The Free Speech Union is giving people an opportunity to write to their MP, raising concerns about the impact of a ‘conversion therapy’ ban on free speech. To access the FSU’s campaigning tool, click here. It only takes a couple of minutes to fill in the form.
Few people would object to banning attempts to change a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity through pseudo-scientific quack ‘treatments’ or by sending them to ‘re-education’ camps where they’re strapped to beds. But it’s unlikely that it’s just these practices that would be caught by the ban, not least because we already have laws that prohibits such practices. As the Government’s own 2021 consultation briefing on conversion therapy put it: “Our existing criminal law framework means that conversion therapy amounting to offences of physical or sexual violence is already illegal in this country.”
There’s also very little evidence that conversion therapy of this type is widespread in the U.K. Indeed, when the Government asked a research team from Coventry University to study the evidence on conversion therapy the only examples it was able to find were drawn from the U.S. As Mark Jenkinson, the Tory MP for Workington, put it in the Telegraph: “From all the published evidence, it is clear that current laws are sufficient to cover the vanishingly rare number of cases of conversion therapy.”
My concern is that the ‘conversion therapy’ the bill will outlaw will be defined much more widely. At present, that term is too vaguely defined to form the basis of a workable new law, and if it remains devoid of precise, technical meaning – if its meaning can be extended to encompass whatever trans rights activists or militant secularists want it to mean – then any such law will inevitably have a negative effect on free speech.
For instance, would ‘conversion therapy’ include a religious leader telling a member of their congregation that homosexuality is a ‘sin’ or ‘haram’? In the state of Victoria in Australia, which banned conversion therapy in 2021, it is a crime punishable by up to 10 years in jail for a religious leader to have a one-on-one conversation with a member of their congregation in which they pressurise them to practice celibacy rather than act on their feelings of same-sex attraction.
The prospect of the state prohibiting, on pain of imprisonment, what a religious leader is able to say to a member of their faith about what their religion teaches about homosexuality is alarming enough. But even more worrying is the prospect that conversations between parents and children about their gender identity will be caught by the new law.
As Kemi Badenoch, the International Trade Secretary and Minister for Women and Equalities, has pointed out, it’s possible that a poorly-drafted bill would bring conversations between parents and their children within scope of the ban, effectively meaning parents who attempted to dissuade their child from undergoing serious and potentially life-changing medical treatments could be prosecuted. In the state of Victoria, it’s a crime for a parent to refuse to support their child’s request for puberty blockers.
A poorly drafted bill could also force medical professionals to rule out treatment that they believe is in the best interests of some of their trans patients – forcing them to break their Hippocratic Oath. Doctors have both a right and a duty to recommend what in their judgement is the best clinical pathway for a patient who identifies as trans, particularly if that patient is a minor.
Consider a condition like gender dysphoria, currently defined by the NHS as “a sense of unease that a person may have because of a mismatch between their biological sex and their gender identity”. For trans activists and ideologically aligned therapists, this is an innate feeling that must simply be ‘affirmed’, with the patient’s problems potentially being solved by helping them to ‘admit’ they’re transgender. Anything less, in their view, would be transphobic and something they would like to fall foul of a conversion therapy ban. Yet for many other medical professionals, research on and around gender identity is still in its infancy, and it cannot be ruled out that in some cases identifying as trans may be symptomatic of a mental disorder – ‘gender dysphoria’ still appears in the latest edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the Bible of the American psychiatric profession.
Nor can it be ruled out that an adolescent who identifies as trans and wants to embark on transitioning is simply being swept along by a trend within their peer group or on social media. That’s one explanation for why you find ‘clusters’ of trans teens within particular schools and why teenage girls are more likely to identify as trans than teenage boys. After all, if the sharp rise in the number of teens identifying as trans is just a result of a taboo being lifted, why aren’t trans teens distributed equally between different schools and why aren’t there the same number of trans boys as trans girls? If trans adolescents who are just following a passing fashion aren’t persuaded to wait before undergoing life-changing medical procedures, such as a double mastectomy, they may come to regret it. Is it really in the best interests of such teenagers to criminalise attempts by parents or clinicians to make them pause and reflect before permanently changing their bodies?
The Government does at least seem alive to these dangers and several ministers have expressed the hope that these risks will be identified and guarded against during pre-legislative scrutiny of the bill. That’s why we think it’s important that as many people as possible write to their MPs to bring these risks to their attention. Use the FSU’s campaigning tool to send a pro forma email – and feel free to personalise it. Filling out the necessary details won’t take more than a couple of minutes.
At the FSU, we seem to be engaged in a constant battle to stop the Government making it illegal for people to speak their minds. But if this bill ends up being anything like the conversion therapy ban in the state of Victoria, it will criminalise advice, both personal and professional, that could help young people avoid making life-changing mistakes.
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I’ve written to my Woke Socialist Tory MP dozens of times. She knows very well I will never vote for her, and she doubtless thinks I’m Literally Hitler. I used to get an automated response – the ones that say “thanks for your email, we’ll have a look and may get back to you. Now I get nothing. I then used an old email address of mine, and got the automated response. It’s pretty clear my main email address is on the auto-delete blacklist. She’s in what was a safe Tory seat, only in danger from the Lib Dems, so she’s going to lean left if she feels in danger, knowing that dutiful Tory voters, still asleep, will keep voting for her, thinking they might get conservatism.
Mine has stopped responding to my emails too. Another MP who has subscribed to the party first, constituents & country last agenda.
It will cause pain for a while but I think our only hope is the destruction of the Conservative Party. I believe that there is still substantial support for conservatism among the UK population, but it is not being given a voice because people keep voting Tory in the hope that the Conservatives will be conservative, or knowing they won’t but hoping they will be less bad than Labour.
