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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“Let’s make Climate Change the central organising principle of civilisation” —John Kerry.
There is nothing that the One World Government people won’t do to do stuff climate change panic down everyone’s throats. They will say anything, do anything, lie, cheat, steal and brainwash———But all for the “greater good”. ——Assuming that the “greater good” is a world run by technocrats at the UN/ WEF who no one ever heard of or voted for.
Exactomondo ( again ), and I think Ivor Cummins does a great job at explaining where all of this crazy BS originates in this 20min vid. This’ll be teaching you how to suck eggs but for others less well read I think he provides a fantastic explainer here.
Sorry not sorry to the resident misogynists and obsessives but Ivor doesn’t mention feminism as being the cause of the downfall of civilization once. Perhaps try following the money for a change. In fact, ”Gender equality and the empowerment of women” is yet another agenda being pushed by these *largely male-dominated* elites and globalist entities, along with climate, Digi I.D, mass immigration and Scamdemics. As ever, I apportion blame for the decimation of society where it rightly belongs, which this vid covers very clearly;
”Fascism, Communism or something else – which is it running the world today?”
https://x.com/FatEmperor/status/1765361884641845527
These guys seem to be mad keen on all things gender identity and DEI-related. I think the ‘Alphabet Mafia’ must be happy to receive support from such big players. From 2020;
”As the world continues to grapple with the unprecedented global health crisis of COVID-19, the scale of the related global economic crisis is becoming increasingly clear. We are facing the sharpest economic contraction since the Great Depression in the 1930s, according to the United Nations – threatening to roll back decades of progress in the fight against poverty.
At the same time as taking emergency measures to minimize the immediate economic impacts of the pandemic, governments around the world are looking to position themselves for recovery. A new analysis of economic resilience offers a potential clue to which economies may be able to recover faster: LGBT+ inclusion is correlated to the resilience of a country’s economy.
The analysis by Open For Business, a coalition of companies advancing LGBT+ equality, shows a strong positive correlation (0.67) between how resilient an economy is and how accepting it is of LGBT+ people (see the chart below). This is a significant finding: a one-point increase in social acceptance suggests a three-point increase in that economy’s economic resilience index, even when controlling for GDP per capita. Could LGBT+ inclusion be a secret ingredient for economic resilience?
The connection between resilience and inclusion is widely accepted by policy-makers. The World Bank describes “inclusive communities” as a key dimension of sustainable, resilient cities. The OECD identifies “inclusive society” as a driver of resilience in a city. The IMF contends that an economy is “more fragile and less resilient when it is not inclusive”. A report by UN Habitat finds that inclusion is required for a “successful urban resilience agenda”.
Now is the time to be embracing LGBT+ communities, not stigmatizing them. Creating inclusive societies isn’t just the right thing to do; as the evidence shows, it’s an important part of an economic strategy focused on resilience and recovery.”
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/06/lgbt-inclusion-cities-post-covid-reset-recovery/
Useful summary, but I did find myself trying to predict the next “Yadda, yadda, yadda.”
Cheers——–I am in the Climate Change Department when it comes to attacking the Progressive left and their One World Government aspirations all based on a pack of lies. You know they are lying when they want to lock you up for being a “denier”. ——-So that is where my focus is and has been since 2007. I won’t therefore be as knowledgeable on Gender, pandemics and vaccine stuff as others like yourself. But I can see that if anything comes out of the UN where 70% of the Nations are run by Kings, Colonels, Tyrants and Dictators, then I want NOTHING TO DO WITH IT, and neither should anyone who appreciates freedom and prosperity, because these people have a goal. That goal is to remove all of that.
Yes, but that’s because they want population reduction and “gender, equality and the empowerment of women” is part of the process to achieve it.
Yes but you can’t have it both ways. We constantly hear about how many countries have a birth rate below replacement level, on the surface the ‘solution’ to this is to just keep shipping in migrants from far away lands. That’s their excuse anyway. And yet we scratch the surface and see who is behind the orchestration of this, from way back when, and all other agendas being pushed. It’s the usual suspects; Rockefeller, Club of Rome, UN, WEF, ‘Big Finance’, the WHO obviously play a big role with the scamdemic element. But all of the agendas our governments are pushing are coming from the same shady organizations. They create the ‘problem’ then supply the ‘solution’, thereby deconstructing and reconfiguring our societies to their liking. How many cabinets do you suppose Schwab has penetrated by now in order to make this all possible? We refer to them as ‘puppet politicians’ for a reason, after all.
