Mick Hartley

A clear-eyed look at the proposed conversion therapy ban bill, from Sonia Sodha:

The reality is that this bill is a Trojan Horse that smuggles in a whole host of dangerous unintended consequences that gender activists could use to pursue people who don’t comply with their ideological demands. First, that men who believe they are women should be treated as women for all purposes in society, and second, that gender-questioning children should be affirmed as trans and funnelled onto irreversible medical pathways that come with lifelong risks for their fertility, bone health and brain development…..

The ideological background:

Gender activists who hold the quasi-religious beliefs that everyone has an inner ‘gender identity’; that trans people have a different gender identity from the reality of their sexed bodies; and that it is gender identity rather than the scientific fact of someone’s sex that determines whether or not they are a man or a woman, have long campaigned for a statutory ban on what they term ‘conversion therapy’.

You cannot understand the conversion practices bill without understanding these roots. It is primarily a tool for campaigners to smuggle in the means to impose their ideology on the rest of society – an ideology that has harmed women and children through its erosion of sex-based rights – using the criminal law, under the guise of banning things that are already criminal. The pledge to criminally ban ‘conversion therapy’ in the Labour manifesto was made to keep these campaigners happy, not on the basis that there is a significant problem with abusive practices not covered by existing criminal statute. We can see this in the fact that the government’s draft impact assessment neither gives clear examples of conduct that should be but is not already criminal, nor establishes that there is a problem new legislation is needed to address.

Conclusion:

Just as a medical consensus is finally emerging that it has been deeply harmful to treat gender-questioning children as though they have a fixed ‘gender identity’ that necessitates unquestioning affirmation and irreversible medicalisation, a conversion therapy bill has come along that threatens to criminalise parents, teachers and schools, and other adults who are seeking to act in a child’s best interest. It does this by embedding the undefined concept of ‘transgender identity’ into the criminal law, as the basis for a serious criminal offence of trying to change someone’s undefined identity, that could result in imprisonment.

The bill will also be undoubtedly used to try and prevent people expressing and acting on their protected belief that sex matters in society and law, and that men who identify as women do not have the right to demand to be treated as women in a way that undermines women’s privacy, dignity and safety by eroding their hard-won access to single-sex facilities, services and sports. That a significant number of ministers and MPs could be gullible enough to fall for this ruse tells us a lot about the current quality of law-making and scrutiny.