Equalies minister Bridget Phillipson presents her particular take on the Conversion Practices bill, here at the Independent.
Dennis Kavanagh takes it apart:
The Conversion Practices bill applies in the case of a child who says they’re the opposite sex. Think about that.
Apply Phillipson’s thinking to the parent of a four year-old boy who says ‘mummy, I’m really a girl’.
Or to the parent of a teenage girl who is screaming ‘I’m not your daughter I’m your son, you bigot!’
By trying to present the bill as completely reasonable ‘common sense measures’ Phillipson has only succeeded in exposing its ideological basis. Her language is pure trans activism.
Added:
Bridget Phillipson’s key argument is that ‘being T+’ does not need fixing. But in reality, ‘being T+’ involves many thousands of children with a host of mental health issues and other vulnerabilities, who reject their healthy body, experience escalating distress and seek unevidenced medical interventions.
That really does need fixing.
When T+ is defined simply as ‘who someone is’ or people just being ‘their true selves’, any appreciation that the identity itself could be a maladaptive response to a range of external factors is dismissed. Even worse, the unremarkable understanding that not all identities bring health or happiness is misrepresented as an abusive effort to ‘change who someone is’. This is the kind of activist language that led to the chronic safeguarding failings at GIDS and at WellBN.
Under this framing, any denial of personal identity is seen as abhorrent: ‘no one should be abused, shamed or threatened into denying who they are’. What is encouraged instead is affirmation of the ‘true self’ even if ‘who they are’ involves rejecting their own body.
So this is what the bill would achieve: special protection for an identity linked to unhappiness about the body, and criminalisation of alternative understandings because these could be ‘intended to change who someone is’.
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