Julie Bindel in the Telegraph:
There are only a few days left for the public to respond to the call for evidence on the Government’s draft Conversion Practices Bill, and those of us who consider it dangerous are doing all we can to get our voices heard above the din from trans activists.
Among the legislation’s opponents is the feminist philanthropist and author JK Rowling, who this week endorsed a post on X explaining how the bill, if passed, will adversely affect lesbian and gay rights. The post, by the journalist Kevin McKenna, said that the bill may be “the biggest threat to gay rights since Section 28”.
I disagree with McKenna on one point: it would be way worse than Section 28 ever was. Section 28 notoriously banned schools from “promoting homosexuality”. Because Labour’s draft bill contains no exemption for parents, its vague criminal offence of “psychological pressure” could threaten mothers and fathers with prison simply for questioning a child’s self-identification as trans. This could result in more gay and lesbian people being persuaded to believe they are, in fact, transgender and making it hard for parents to act in the best interests of their gay or lesbian children.
When I was in my early teens, I wanted to be a boy. It wasn’t because I was trapped in the wrong body. It was because I wanted to be perceived as normal, and I grew up to become a happy lesbian.
But if I were growing up today, the chances are that someone would have suggested that I wasn’t a lesbian but transgender. And if I had middle-class, liberal parents, they would have the option of taking me to a gender clinic. They would have been able to “trans away” the gay….
It’s all part of the ongoing attempt to lump gay and lesbian people together with trans people. Despite the ongoing gender war, things have never been so good for lesbians and gay men in Britain. But the organisations that claim to represent us, such as Stonewall, do not want to accept this. So they include us in the ever-expanding constellation of LGBTQQIA+ people, and any perceived slight on the “queer” community, such as misgendering or telling a bloke you can’t come in the women’s bathroom, ends up being treated like our problem too.
Stonewall, with its tendency to conflate gender nonconformity – a camp boy or a tomboy girl – with being trapped in the wrong body have become the new homophobes, and taken us back to the days of 1950s sex stereotypes. Its evidence in support of the Government’s bill is self-evidently ludicrous….
This draft bill is the most anti-gay piece of legislation I have been witness to in my lifetime. It must be assigned to the rubbish bin in its entirety.
It’s compelling us to believe in the fantasy of gender identity: a completely unscientific fantasy concept dreamt up by trans ideologues. If we don’t accept it, we’re criminals. It’s that absurd.
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