Mick Hartley

 In the Times:

Rishi Sunak is facing a fresh Commons row after a group of Tory MPs threw their weight behind a bill to ban conversion therapy.

Former senior ministers and the first openly transgender MP are among those who have co-sponsored a private member’s bill to clamp down on the practice.

Sunak backed away from the long-promised ban on attempts to change someone’s sexuality and gender identity by not including it in his King’s Speech last month.

For the hundredth time….this so-called conversion therapy ban is not what many people seem to think it is. There's no need for a ban on "attempts to change someone’s sexuality", because that battle's already been won. The controversy arises over attempts to change someone's gender identity, because gender identity is not a thing. If passed, the law would ban any attempt to persuade an unhappy teen, fresh from hours spent on social media, that they've not been born in the wrong body and really don't need medical intervention to change them into some sort of caricature of the other sex. It would – despite all the nonsense about "trans joy" – ruin their lives. So a parent or a therapist, trying to persuade the child that, yes, puberty can be traumatic but it's what we all have to go through, could be charged with this "conversion therapy" crime for simply being there to talk sense in the face of all the gender woo. It could be illegal, in other words, to tell girls that they're not boys, and boys that they're not girls.

The real conversion therapy, of course, is "transing away the gay". Many of the children – probably a significant majority – who get sucked into this gender nightmare would grow up gay if left alone. This bill, if passed, would make it much less likely that they could be allowed to grow up safely, rather than be cruelly mutilated by a profoundly homophobic ideology.