Mick Hartley

Yesterday I wasn't sure if the government was really planning to include gender in their proposed conversion therapy ban. Well yes, it seems that they are:

A new law to ban all forms of conversion therapy in England and Wales will include practices aimed at transgender people, the government says.

The ban will outlaw attempts to change someone's sexuality or gender identity.

Mental health groups have warned all types of conversion therapy are "unethical and potentially harmful".

The government had previously said transgender conversion therapy would not be included in the ban.

Culture Secretary Michelle Donelan said in a written statement that the bill would be published shortly and would "protect everyone, including those targeted on the basis of their sexuality, or being transgender".

Ms Donelan says it is a "complex" area and legislation must not "harm the growing number of children and young adults experiencing gender-related distress, through inadvertently criminalising or chilling legitimate conversations parents or clinicians may have with their children".

"We recognise the strength of feeling on the issue of harmful conversion practices and remain committed to protecting people from these practices and making sure they can live their lives free from the threat of harm or abuse," she added.

The bill will undergo pre-legislative scrutiny by a joint committee.

It's some comfort I suppose that they're planning pre-legislative scrutiny, and at least paying lip-service to the problem of "criminalising or chilling legitimate conversations parents or clinicians may have with their children". But this should really not be happening at all.

The issue surely stems from the the way that the T has been added to LGB, with the implication that trans is another – the next – letter in the great gay liberation march. It isn't, though: there's no such thing as a trans child. There are children with gender dysphoria, which is very largely a social contagion – as we see from the astonishing rise in recent years of, in particular, young girls finding that puberty can be traumatic for them and looking for a way out in the remedy that's most heavily pushed on social media. There's nothing intrinsic or innate in being trans, as there is with being gay. It's a solution imposed by an entirely bogus, unscientific gender ideology which involves serious and irreversible medical intervention. And we're being told that we can't even discuss it?

The irony, as has been pointed out often enough, is that many of these supposedly trans children would, if left alone, grow up to be gay. Trans ideology tells them that they’ve been born in the wrong body, and the gay can be "transed" out of them. That's the real conversion therapy. That's the real scandal.