If they do not affirm

Sex Matters reports:

The government has published a draft bill to ban “conversion practices”.

While there are improvements on previous drafts of this law, it remains an attempt to shift “Stonewall Law” – now slowly being driven out of workplaces and services – into homes and classrooms.

It puts parents, therapists, teachers and partners at risk of being subjected to investigation if they do not affirm that someone is “male” or “female “ (or both, or neither) based on their personal declaration rather than their biology. 

Um. That’s an incredibly low bar for being investigated. Terrifyingly low.

It also hands the power of private prosecution to organisations like the Good Law Project and Nancy Kelley’s Trans Solidarity Alliance.

So Jolyon Maugham will be empowered to punish people for not pretending a man is a woman.

The bill defines “conversion practice” as any conduct with the intention of causing the individual to have or not have (or to believe that they have or do not have) a particular sexual orientation or transgender identity. The question of whether conduct amounts to an abuse is a question of fact “to be determined by reference to all the circumstances of the case”.

Hey you know what else is a question of fact? The whole idea that men can be women. The relevant fact is that they cannot. Many other relevant facts flow from this one. Will the courts be keeping that in mind?

The offence of carrying out an abusive conversion practice on an individual is defined in terms of causing “serious harm” to the individual’s physical or mental health, or “serious alarm or distress to the individual which has a substantial adverse effect on their usual day-to-day activities”. This could potentially mean a wife telling her husband to stop wearing her clothes, parents telling a child they will not pay for puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones, or a school insisting on referring to all children accurately as girls or boys, in line with its safeguarding responsibilities. 

And the potential is all the greater because of years of catastrophizing about “transphobia” and genner idenniny.