Another transcript from a speaker at last weekend’s Battle of Ideas Festival, on the Conversion Practices Bill. From Lucy Beney:
Unless you can talk to children and hear the story, talk about what is going on and show them a different way – then there’s very little chance of either addressing the underlying problem or of saving them from going down a pathway which is not like other sociogenic fads of the past. It will actually ruin their health longterm. The likelihood is it will ruin their chances of growing healthily, having a healthy family of their own and having a healthy sexual relationship. All of that can only be addressed, if you can talk about the backstory.
And effectively what happens under this bill is – you ‘fix’ children at a point in time. A child comes in and says “I think that I am whatever”, and this bill obliges you to take that child at face value. You are fixing them at a point in time.
I remember my grandmother saying “If you make a stupid face and the wind changes, you are going to be stuck like that” and this analogy keeps coming back to me. If you can’t address what is going on, and you can’t look at the backstory, you are effectively fixing a child at a point in time – and often at a time when their identity, and their feelings about themselves are most fluid. They are experimenting with things. They need containment, they need kick-back from adults, they need adults to say “no” – “no, that isn’t true”, or “no, that isn’t right” – and everything about this bill means that this will no longer be possible.
This example captures the issues perfectly:
I will just end with a very brief composite case study. I had the pleasure of meeting a young man when I was working in school, who on our first meeting declared himself to be a “gender-fluid, polyamorous pansexual” (at this point there was laughter in the hall). It is desperately serious, but sometimes it is difficult not to laugh, when you hear this from a child – and he was a child. This was not somebody who had fully gone through puberty. I said “Tell me about this”.
He said he was gender-fluid because he had no interest in football – all his friends liked football and therefore he was somehow ‘weird’. He thought he was a boy, but maybe he wasn’t a ‘real’ boy – you get the picture. Polyamorous – because he hoped in his life to have more than one girlfriend before he got married; and he was a ‘pansexual’ because emotional connection was important to him, and he didn’t just want to ‘go for somebody’ simply on the basis that they looked ‘hot’.
Now this was a serious boy who had obviously spent a lot of time going through all sorts of stuff on the internet. So many children do this – “Oh I’m this, Oh I’m that” and then they get anxious because, “maybe I picked the wrong one”, or “my friend is something different”. You know, it really is at that level.
This boy complained of sibling transphobia, because his older brother didn’t accept that he was what he had declared he was. In this case, the family was very sensible. The mum and dad put their arms around the young boy and said, “Look, get off the internet, stop looking at this stuff, things will work themselves out. You know, you are just an ordinary boy, with ordinary feelings, going through this stage in your life”. And they told the older brother to lay-off, and stop winding him up. And believe it or not, things resolved themselves.
But all of that is at risk. All the people involved in that – the parents, the brother, myself as a professional, teachers, other support workers – could all be at risk for challenging what I’m sure you will agree is a quite absurd assertion by a child.
Yes, this is what is at risk.
Closing remarks:
I would just say that this represents the most grotesque abandonment of some of the most vulnerable young people and children you could imagine – those who have suffered trauma, those who have various diagnoses of neurodivergence, those who are same-sex attracted, those who are lonely, afraid and spend lots of time on the internet. We are throwing them to the wolves. It is an utter disgrace and we have to do everything we can to stop the bill.
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