To try to persuade

Written by

Ophelia Benson

in

The Free Speech Union declares:

The FSU is disappointed that the King’s Speech included a draft bill to ban conversion therapy. Trying to force gay people to become straight is already illegal in this country, so what does the Government want to ban?

We fear Labour wants to make it a criminal offence for parents and health professionals to try to persuade gender-confused children not to embark on irreversible, life-changing medical treatment that can leave them permanently sterile and cause other lasting harms. If that is the Government’s intention, we will vigorously campaign against the bill.

There’s a crucial difference there. Being gay requires zero medical or physical intervention of any kind. It requires no action of any kind. It requires no performance. It requires no demands placed on other people. Being trans cannot claim this level of non-interference. In theory people could just announce they’re trans while continuing to look and talk like the sex they really are, but in practice we don’t see that.

In practice what we see is people, including children, making drastic permanent changes to their bodies in a doomed attempt to become the sex they are not, motivated by a loony popular fad.

Comments

2 responses to “To try to persuade”

  1. Your Name's not Bruce? Avatar
    Your Name’s not Bruce?

    “Gender affirming care” is conversion therapy.

    We fear Labour wants to make it a criminal offence for parents and health professionals to try to persuade gender-confused children not to embark on irreversible, life-changing medical treatment that can leave them permanently sterile and cause other lasting harms.

    Starmer realy, really wants to appease the small percentage of “women who have penises,” doesn’t he?

  2. Artymorty Avatar
    Artymorty

    This issue is particularly fraught, because the practice of gay “conversion therapy” should indeed be illegal, regardless of whether the patient claims to want it. No one should be allowed to offer the service, on the grounds that it’s quack medicine. Sexual orientation modification is (presently) impossible and attempts to change it are psychologically harmful to the patient.

    But most reputable professional medical associations already proscribe it, and most professional therapists, psychiatrists, and psychologists are covered under them.

    What remains are the religious groups. It’s primarily through churches and mosques that peddlers of “conversion therapy” are hooked up with clients who are ostensibly requesting it.

    The question, then, is whether it’s necessary for the government to step in and outlaw it outright, for the sake of gays who are aligned with or trapped within religious communities that don’t tolerate homosexuality.

    As much as I would like to see that happen, I’m plenty skeptical of this particular motion at this particular time, because I suspect the government would botch the wording, and we’d end up with legal bans on any kind of therapy that touches on modifying sexual behaviour or “gender identity”. Some sexual behaviors really are unhealthy and worthy of therapeutic treatment. Same goes for some beliefs about “gender identity”.

    In the current political climate, with trans hysteria still blazing through Britain’s quangos and bureaucracies, any effort to address homosexuality unshackled from its impostor twin seems all but impossible.

    Now is just not the right time.

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