Mick Hartley

Janice Turner in the Times this morning on the unseemly rush by the government to ban conversion therapy:

Next Friday the government consultation on banning conversion therapy will end. It lasted just six weeks, where normal practice is a minimum of 12. Why the urgency? In June, London will host the first global LGBT conference entitled Safe To Be Me. Its agenda should be packed, given the Taliban’s resurgence and nations such as Hungary and Poland drafting vicious homophobic laws.

A large government team working on the conference, led by Mike Freer, the LGBT equality minister, hopes to announce a legacy achievement. Cue applause for a progressive, modern Conservative Party that finally got a ban on the statute book. The consultation is “relatively quick”, Freer says, because it addresses not whether to ban, only how.

Freer is right: opposition to conversion therapy is universal. That young people were once tortured, raped, drugged and subjected to exorcism-like religious rites to make them heterosexual seems not just abhorrent but absurd. How could our hardwired desires be changed? Indeed, such practices in Britain are now, thankfully, vanishingly rare and, as the consultation states, “physical violence in the name of conversion therapy” is illegal already.

Yet the proposed ban applies to both sexuality and the more nebulous concept of gender identity. This has led to grave concerns, not from social conservatives but liberal, compassionate therapists, some LGBT themselves, who for a decade have noted a drastic rise in young female clients, typically same-sex attracted, mostly with profound mental problems such as depression, anxiety, undiagnosed autism or self harm. Many have suffered homophobic bullying, some sexual abuse. Now 75 per cent of referrals to the Tavistock GIDS clinic are female, a phenomenon reported worldwide.

Under the uncontroversial idea of banning old-style conversion therapy, the government is sneaking in a ban on gender conversion therapy – ie the very necessary questioning of young people, especially young girls, who've been persuaded by their peers and by social media (see Keith Jordan) that the only cure for their adolescent angst is to transition.

A growing body of research on these “rapid onset gender dysphoria” cases suggests girls are influenced by peer pressure and online forums to attribute unhappiness with their developing female bodies to being trans. A responsible therapist would first examine their mental health history, tease out why they feel male, create therapeutic space for discussion. Left unmedicated, about 80 per cent of dysphoric adolescents come to terms with their natal sex.

But therapists are already impeded by their own professional bodies, including the NHS, who have signed a “memorandum of understanding” (MOU) prohibiting therapy that challenges a client’s avowed gender identity. Rather, they must only “affirm” their belief and help to facilitate transition, via referral for hormones and perhaps surgery. In four years writing about this subject, I have frequently been contacted by desperate relatives seeking a therapist for a troubled girl whose prior problems are dismissed by clinicians who care only about gender.

A group called Thoughtful Therapists fears the government conversion ban will enshrine this MOU in law. Proposals state law shouldn’t “override the independence of clinicians to support those who may be questioning their LGBT status”. Yet often, distressed 13-year-old girls are not “questioning”: rather they are categoric they are trans. Will the gentlest unpicking of their feelings be classed as conversion therapy and thus criminalised?…

The absence of rigorous gender therapy has been condemned by a growing number of detransitioners, mainly women, including Keira Bell, who brought a judicial review against the Tavistock. Why, they ask, were their mental health and family problems briskly brushed aside in favour of propelling them towards irreversible hormones and double mastectomies they now regret?

It is seldom acknowledged that transitioning is more physically dangerous for girls than boys. Not only does breast-binding damage growing tissue and cause breathing problems, but testosterone’s effect on the female body is far more damaging than oestrogen for males. A girl will have a permanently deepened voice, facial hair, vaginal atrophy, probable infertility and uterine problems that often end in hysterectomy. Transition will be necessary for some but any girl embarking on this path should be fully informed and utterly certain.

In government, those driving anti-conversion policy are all men. Besides Mike Freer there are Lord Herbert, who will chair Safe To Be Me, and Crispin Blunt MP, head of the LGBT all-party parliamentary group, forced by the parliamentary standards commissioner to apologise for trying to secretly influence government policy on gender self-ID and conversion therapy. Most influential is Henry Newman, a No 10 adviser, who as Nikki da Costa, herself a former adviser, recently told The Times, ensures Stonewall has the PM’s ear. Their reluctance, even refusal, to meet therapist and feminist groups questions their empathy for vulnerable women.

Rather they think of their key address, Stonewall gong, being on the “right side of history”. But that magical line is shifting in Europe, and even in the US, leading gender surgeons including Dr Marci Bowers, a trans woman, now say publicly young people suffer under an affirmation-only approach.

If a conversion therapy ban is rushed through, its legacy won’t be a conference ovation, but the damaged bodies of more teenage girls.

As I said the other day, the old-style conversion therapy – trying to turn gays and lesbians "straight" – is universally condemned outside of a few fringe religious groups, but the new-style conversion therapy as pushed by trans activists involves the medical transformation of young often potentially gay children via the use of puberty-blockers and cross-sex hormones into some wretched parody of the other sex, without even the need to inform their parents. Better a trans man than a gay woman, it would seem.

The government aims to ban the old-style therapy while encouraging the new. They should think again.