There was speculation last week that the U.K. Government’s bill to ban ‘conversion therapy’ has been quietly killed off, given that time had all but run out to publish draft legislation before the King’s Speech in November. When Lib Dem MP Wera Hobhouse asked on September 14th if the bill would be ready in time for the King’s Speech, Leader of the House Penny Mordaunt deftly sidestepped the question.
Sources have now confirmed to the Sunday Times that the Government is expected to formally announce the legislation will no longer be brought forward, five years after Theresa May’s Government first vowed to make ‘conversion therapy’ a criminal offence, with ministers concluding that bans have proved problematic or ineffective in other countries (most notably the state of Victoria in Australia and Canada).
This is a significant victory for free speech – and one thanks in no small part to the thousands of Free Speech Union members and supporters who used our digital campaigning tool to email their MPs urging them to scrutinise the Government’s proposals and consider the unintended consequences for freedom of speech if ‘conversion therapy’ is defined too broadly.
One obvious concern is that people of faith, particularly religious leaders, would be vulnerable to prosecution if they tried to dissuade a member of their community from becoming actively gay, or offered to pray for them, or invited other members of their community to pray for them. Provided such attempts at persuasion don’t extend beyond speech and don’t involve an element of coercion, what right does the state have to police what people of faith say to other members of their communities?
But even if you don’t share that concern, there are other risks associated with such a bill. We know that some advocates of the ban want it to cover any attempt to persuade children suffering from gender dysphoria not to have medical procedures that they may later come to regret, such as a double mastectomy. A bill that prevents parents from trying to talk their children out of such procedures is clearly unacceptable from a free speech point of view.
Of course, there are some forms of ‘conversion therapy’ that few people would object to being banned, such as attempts to stop someone from being gay or transgender via exorcism, physical violence or food deprivation. No-one is disputing that ‘treatments’ of this kind have no place in a free society. But a bill isn’t required to ban them because such practices are already illegal in the U.K.
Where things start to get more complicated is if ‘conversion therapy’ is defined too broadly. In the past few years, an ‘affirmative’ approach to children and adolescents presenting with gender dysphoria has become the orthodoxy in clinical settings like the NHS’s controversial, soon-to-be-closed Tavistock Clinic. Faced with cases of gender dysphoria, this approach encourages clinicians to affirm rather than question a child’s chosen gender identity, before then putting them on a medical pathway that can have lifelong, irreversible consequences. We now know that even puberty blockers, intended to delay the onset of puberty so children suffering from gender dysphoria can have more time before deciding whether to have surgery or hormone treatment, can cause lifelong harms, such as bone disease and infertility.
The risk, then, is that a poorly drafted bill would effectively criminalise parents, teachers and doctors who deviate from the ‘affirmative’ approach. Even a carefully drafted bill would be in danger of being amended by members of the LGBTQ+ lobby as it went through parliament so it ended up banning ‘conversion therapy’ of that kind. That might seem like an outlandish fear, but in the Australian state of Victoria, where ‘conversion therapy’ has been banned since 2021, a parent who refuses to support their child’s request for puberty blockers is at risk of prosecution.
Trans activists and trans lobby groups like Stonewall pooh-pooh this as scare-mongering, but anyone familiar with the fraught wrangling now taking place over the meaning of the word ‘sex’ in the 2010 Equality Act can attest to the unintended but profound consequences that an undefined word or phrase can have on the right to freedom of expression when it comes to society’s most controversial issues.
Canada’s Bill C-4, which two years ago made it an offence to “cause another person to undergo conversion therapy”, illustrates what’s at stake here.
According to Canada’s criminal code, it is now a crime to “repress a person’s non-cisgender gender identity” or to “repress… a person’s gender expression that does not conform to the sex assigned to the person at birth”.
Note the subtle inference here that ‘gender identity’ and ‘gender expression’ are not in fact contestable theoretical postulates, but cold, hard, unquestionable facts. In effect, Canadian parents who want to explore the many, varied reasons why their children are showing signs of gender confusion, or who might want their child to see a psychotherapist before agreeing to irreversible medical procedures, now risk prosecution and up to five years in jail. By contrast, trans rights activists and health professionals who encourage children to change their gender – a form of ‘conversion therapy’ in its own right – have nothing to fear from the new law.
There’s a whiff of Soviet-era Lysenkoism about any state sanctioned attempt to protect a supposedly scientific framework from scrutiny, but given that ours is a culture in which tolerance of dissent from gender identity ideology is in short supply, it’s easy to see how a ‘conversion therapy’ ban could quickly be weaponised by trans activists – witness the attempted cancellation of Irish singer Roisin Murphy for expressing her concerns about the over-prescription of puberty blockers.
Doctors have both a right and a duty to recommend what in their judgment is the best clinical pathway for a patient who identifies as trans, particularly if that patient is a minor. As per the findings of NHS England’s interim Cass Review last year, clinicians at the Tavistock said they felt under pressure to adopt an unquestioning affirmative approach in a manner that was at odds with the standard process of clinical assessment and diagnosis that they had been trained to undertake in all other clinical encounters. How much more pressure would they feel under to take this approach if a bill banning ‘conversion therapy’ was passed? Would it require them to break their Hippocratic oath on pain of prosecution?
For all those reasons, the FSU welcomes the Government’s decision. We have been lobbying hard against this bill for over a year and are delighted the Government has listened – not just to us and our members, but to all the other advocacy groups concerned about the bill’s impact on freedom of expression. This is a major victory for free speech.
If you support the work of the Free Speech Union but haven’t yet become a member, please do consider joining by clicking here. Without your financial support we cannot engage in vital work such as this.
