Mick Hartley

Malcolm Clark at Spiked – The lies behind the ‘conversion therapy’ panic:

The Scottish government is refusing to learn from its mistakes. Its first flagship bill of the year will be a ban on conversion therapy – a proposal that is steeped in the same rhetorical obsession with trans rights that gave us the political disaster of the gender-recognition bill. Even more inexplicably, the government’s latest policy suffers from the same fatal flaw as that bill: it betrays a cavalier attitude towards facts and evidence.

The Scottish government says that a conversion-therapy ban is desperately needed to stop LGBT people from being beaten or bullied into changing their sexual orientation or gender identity. But these claims are a veneer to mask the true substance of the bill, which is an attempt to prevent therapists and parents challenging any young person who declares they are ‘trans’.

What is shocking is how little evidence the Scottish government has provided to back up its claims of widespread attempts at conversion of the ‘LGBTQI+ community’.

Basically, there is none. It's a concocted panic. The old-style conversion therapy – attempting to "straighten" homosexuals – died out years ago. 

This is all an echo of the decision by Stonewall etc. to keep the money flowing in by moving on from their original raison d'etre, gay rights – a battle they'd won – to the trans campaign. It's been astonishingly successful, it has to be said, but it's basically a con. There are gay kids: there aren't trans kids. Just as trans rights are not the new gay rights, so this new supposed "conversion therapy" has nothing to do with the old nasty conversion therapy: it's just talking to troubled young people who've been sucked into the social contagion of gender-identity and "changing sex", suggesting that they don't rush in to irreversible medical interventions that they'll come to regret.

The tragedy is that there is a genuine conversion-therapy problem in Britain right now…. Thousands of vulnerable kids, many of them gay or autistic, are being misled into believing they have some inner gender identity that is different from the sex of their body. And they are encouraged to take drugs and have surgery to ‘correct’ themselves.

This transing of young – often gay – people is the real conversion-therapy epidemic in Britain. Yet it has the fulsome support of the LGBT lobby and the Scottish government. This is one of the great scandals of our age. And yet too few in politics seem to care.