Mick Hartley

We're back to the old conversion therapy controversy.

The overwhelming majority of children who come to believe they were "born in the wrong body" and want to transition to the other sex will, if left to go through a normal puberty, forget about their early delusions and go on to lead normal lives. Most will turn out to be gay. It would be a catastrophic mistake, then, to insist that these troubled teens should immediately be affirmed in their delusions and undergo serious and irreversible medical intervention. But that's what the conversion therapy ban, if applied to "trans" teens, would mean. It's a duplicitous attempt to co-opt the horror of those gay conversion therapies of earlier less enlightened times – now thankfully in the past – to a wholly different situation. 

And yes, it's Stonewall, as always, leading the charge again.

The new head of Stonewall has pledged to fight for a ban on conversion practices that includes “every member of the lesbian, gay, bi and trans community”, as he said that the progress of Labour’s bill may be exploited by those pursuing global attacks on LGBTQ+ rights.

With the UK government expected to publish draft legislation this spring, Simon Blake said: “It’s really important that a conversion practices bill covers all practices designed to try to change or correct somebody’s sexual or gender identity.”

It's not. It's really important that we don't have a conversion practices bill covering gender identity. It'd be disastrous. For a start, gender identity itself is a delusion: the gateway to the trans cult. It's also really important that Stonewall loses its pernicious influence on British public life, and just disappears.

Julie Bindel at the Spectator:

Stonewall was never much help in guiding employers and institutions on how to support lesbian or gay employees. The charity’s Diversity Champion Scheme seemed more focused at times on upholding gender ideology than properly helping gay and lesbians in the workplace.

I talk to young lesbians on a regular basis, having interviewed dozens of them for my forthcoming book. Even those sympathetic to gender ideology tell me the same story: they are branded as transphobic if they refer to themselves as lesbians. Instead, they are told to say ‘queer’ or ‘non-binary’. This erase of the word ‘lesbian’ is not in spite of Stonewall’s existence, it is because of Stonewall.

Stonewall has forgotten its founding purpose: to campaign for gay rights. The LGB Alliance was set up in 2019 to fill the gap left by Stonewall after it drank the gender kool aid. It’s time to let a new organisation take over. Stonewall must be consigned to history.