Hadley Freeman, on that bill:
Conversion therapy. Just the words cause a shudder. They bring to mind horrific historic examples of homophobia, such as the chemical castration of Alan Turing for the crime of being gay, young lesbians subjected to “corrective rape” and gay teenagers forced by their parents to “pray the gay away”.
These appalling stories are what the government is hoping you think about when you hear about its draft Conversion Practices Bill, which was proudly unveiled by the minister for women and inequalities, Bridget Phillipson, last month. The government is also hoping that you don’t read the bill online because if you do, you will see that it is about something extremely different. You will see — more easily than our politicians, it seems — that if passed, this bill will cause enormous harm to the same people Labour claims it protects. If that strikes you as ironic and self-contradictory, there’s a reason for that.
The bill aims to criminalise anyone who attempts to change a person’s sexuality, such as by threatening or abusing them. This is obviously reasonable — so reasonable, in fact, that it is already against the law. Grievous bodily harm, coercive control, child abuse, homophobic hate speech: these are already criminal acts. Which would make this bill seem rather redundant until you read on and you realise that the bill is, in fact, a bait and switch: it is not actually about protecting gay people from abuses, from which they are already protected. It is about banning anyone — parents, teachers, spouses, doctors, employers — from asking questions when a person, even a child, says they believe they were born in the wrong body and are transgender….
This bill confirms several truths. First, that gender ideology is like a mutant virus. Every time we think it’s been dealt with, because civil courts and the highest court in the land have confirmed that men who identify as women aren’t actually women, and that unhappy children should not be given untested hormones to stop puberty — it comes back, again and again. This bill — which you may not be surprised to learn was drafted with the help of Stonewall — is the latest mutation, a protest against For Women Scotland’s victory at the Supreme Court last year, a temper tantrum by legislation. It’s protected speech to say men who believe they’re women aren’t really women — but this bill proposes to make doing so a criminal offence. It’s a deliberate muddying of the water.
It also shows how the trans cause exploits the gay rights movement. It uses the painful history of homophobia to force parents to accept it when their child says they want to change sex, which is completely different from being gay. It has never made sense for T to be tacked on to LGB: one is about sexuality; the other is a homophobic and misogynistic movement which argues men who feel feminine are women, and women who feel butch are men. This is why this bill is so self-contradictory: it claims to be preventing conversion therapy, but the real conversion therapy is transgenderism….
But what this bill proves most of all is, as long as there are politicians who outsource their thinking to activists so they never have to make their own decisions, and who prioritise buzzwords over proper understanding, then gender ideology will never die.
A couple of pertinent comments, here:
I am gay, and so LGBT friendly. My daughter is autistic. At puberty she developed a hatred for her changing body and first decided she was lesbian and then trans. I went with it but didn’t enable it and thought it was likely a phase, and, that autistic girls in particular are subject to messaging around this on social media that they accept as fact. Now as a late teen she has a boyfriend and is a girl again. It all worked out fine. But I was terrified a blue/green/pink haired activist at her school or in the NHS would get their claws into her and enable and encourage her short lived phases and that she might be linked up to grooming adults via them who got her on hormones or secretly gave her breast binders etc. This new law is terrifying. How would I defend my daughter from the groomers if it had been in place?
And here:
I completely agree with your point on the incompatibility of LGB and T. I was a feminine boy and people often mistook me for a girl. I grew up to be a gay man. Very much a man. It was not easy being treated as the wrong sort of boy when I was at school. I fear that if someone had come along and said ‘wear these things, talk squeaky and take these pills and everyone will suddenly praise you and call you beautiful’ I may well have fallen for it. To me the whole point of gay rights is to say ‘there is more than one way to be a man.’ And trans rights is saying the opposite, that if you are not a traditional man you are actually a woman. And that being a woman means putting on lipstick and having big breasts etc. It is all regressive and stereotypical.
Leave a Reply