Dr. Frederick Attenborough is the Communications Officer of the Free Speech Union.
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FFS even you’re peddling this shite about “two waves” now.
Waste of time coming to this site anymore.
The simpler reason is that the most vulnerable died in early 2020, don’t forget that the mortality in the previous few flu seasons were reduced.There was no second wave, it was the natural cycle for a corona virus. We never refer to multiple waves of any other respiratory virus infection when they’re known to be seasonal. There will be an increase in “cases”, possibly hospitalisations and deaths starting late August/early September. What must be avoided at all costs is closing in September/October or more likely not reopening the country on 21/6, that would be catastrophic.
Fair point about the most vulnerable dying in the spring. I have updated the post in response to your comment.
Wow, reader democratic input. I love LS.
Reduced morality between the two waves? The deaths in April 2020 were probably due to patients actually having CoViD19 related pneumonia, don’t forget there is/was no definitive diagnosis for a SARS-CoV-2 infection, being discharged to make space for the expected epidemic (a self fulfilling prophecy)
But boris said we need to lock up the young to save the old. He said it was impossible for vulnerable people to remain at home and be safe whilst young people went out socialising (I mean, they went out to work every day but that’s ok, Covid only kills granny if you’re out of the home for pleasure). Another absolute shocker. Who could have seen this coming?
Second Wave….Third Wave…..there was no f**king First Wave!!!! The whole thing has been a load of bollocks from the start!
I wonder who many waves we will have to have had before the great British public wake up to this nonsense.
Actually, the bar chart for the autumn is consistent with a phase of totally normal mortality, followed by a post-jab surge in ‘vulnerable’ deaths.
I don’t think we should start saying that care homes have been doing a good job. They sound like they’ve become the most soulless hellholes I’ve ever heard of. I’d honestly rather just top myself than go there and never see a human face or touch ever again. Nothing short of torture.
Yes, when my time for this comes I plan to take a pack of sandwiches and die quietly down an old mineshaft in the Pennines rather than go to the old folks death camp. If I can remember to do that, of course.
No doubt they’ll have been paid handsomely to take the dischargees, since many are privately owned or in the third sector these days and can say no thanks to the local Council and NHS Trust.
You’re also absolutely correct about them becoming soulless hellholes, see if you can find information about their self-isolation protocols following positive test results, it’s a shocker. My grandma currently resides in a large one due to fairly advanced dementia, and has on several occasions over the past 16 months been locked in a room not much bigger than a prison cell 24 hours a day for 2 weeks at a time.
They are basically torture camps and prisons. What is worse, letting an old person live to the full and enjoy their lives and accept that there is a risk they will get ill and die (As let’s face it is inevitable for all of us) or attempt to keep them alive forever but in doing so condemn them to a living hell?
To take the point further rather then accepting we are here temporarily and that death is inevitable we as a society now treat death as a horrific event which can and must be avoided at all costs. In doing so we are condemning ourselves to a life locked up in the house, miserable and not living only to find that we end up dying anyway.
I suppose what I am getting at is that there are lots of horrible things we can die of, with Covid been just one of them, also that death is unavoidable so we should all get out there and get living and making the most of the short time we are all here rather than cowering in terror under the kitchen table listening to the doom and gloom prophecies of scientists and politicians whose only aim seems to be to make everyone’s lives as sad and miserable as theirs are.
My dad died in one four years ago. I will NEVER allow anyone to put me in one of those hell – holes. I will see myself off before crossing the threshold of any “care” home.
My thoughts exactly. Doing minor research into the best, most painless ways. My insurance policy.
Second wave – third wave … blow wave – microwave – new wave.
They’re all stark waving mad.
Demi wave
Radio wave
Second Wave!?!?
A virus doesn’t travel in ‘waves’, who writes this shit?
I find myself wondering if the care home fatalities in March/April 2020 were possibly not so much about the dreaded lurgy, just that hospitals rushed the discharge of patients who weren’t likely to survive much longer anyway and covvie the least of their problems. Cue spike in deaths of care home residents. Hospitals then had lots of bed spaces for patients that never materialised – probably because everyone was told not to bother the health service unless they couldn’t breathe, by which point it was likely too late. Hospitals wouldn’t have been able to send patients requiring ventilation (and with low chance of survival) to most care homes, so lo and behold the Nightingales were built – basically sending people away to die. However, those patients didn’t materialise either and the spaces were not suitable for provision of general hospital services.
Got to wonder exactly who the hospital folk thought they’d be treating when they decided to clear the wards…if anyone…
Well don’t forget, this was something of a coordinated effort – certainly all across Europe and the US, from east coast to west, the strategy was prevalent across the world in care home facilities; if you were related to a Democrat lawmaker in places like Pennsylvania you actually had a chance of making it out, before they put thousands of covid patients in.
Why do people persist with this fantasy that it was covid that killed all the care home residents in “the first wave”. It was kicking seriously ill and frail people out of hospital and then denying them all medical care that caused their death, not “COVID”. Government and NHS decided to collude in an act of genocide, then a bunch of trained monkeys stood banging pots and pans and clapping the murder. Stop lying about it being covid and call it what it was. A deliberate cull of an unwanted class of people. Or keep telling yourself whatever makes you feel comfortable.
No mention that the excess care home deaths in Jan/Feb coincided with the vaccine rollout?
Anecdotally, deaths ‘with Covid’ followed shortly after vaccination – because natural immune systems were suppressed – but there will never be an investigation of course, as this conclusion would be off-narrative. Very easy to audit, though, if any journalist could be bothered.
“The reduction in morality”: great typo! Morality was chucked out of the window right from the start of this sh*tstorm!