Mick Hartley

Lara Brown in the Spectator on the proposed gay conversion therapy ban:

Politicians love banning things. Even if the threats they worry about don’t actually exist.

In February 2019, amid Conservative defections and the slow death of Theresa May’s Brexit deal, Conservative MP Bill Wiggin decided that the most pressing task for parliament was banning the consumption of dog meat. Not meat for dogs, but meat made out of dogs. And no, you are right, you don’t get it at the deli counter at Waitrose. Or indeed anywhere in the UK.

Wiggin was honest enough to admit there was no actual evidence that dog meat was being eaten in the UK. And he acknowledged that it was already illegal to sell dog meat for human consumption. But that, he told the House, shouldn’t stop us from ‘setting an example to the world’.

The same logic must have been running through this government’s mind when, last week, during a leadership crisis, it decided that the best way to regain the public’s favour was to publish a draft bill to ban what it calls ‘conversion practices’….

So why, after the legalisation of gay marriage and the Equality Act, in a world with wide-reaching protections for gay people, have calls for a conversion therapy ban erupted over the past decade?

It is actually nothing to do with gay rights at all. It is another attempt by the trans lobby to hijack support for sexual equality to prevent any questioning of their desire to use medical means to surgically alter young men and women. After all, when Boris Johnson considered an original ban on gay conversion therapy practices, numerous campaigning groups including Stonewall, Mermaids and the LGBT Consortium objected because the legislation wasn’t ‘trans inclusive’. They wanted a law not to protect vulnerable gay teenagers, but a law which made it more difficult to protect vulnerable ‘gender–questioning’ teenagers from mutilation.

The ‘conversion therapy’ they want to ban is the sharing of basic facts with children who are considering life-altering medication and surgery. They want to make it more difficult to dissuade teens from taking the puberty–blocking drugs or undergoing the surgery that could render them infertile or traumatised. Campaigners are not seeking to prevent medical abuse – they are trying to make questions about the validity of transgenderism illegal….

The tragedy is that none of this will tackle the form of conversion therapy which still persists in Britain: telling same-sex attracted children they can grow into straight adults simply by ‘transitioning’.

At least it could bring us into line with places like Iran, where homosexuality is taken to be a case of being born in the wrong body, and is “cured” through surgery. Either that or hanging.