Agreed. Feminism, gender equality, and empowerment of women are not the problem per se at all. Rather, it has been co-opted, appropriated, neutered, watered down, and twisted and perverted by the oligarchy for their own nefarious ends.
Yes, quite. It reminds me of the whole ‘Pride’/LGB movement, whereby once the T+ people got onboard and hijacked it we now have something unrecognizable from what its original objective was, not to mention extremely toxic and sinister for kids and vulnerable young people to be exposed to. Operating like a cult, essentially. No wonder at all that gays, lesbians and bis wish to distance themselves from the ‘Transtifa’ banshee mob.
Similarly, I’d hazard a guess that most women who identify themselves as feminists don’t go around hating men, looking to score ‘microaggression’ points wherever they can and advocating that a woman should have the right to abort a baby at full term. These people are both deranged and heinous.
You don’t need to wear the label of ‘feminist’ to fight the trans agenda and speak out about protecting female sports and single-sex spaces because obviously men should be onboard with doing this anyway. Fathers do have daughters and they should be stepping up to the plate just as much as women, who are impacted the most. Huge respect too for the self-identified feminists who are doing great work in third world countries and tackling gender apartheid and all the horrific abuses/stories we’re all well aware of which come out of certain countries by now. I think we all know that Islam plays a major part here. But again, I would argue that the whole ‘feminism’ angle is now unnecessary and obsolete because what we have here is a human rights issue, therefore is it not better to refer to oneself as a ”human rights activist” as opposed to ”feminist”? Also this way it involves men and non-feminist women.
I personally just feel feminism as a movement has had its time, everything nowadays, whether in the Western world or developing ( including Muslim/Arab ) world falls under ‘human rights abuses’. The ‘F’ word has now become quite a divisive and out dated concept.
Anyhoo True, don’t be a stranger.
Well-said.
Do you think this lady’s a raging militant feminist or just an assertive woman sticking up for her human rights? I do hope she’s okay though as I’ve seen how the evil f***ers operate over there;
”In Iran, the ‘morality police’ gets shouted at by woman who refuses to cover up:
“Shut the f*ck up. I sh*t on your law.”
https://x.com/NiohBerg/status/1825101102682939897
I personally consider her a hero.
My recent debunking of the climate change hoax: can anyone rebut it?https://metatron.substack.com/p/debunking-the-climate-change-hoax
You posted that link a month or so ago. ——I read it back then ad I have been saying pretty much the same as that since I first started to investigate this issue back in 2007. –cheers
Child bride marriages found are exclusively in the cults of Muhammad and the Hindu cult.
These travesties of abuse and slavery have nothing to do with the weather.
There, fixed the article for everyone.
Hopefully I won’t be imprisoned for stating the truth.
Ah yes “The Truth”——What is that again? —-Or as Mark Twain joked “A lie spreads half way around the world while the truth is still tying it’s laces”——The Progressive left’s lies have spread all over the western world and the only way they can avoid being exposed is to silence all debate, and call your truth a hate crime.
A couple of years ago it was Covid that was causing an increase in child marriages.
I wish the propagandists would make their mind up.
Personally, I think it’s because Pakistan is a backward, Islamic State where females are treated like property and like any “commodity” they can be bought and sold for a price.
The article suggests that economic insecurity drives child
abusemarriage. I’m not convinced that a reasonable response to economic insecurity is to rape a child.However, the biggest recent cause of economic insecurity was the lockdowns. People in the developing world lost their livelihoods when the West stopped buying tat for a while.
And the same can be said for most of the BBC’s output.
Drought de signeur!
Copied from elsewhere.
Classic Horseshoe Theory in action.
Where does this sit relative to Mrs Balls’ proposal for extreme mysogeny = terrorism? Has she thought it through, or do cultural norms get a pass?
Cultural Norm? Yeeha! Squeal piggy, squeal!