Mick Hartley

According to this Times report, Sunak is planning to "press ahead with plans to ban conversion therapy, including for transgender people, after a backlash from Conservative MPs and warnings that ministers could quit". The reality, of course, is that gay conversion therapy is no longer an issue, while trans "conversion therapy" is gender-speak for taking to children and being aware of the social pressures, rather than watching them being swallowed up by the gender cult and ruining their lives. 

Joan Smith at UnHerd:

Has he changed his mind? I very much doubt it. But every time it looks as though this muddled ideology is in retreat, trans activists flex their muscles. Leading politicians from all parties seem to be terrified of them, recoiling from accusations of “transphobia” as though they’ve been caught expressing sympathy with people who mistreat animals or steal from charity boxes.

Sir Keir Starmer’s recent conversion to the view that women are “adult females” feels like a diversionary tactic, designed to throw feminists and other annoying women off the scent. The Party has just asked Iain Anderson (“he/him”), until recently Chair of Trustees at Stonewall, to carry out an inquiry into small business on its behalf. In a new interview with the Standard, Starmer is still using trans activist language, talking about the need to find “a fairer way” to deal with people “who don’t identify with the gender they were born into”.

His deputy, Angela Rayner, is even more open about where her priorities lie. On Wednesday evening, speaking at the PinkNews awards ceremony, she talked about the need to “modernise” the law on gender recognition, something many women see as a coded reference to a move towards self-ID. She condemned the Prime Minister’s “inaction on LGBTQ+ policy” and promised to introduce a trans-inclusive ban on conversion therapy — thus putting herself on the same page as Sunak.

Both main parties are now committed to unnecessary and unethical legislation, it seems — one for ideological reasons, the other from cowardice. It’s an object lesson about the continuing influence of gender ideology. Don’t let anyone tell you British politics is no longer Stonewalled.