.
This is the Overton Window and to unravel where we’ve got to we’re going to have to go back to the beginning. The problem is many parents, including those on the Right, will not go against the mainstream for fear of being labelled a bigot. So first their kids will come home telling them they’re gay, then they’ll come home telling them they’ve mutilated themselves. Then things will only get more horrifying from there.
You make some interesting points.
Homosexual behaviour could be argued to be somewhat of an aberration, especially if someone is exclusively homosexual meaning they are not going to procreate. But humans do lots of aberrant things and lots of things that have no obvious value to simply keeping the species going. We’re animals, but we seem a lot more complex than all other animals. Heterosexuals also have sex just for fun – this is pretty common and with many it’s the norm.
I do find homosexual behaviour a bit puzzling, but then perhaps they find heteros puzzling or think it’s all just a matter of taste. I personally don’t have strong feelings about it one way or the other. As for it being a choice and not innate, I wish I knew more about it but for example if you’re a bloke then there are certain physical reactions that occur when in certain situations with people of the sex to which you’re attracted – surely you can’t force yourself to have those – don’t they just happen?
I think there’s a distinction to be made between conduct (e.g. gay sex, cross dressing) and getting your bits chopped or being chemically mucked about to try and become something you were not born to be.
I tend towards a fairly libertarian approach to what adults do with each other, and I guess if an adult wants to get their bits chopped maybe they should be able to, though not on public money and if it was someone dear to me I’d send them to a shrink. I also wonder about doctors who perform that surgery or give them the hormone stuff – are they not breaking their oath to do no harm?
Don’t you get lots of male homosexual activity in places with no available women? I’m thinking of (historic) warships, prisons and public schools and Muslim countries. Which suggests that lots of men are capable of choosing homosexual sex over no sex.
And who was it who suggested that homosexual orientation might be caused by a pathogen? (You’d obviously never get funding to investigate that!)
A fair point, yes. I guess the “innate” brigade would argue that those are special circumstances and if you are gay then you will choose the same sex even when the other sex is available – but of course the other sex is not always as available as you might wish, for various reasons.
It’s an awkward business. I have no interest in telling other adults how to live their lives in this regard, but think the decision is less clear cut when it comes to children. There’s a period during teenage years where they are slowly moving towards adulthood, making choices that as a parent you often disapprove of, and sometimes you take action and sometimes you let them make what you think are mistakes. To me, choosing to be gay seems like a poor choice – fewer partners to choose from, no chance of having your own kids together, the physical awkwardness of sex, and I just think male and female complement each other well. But goodness knows most relationships have their flaws and many are pretty terrible.
I’ve remembered that it was Gregory Cochran.
And why do those who choose homosexual relationships never seem to understand, or accept, that their choices would have resulted in the extinction of the human race long before the invention of IVF in the mid/late 1970s?
I think there is a misunderstanding here and it’s important to define what so-called homosexuality is. It’s the argument that someone is born to be sexually attracted only to members of their own sex. They may have had sex with members of the opposite sex before, but one day they “discover” that they are homosexual and that they only have sex with members of the same sex from then on because it conforms to their sexual orientation. It’s pure ideology.
So you agree with me then, that so-called homosexual behaviour is something some people do, not something they are? It’s a matter of taste for something people do recreationally. If that’s the case, how can we make the argument it’s innate?
As for the argument that heterosexuals have sex just for fun, that’s only since the advent of contraception and the subsequent sexual revolution, or much further back since we actually started caring about our offspring. Sex outside of marriage has only been possible since the advent of contraception and you only have to look a few generations back to see how people that reproduced out of wedlock were treated by the rest of society.
I never said homosexual behaviour was a choice. But being a heavy drinker or smoker is not really a choice. It’s a habit formed out of many years of practice. Many people remember the first time they smoked or drank alcohol as times they felt sick, because they were doing something that was completely foreign to them and their bodies at the time, but also socially acceptable among their peers.
There’s a lot a room in between something being innate and being a choice, but we all have urges to do things that we don’t act upon. There are a number of times I’ve been angry enough to do violence to someone else if I’d followed through on my urges. It doesn’t mean that I followed through.
There have been several studies that have shown that men or women that masturbate in front of an inanimate object (a potted plant for example) will then eventually get sexually aroused when presented with the same inanimate object. It’s here that it becomes impossible to distinguish between so-called homosexual behaviour and other paraphilias. By the same token, if a person is attracted to a cuddly toy, is that their sexual orientation? You could extend it to animals or children or dead people. All that changes is whether it’s socially acceptable.
Maybe it’s a developmental disorder, but homosexual advocates don’t want to admit that because that’s exactly the kind of thing that’s treated by conversion therapy.
This is the problem I have with the conversion therapy ban. It assumes that people aren’t subscribing to it willingly because they know it’s an unhealthy behaviour and they know they can get over it and stop it. There are many people that have left the gay lifestyle and gone on to have families. I would be against any therapy that was forced on someone unwillingly, including drugs and alcohol therapy. As I said, homosexual behaviour is a worse health choice than those two in many cases and the people involved in it know it all too well.
But as I say, I don’t think this is the reason for the government’s involvement in this matter. They want to subvert the family unit as is the Marxist model. But it starts by quashing the freedom of speech over this whole sexual orientation and gender ideology in the first place.
I agree that the government’s motives are not good.
Innate or not, or something in between? Probably something in between. I think where we are now, that homosexual conduct is not illegal, is preferable, but I tend to think we’d all be better off if people stopped going on about the whole thing. From where I stand, most people are happy to do that, but there’s a small minority of identity politics hustlers and extremists who are stirring the pot for various unpleasant reasons.
Contrary to popular belief (a) The Hippocratic oath is not usually taken by modern doctors and, (b) “First, do no harm” isn’t actually in the oath. And (c) what is the power of an oath in God’s name in a society that has consciously abandoned religion?
Yes indeed – all good points.
I’m very much inclined to agree with that. Ultimatively, sex is mechanical and physically pleasing regardless of who’s operating the mechanism. That’s why gay people (more personal experience with that than I could remember) are so hell-bent on groping other men despite these object to that. They know how they acquired the habit. And they’re perfectly convinced that they can also teach it.
God help us !
If the Human Race manages to survive this era of a twisted apology for a ‘civilised’ society, we shall be an embarrassing laughing stock for centuries afterwards. World leaders of today will surely be remembered as villains in the most implausible of pantomime fairy tales, utterly inconceivable and impossible to relate to a real life episode of human history.
Don’t ask a tranny
if he’s got a fanny
And asking if he’s male
Will land you up
in jail
Anyone persuading a confused child in to thinking that they are trans could be considered to be involved in conversion therapy. If this is passed then all of the groomers should be put in jail.
Several states in Australia have already legislated a ban on “conversion therapy”.
Usually the ban has been legislated by a Labor government, though our so-called conservative oppositions have fully supported the legislation.
In Victoria, those who ignore the ban face up to 10 years in prison.
https://engage.vic.gov.au/conversion-practices-ban
Pigglrdsy
I no longer recognise my country, the government and parliament. The Media and our institutions are rotten to the core. Family values, morality, ethics, justice, have all been destroyed. It is beyond correction. I want to escape before we are finally corralled and eliminated. I don’t know where is any better. Every day we drown a little more in this disgusting, perverted, dystopian Marxist sludge.