Written by Caroline ffiske. Published 2 December 2021.

The Conservative Government is proposing to ban 'conversion therapy'. A rushed six-week consultation ends December 10 2021, with legislation planned for Spring 2022. The proposal is dangerous. It extends the definition of ‘conversion therapy’ to cover talking therapy with young people who ‘identify’ as transgender. This will make it harder for expert adults to explore, challenge, and support these young people without fearing the risk of prosecution.  This will ruin young lives.

• There is an upsurge in young people, particularly girls, often same-sex attracted, on the autistic spectrum, with health or home problems, who are persuaded they were were ‘born in the wrong body’. They become convinced they are ‘trans’; or have an ‘inner gender identity’ different to their sex ‘assigned at birth’. 
• If adults ‘affirm’ them in this identity, some will go on to puberty blockers, which almost always leads to cross-sex hormones. This will eventually sterilise them; impair their adult sexual function and pleasure; impact bone and brain development; make them medical patients for life. Girls might have their breasts cut off. Boys might get ‘surgical holes’ which will need manual dilation for life. 

We risk healthy kids becoming life-long medical patients, stunted and sterilised, because they got caught up in a social media craze - and then the Conservative Government made caring for them harder.

The Government’s proposed legislation risks criminalising expert adults who work with these young people. It will criminalise talking therapies that explore this socially-contagious currently-fashionable tragedy. We are not exaggerating. From the Government Equalities Office website:

“Consultation questions on the proposal for targeting talking conversion therapy:

Question 2. The government considers that delivering talking conversion therapy with the intention of changing a person’s sexual orientation or changing them from being transgender or to being transgender either to someone who is under 18, or to someone who is 18 or over and who has not consented or lacks the capacity to do so should be considered a criminal offence. The consultation document describes proposals to introduce new criminal law that will capture this. How far do you agree or disagree with this?”

Is this the Conservative Government’s new Section 28?

A significant proportion of young people caught up in gender ideology are same-sex attracted. Do we want to sterilise gay children, encourage the slippery slope towards the amputation of their sex organs? Medicalise them for life? Do we want to ‘change their gender’ to make them ‘straight’? Because that’s where this legislation heads.

The hard truth behind this trend:

• USA: ‘My once beautiful daughter is now 19, homeless, bearded, in extreme poverty, sterilized, not receiving mental health services, extremely mentally ill, & planning a radial forearm phalloplasty (a procedure that removes part of her arm to construct a fake penis).’ 

• Sweden: ‘After 4 years on blockers 'Leo' hasn't grown, has osteopenia, spinal fractures and is in constant pain. 12 children in Stockholm have 'healthcare-acquired injuries' from blockers’. Watch here.

• USA: ‘During my own transition, I had seven surgeries. I also had a stress-induced heart attack, sepsis, a 17-month recurring infection due to using the wrong skin during a (failed) phalloplasty, 16 rounds of antibiotics, (only partially successful) arm reconstructive surgery, permanent lung and heart damage, a cut bladder, insomnia-induced hallucinations—oh and frequent loss of consciousness due to pain from the hair on the inside of my urethra.

• UK detransitioner:  ‘I don't know if I'll ever fully get over what transition did to me but I'm hopeful. Sometimes I feel like I have, but it's so hard to ignore the permanent effects. I'll live with them until the day I die. I'll never fully accept that I was aided by clinicians to do this’.

• Keira Bell: ‘By the time I got to the Tavistock, I was adamant that I needed to transition. It was the kind of brash assertion that’s typical of teenagers. What was really going on was that I was a girl insecure in my body who had experienced parental abandonment, felt alienated from my peers, suffered from anxiety and depression, and struggled with my sexual orientation. After a series of superficial conversations with social workers, I was put on puberty blockers at age 16. A year later, I was receiving testosterone shots. When 20, I had a double mastectomy.
  
  The consequences of what happened to me have been profound: possible infertility, loss of my breasts and inability to breastfeed, atrophied genitals, a permanently changed voice, facial hair. When I was seen at the Tavistock clinic, I had so many issues that it was comforting to think I really had only one that needed solving: I was a male in a female body. But it was the job of the professionals to consider all my co-morbidities, not just to affirm my naïve hope that everything could be solved with hormones and surgery.’

Is this the future we want for our gay kids, our autistic kids, our vulnerable kids, our kids who don’t conform to sex stereotypes, our kids just trying to fit in and who get caught up in a social media craze, and who see a route to social acceptance and status?

Nobody is born in the wrong body. Nobody deserves to be caught up in this craze - then have the

responsible adults turn away, afraid to help, criminalised for caring.

The Government must pause the process:

1. Wait for outcomes of the Cass Review which explores trans-identification in young people.
2. Limit meaning of ‘conversion therapy’ to apply to lesbian and gay conversion only.
3. Do not let the nebulous nonsense of ‘inner gender identity’ anywhere near our law. 
4. ‘Transgender’ has no scientific, biological, legal or clinical definition. It should not be written into law. 

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Mark Jenkinson MP writes for ConHome.

Gary Powell, Conservative Activist writes for Lesbian&GayNews

A briefing from Maya Forstater and Sex Matters

A briefing from TransgenderTrend.

Maya Forstater writing in ConHome: 

If you read one more thing: The Mental Health Establishment is Failing Trans Kids

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