Mick Hartley

The old conversion therapy lie is back again. Labour MP Kate Osborne has tabled a draft resolution at the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe calling for a Europe-wide ban on ‘conversion practices’, which would include any attempts to dissuade a confused youngster from transitioning.

Jo Bartosch at Spiked:

Trans ideology is a persistent pest. Strike it down in one place with the sanity hammer and it simply pops up somewhere else, undented by evidence and immune to embarrassment. This game of whack-a-mole is playing out in Europe. After the public’s turn against this damaging ideology in the UK, Labour MP Kate Osborne is now attempting to export dangerous and discredited ideas about gender identity across the continent….

Osborne’s campaign relies heavily on misdirection. The days of gay people being subjected to electric shocks to ‘straighten’ them out are, thankfully, long gone. Yet the moral revulsion attached to those genuinely barbaric practices still carries enormous rhetorical power. It is why trans activists are trying so hard to redefine and reapply the idea of conversion therapy.

Of course transitioning is the real conversion therapy – mutilating children who are very likely to be gay into sad simulacra of the other sex. It’s what they do to gays in Iran, if they don’t hang them.

That a ban on conversion therapy risks becoming a vehicle for an actual form of conversion therapy should not come as a surprise. Trans ideology operates by inverting reality. It treats the biological categories that underpin the existence of every mammal as mere ideas, while elevating regressive sex stereotypes into identities that must be affirmed. It excludes in the name of inclusion, recasts falsehood as ‘authenticity’, and medicalises distress under the banner of kindness. This is how people who believe they are on ‘the right side of history’, including politicians like the terminally right-on Kate Osborne, become the agents of something profoundly harmful.

Here’s the LGB Alliance’s Bev Jackson:

If you care about the lives of lesbian, gay, and bisexual teens – or about any children distressed by the turbulence of puberty – please oppose all attempts to enact a “trans-inclusive ban on conversion practices.”

These proposals are deliberately phrased in language that evokes the cruel and outrageous medical abuse of decades ago that was inflicted on gay people in an attempt to turn them straight.

But the proposed ban has nothing to do with those practices – which have long been illegal. It is about stopping parents, teachers – even therapists – questioning a girl who says she is a boy. (Or vice versa). A ban would deter everyone from helping the child or young adult to explore what is going on. It would have the effect of intimidating people and enforcing the “affirmative” approach, for fear of prosecution. Yes – prosecution.

Instead of asking how she concluded she is a boy, what she has been following on social media, if someone at school has persuaded her she is a boy, everyone would be forced to say “Ok you’re a boy now”. Everyone!

I am furious that activists are manipulating politicians to nod through terrible, terrible legislation that will hurt so many lesbian, gay and bisexual – and other “gender non-conforming” – teens and young adults.

Ideologically obsessed MPs like Kate Osborne are trying to push through this pernicious legislation in the UK and now throughout the Council of Europe. So many people assume it’s about banning something awful. It’s quite the opposite.

Added: see also this letter to MPs from Marcus Evans.