Mick Hartley

Kathleen Stock at UnHerd helpfully points out that the proposed Conversion Therapy Ban bill works both ways:

But not much has been said about one unexpected implication of the bill: that conversion practices involving straight people are just as harmful as those involving gay or trans ones. The intention to cause a heterosexual or “cis” person to become homosexual or trans is to be treated in just as draconian a manner as the inverse case. In theory at least, progressive parents who preach the gospel of gender affirmation a little too enthusiastically risk criminal investigation later, when their children have second thoughts — a possibility which, you have to admit, is darkly funny. The idea that there might also be criminal liability for the hundreds of lanyard-wearing youth workers out there, still working very hard to cement the idea of medical and social transition into deeply unworldly heads, is even more delicious.

But these enticing visions also point to an ambiguity at the heart of the draft legislation; namely, how are third parties supposed to know for sure that a professed sexual orientation or gender identity is permanent, as opposed to a temporary form of experimentation? It would be ironic if the first parent prosecuted for trying to “convert” her child from X to Y turned out later to have been right about the merely transitory presence of the X-ness all along. Unless authorities can answer this question, the law will be unworkable; and I suggest that they can’t.

Historically, in the days of gay lib, any expression of gayness was taken as genuine and brave, given the general homophobia of the culture, while an expression of heterosexuality was to be treated with suspicion. Trans activists picked up on this, as they picked up on so much from the success of gay lib, and applied it to “coming out” as trans.

As gay and trans identities have become extremely popular in young people, the preferred strategy has not adjusted. According to rainbow dogma, such people can only be expressing authentic realness when they announce their identities, whereas those who say they are straight or “cis” may just be blindly going along with the normie flow. Professed heterosexuality is always suspicious and can legitimately be challenged, in case there is a less conventional, more socially oppressed orientation trembling shyly underneath, waiting to be coaxed into the sunlight.

But by including legal protection for straight people, the Conversion Practices bill produces a reductio ad absurdum of this whole approach. The logic of infallible authenticity, as applied to heterosexual identities, patently collapses; for almost every gay person started off by sincerely self-interpreting as straight. Things are even worse with asexual identities which — ludicrously — are also protected by the bill, according to the accompanying notes. As a concerned mother worried about your lonely son, it seems you will not be permitted try to robustly argue him into trying to find a girlfriend, if he is telling you at the time that he is asexual. Otherwise, though, it is fine. But since, with the right sort of encouragement, today’s depressed asexual might easily become tomorrow’s happy lothario, why on earth should the law protect awkward teenagers from what they don’t want to hear?

Ultimately, the point extends to gay and trans identities too. These days, we don’t so much have compulsory heterosexuality in youth culture as compulsory queerness, and it no longer makes sense to say that the only plausible reason a young person would tell herself she was gay or trans, is if she “really” was. There are several alternative explanations available, including that a non-binary teaching assistant suggested she might be; or that she thinks it sounds cooler and more likely to win her friends than the boring straight alternative. This associated glamour can make self-interpretation confusing, and lead to false positives; not something that could have been said of the typical gay experience in the Sixties.

The insuperable problem here is that nobody can tell now whether a current identity will stick; not even its owner, and especially not when she is young and jejeune. And of course — a bit like television channels — though there used only to be two or three, there are now so many more to choose from. Ironically, gender studies academics used to stress this impermanence before it became inopportune to do so, always banging on about the endless flexibility of constructions of the self. What seems lifelong today may turn out to be temporary, and vice versa; in which case it cannot be remotely helpful to criminalise the verbal attempts of others to persuade you to take a different path. Critical discussion might feel rude, upsetting, or intrusive, but none of that means it is the business of the law to rule it out. And in fact, with the presumption of your own infallibility about yourself removed, attempts to “convert” you may turn out to be perceptive recognition of what there is, or what still could fruitfully be.

The fantasy of an immutable orientation or identity, offering a key to your true nature, sits awkwardly with human powers of self-interpretation and self-creation. For as long as you are alive, your current understanding of yourself might change, because of social influence or personal reinterpretation or something else entirely. No amount of felt certainty that this won’t happen can rule the possibility out. Life is full of surprises. And sometimes conversion from one set of outworn ideas or feelings to another can be a form of personal salvation.

Basically the bill attempts to put a stop to discussion. Everyone is, always, what they say they are, and it will be illegal to talk about it in any way except to agree and nod one’s head vigorously.

Yes, a person should indeed know, by the time they’re through puberty, the nature of their sexual orientation – though obviously later revelations and changes are always possible. The civilised approach here is clearly to acknowledge and accept, within limits, what people say about themselves – though it’s not at all clear why the law should be involved. What isn’t possible, though, is to change sex. It would seem reasonable to be able to point this out to young people in the grip of a delusional social contagion.