Suzanne Moore in the Telegraph adds her voice to the campaign against the ridiculous and dangerous Conversion Practices Bill. Labour’s trans law is a disaster for young girls.
When one of my daughters was a teenager, she told me she had formed a pop group at school. They were called “Not like other girls”. I didn’t ask too much about it. She and her two friends practised some songs apparently, but I never got to hear them. It was but a phase.
Teenage girls are a law onto themselves. I was one once and have brought up three of them. They have at various times all laid on their beds at night crying that they wanted to be special and not like everyone else and also fit in and be the same as everyone else.
This is the cri de coeur of every girl going into puberty. She will be flooded with hormones, bodily changes, feelings of both desire and disgust. Becoming a woman is not easy, especially in today’s pornified hall of selfies. It is no wonder then that some would prefer to opt out.
They want to refuse a female identity, pronouncing themselves as non-binary or male. When I was young, there seemed to be many more ways to escape the straightjacket of femininity than there are now. Androgynous stars and punks gave us ways out.
There is now a huge and online subculture where kids can find labels and instructions on how to avoid being simply – girls. They may be genderqueer, they may be demi-girl. They may identify themselves as “cat-gender”. A large degree of social contagion is at work here.
A parent may not go along with all this, perhaps by “misgendering” their daughter or saying “I am limiting your internet access”, or even: “You are not a boy.” But, shockingly, the muddled law that is being discussed under the Labour government could mean that they might end up in prison for such actions.
I am not making this up – as The Telegraph has made clear with its campaign to scrap the Conversion Practices Bill. Part of the Labour manifesto at the last election, it could mean that if a parent questions their child about being trans, they might be suppressing their child’s “gender identity”. Doing so runs the risk of being a criminal act.
Perfectly ordinary conversations had in private in the family home could be seen as part of a “conversion practice”. Saying: “You were not born in the wrong body” would be seen as coercive and abusive. Telling a child that their distress may pass and that their feelings of gender dysphoria may just be a phase would be criminal. How did we get to this and why on earth is Labour backing it?…
The issue with Labour’s bill is that it speaks of gender identity as equivalent to sexual orientation. No one has ever defined gender identity in any way other than an innate feeling. This feeling usually manifests as wanting to embody the most regressive stereotypes of the opposite sex. Indeed, we have seen tiny children treated as “trans” simply because they prefer dolls or trucks.
Making legislation around inner feelings is impossible, but it is something that trans activists have been pushing for years. Self ID failed in Scotland but, here in this ill-thought-out bill, it rears its head again.
There is no understanding in this proposed legislation that a parent has a right to question their child’s self-expression. There is no understanding of safeguarding either: a parent may well not want their child buying hormones on the dark web.
It is as if the last few years – not least the scandal involving the NHS’s Tavistock clinic – have not happened. Seemingly forgotten too are all the known co-morbidities of so many gender-confused girls, such as autism and eating disorders.
Baroness Cass, in her review of Tavistock, highlighted the dangers of puberty blockers and was concerned about the increase in young girls being put on these irreversible medical pathways.
So the Labour fools who like to present themselves as trans allies are no friends to teenage girls. If they were, they would say that we ARE our bodies and our inner feelings can never simply override biology, however much we want them to. We would accept too that girls can be as gender non-conforming as they like without being trans.
An important point. Yes, we are our bodies, as feminists have pointed out: Our Bodies, Ourselves. There’s no ghostly gendered soul hovering inside, waiting to be validated, which may or may not accord with our actual sex. It’s a nonsense.
It is clear that most Labour MPs do not understand it, as it fundamentally brings the state into family life in a way that no one is asking for. It is both authoritarian and unworkable.
The state has no right to police our conversations with our children. Of course, there will be difficult conversations because growing up is difficult.
Parents are (or should be) allowed to set boundaries for their children. It is not suppressing a child’s identity to tell them they are not in fact a cat just because they say they are.
Anyone who thinks that we need legislation about this is deluded. This bill is a waste of time and money. Hasn’t the Government got better things to do?
That’s the tragedy. They’re so convinced of their righteousness that they don’t see the obvious dangers. And most of them don’t even seem to understand what the bill actually means.
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