Mick Hartley

The draft conversion practices bill has been published. Things are moving forward. Time for some principled opposition.

Added: the Gay Men’s Network response.

• Gender ideology is a dualist and quasi-religious philosophy which holds that humans can be born into the wrong body and that every person has a soul-like “gender identity” which may or may not accord with their sexed body. Those who support gender ideology promote conversion
  legislation not because they wish to end suffering for gay people, but because they wish to embed their ideological world view into criminal law to penalise or stifle their opponents.
• Same-sex-attracted youth are overrepresented in gender services, and gender medicine is a
  species of gay conversion therapy. It takes homosexual urges in young people and
  “heterosexualises” them via puberty blockers, hormones and surgery. That is the real gay
  conversion therapy, and it is actively supported by the current government in the form of a clinical trial on the use of puberty blockers.
• There is a real and evidenced history of gay conversion therapy. It involved administering chemical castration agents to men such as Alan Turing. It involved electroshock therapy. In the case of lesbians, it involved “corrective” rape. All of those forms of abuse and violence are covered by modern criminal law, which punishes offenders more harshly than the proposals in this Bill….
• The Bill embeds contested identity politics concepts into criminal law. The “transgender identity” concept is in reality simply “gender identity” and the Bill permits self-identification because it expands the concept beyond the relevant equivalent protected characteristic. The Bill also introduces nonbinary identification into law for the first time so it would exist in criminal, but not equality law. That is incoherent.
• The low harm threshold in the Bill (serious alarm or distress) ignores the reality of parents
  struggling with difficult situations involving teenage children. The checklist of abusive conduct is designed for adult relationships between equals, not for parental or in loco parentis situations.
• There are no statutory defences to the main offence. No parent will be able to say they were
  guided by the welfare of their child. No school will be able to say a failure to use new pronouns
  was a matter of policy.
• The main offence can be privately prosecuted. This is an invitation to ideological actors to step in and weaponise criminal law for political purposes.
• Almost every kind of organisation, company and public body can be prosecuted if they commit
  the offence or fail to take reasonable steps to prevent it. This is an invitation to ideologically
  motivated actors to weaponise the criminal law against political rivals….