The problem is that we only have an illusion of democracy. No leader of any party is permitted to enter a leadership contest if they don’t subscribe to the agenda or if they do get there, you can be certain that something will be ‘uncovered’ that is so embarrassing that they have to step down , thus ensuring the leader of ‘choice’ is successful.
Politics is just theatre to keep the plebiscite convinced that democracy is alive & well.
Brexit seems to me to have proved that there are exceptions to that.
The vote, agreed. The implementation of the vote? No.
Parliament tried to wriggle out of it, but Johnson saw an opportunity to seize power through it. Right now I don’t know where we are with it though as I have been distracted by the covid thing.
We’re in limbo – Northern Ireland being within EU jurisdiction still is just extracting the urine. There was no intention of allowing the UK PLC to leave the EU PLC.
Ah yes, NI. Seems insoluble really. We dug that hole with the Good Friday Agreement.
I’ll give you the update.
Having left the EU, we now have none of the perks of being in the EU – like automatic permission to travel and settle in any EU country, duty and tariff free trade with the EU and other bits and bobs.
And the political agenda is still the same as the rest of the EU’s because it’s the same agenda that every western country has – climate change, vaccines (except we got them even quicker… yippee), lockdowns, masks, war with Russia, pandemic treaty coming your way, online censorship, transsexualism, more expensive energy, the whole nine yards – and not much hope of ever being free of any of it.
In fact, what Brexit actually seems to have meant is that now that we aren’t in the EU we can be front runners for the whole agenda, thanks to our leaner, more streamlined lawmaking capabilities. So Net Zero sooner, covid jabs sooner, the first of Moderna’s mRNA facilities. So we get it all sooner.
Aren’t we lucky…
I voted Leave and still believe that was the right choice, though in practice it only matters if we have a sovereign national government acting in the best interests of UK citizens – and we all know how that is going
Absolutely correct BB or as I like to put it:
Our salvation will not arrive via the ballot box.
Mine is Ian Liddell-Grainger, (name and shame, on him) he never responds to anything that doesn’t follow the political agenda. I know I’ve tried on numerous occasions over the last few years. The man is pointless unless you are a full blown somnambulist, but also sits in what for many years has been a safe seat.
“…pseudo-scientific quack treatments…”
I am always worried when we encompass ideologically loaded terms like “pseudo-science” to defuse opposition, as philosophers of science know that “pseudo-science” cannot be defined in relation to “real science” without simply an appeal to “consensus,” which we know from recent experience to be anti-scientific and very often mere fabrication. It’s like the common, “I would never go down the conspiracy-theory nonsense, but something isn’t quite right” – how do you know there isn’t a conspiracy apart from the conspirators denying it?
Here is some pseudo-science which underpins the ban on conversion therapy: “Homosexuality is genetic, and therefore inborn and unchangeable.” “Trans people are born in the wrong body, and therefore cannot change.” “Biological sex is not binary.”
By contrast, if somebody wants to change a lifestyle they regret, counselling that maybe provides satisfactory understandings of what went wrong, whilst not likely to be amenable to scientific demonstration, may well help an individual to a happier and healthier life.
Addendum:
If you look up the prestigious Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on “Science and Pseudoscience,” you’ll see among the list of pseudo-sciences that is, it says, more or less universally agreed by the “community of knowledge disciplines” not only holocaust denialism and dowsing, but climate denialism. Tough luck Richard Lindzen and all the accredited scientists at WUWT.
In the section on “conspiracy theories,” anti-vaccine proponents fall into the pseudoscience category because of their absurd belief that “large pharmaceutical companies and governments are covering up information about vaccines to meet their own sinister objectives.” The fact that those companies have been fined huge amounts in the past for just that is, apparently, irrelevant. The conspiracy theorists, we read, have to explain “the overwhelming consensus among medical experts that vaccines are efficient.” We’ve learned since 2020 that keeping your medical registration is a powerful former of such consensus.
Now substitute for those the vast consensus of experts, professional bodies, governments, religious leaders and educationalists who agree that denying children can be born in the wrong body is hate speech, and that trying to persuade children otherwise has no place in civilised society. It becomes obvious that “pseudoscience” is a very dangerous concept to embrace, however useful it seems for debunking von Daniken or astrology.
The very first ‘live’ group I ever went to see were The Kinks. 1964. Burnley Mechanics’ Institute. Seems like Ray Davies was onto something in 1970 when Lola was released.
“Girls will be boys and boys will be girls
it’s a mixed up, muddled up, shook up world, ‘cept for Lola
La la la la Lola
–
Well I’m not the world’s most masculine man
But I know what I am and I’m glad I’m a man
so is Lola
La la la la Lola
Some saddo has down voted song lyrics. “It’s a mixed up, muddled up, shook up world.”.
Don’t worry about it. Trolls are just what we have to put up with. They are sad little people really. I have one following me around all day waiting for my posts so they can downtick. As Mogs puts it – a splash of red adds a bit of colour
This has been marketed more-or-less aggressively since the 1970s. Or maybe more correct, it was marketed aggressively back then and is again being marketed aggressively now, except that the people doing this now control everything and not just so-called popular culture.
The assumption is that MPs are interested in or supportive of free speech. Nothing could be further from the truth.
How about repealing all Crimes invented since 1997. We need to police to deal with real crimes not Thought Crimes.
Stand in the Park Make friends & keep sane
Sundays 10.30am to 11.30am
Elms Field
near Everyman Cinema & play area
Wokingham RG40 2FE
I hereby self-identify as sex: male, gender: none. I’m me. I’m not playing some canned role. People have no gender identities unless they chose so.
Yes I just find it baffling how hung up people get on this stuff. God knows life is difficult enough without imagining problems that don’t exist.