The return of gay conversion therapy

The UK government wants to bring back the medicalisation of same-sex attracted people.

The current Labour government is the most anti-liberal in living memory. It has cracked down on free speech, sought to scrap juries in certain trials, postponed elections that are unlikely to go its way, laid the groundwork for the reintroduction of blasphemy laws… the examples are endless. And now, to cap it all, it has charged forward with its plans to reintroduce gay conversion therapy by stealth.

In yesterday’s King’s Speech, the government announced its Draft Conversion Practices Bill, which seeks to ‘prohibit practices whose predetermined purpose is to change a person’s sexual orientation or to change a person to or from being transgender’. In practice, this risks the criminalisation of medical professionals who offer much-needed therapeutic services for those who believe they have been ‘born in the wrong body’.

This is a linguistic minefield, an instance of regressive ideas being smuggled in under the cover of progressive rhetoric. Most of us understand ‘conversion therapy’ to be those ghastly practices from decades ago when crank doctors would resort to electric shocks to ‘cure’ gay men, or the horrific ongoing incidents of the ‘corrective rape’ of lesbians. These are already, quite rightly, illegal. The government’s new bill is concerned with an entirely different phenomenon.

The key to understanding the bill is in its ‘trans-inclusive’ nature. It is based on the fundamental error that ‘gender identity’ is a fixed essence or soul rather than an ideological principle. Under Labour’s new law, if a young person tells a doctor that he or she is ‘in the wrong body’, the belief must be automatically affirmed. Yet the overwhelming majority of young people who are confused about their gender are simply same-sex attracted. Homosexuality is routinely being diagnosed as ‘gender dysphoria’ and medically ‘corrected’.

Thanks to the work of Hannah Barnes, we can be specific about the statistics. In her book Time to Think, Barnes revealed that between 80 to 90 percent of adolescents who were referred to the Tavistock paediatric gender clinic were same-sex attracted. We have known for a long time that there is a strong correlation between gender nonconformity in youth and being gay in adult life. Members of the staff at the Tavistock itself joked that ‘soon there would be no gay people left’ and whistleblowers revealed that homophobia was endemic. In other words, children who are likely to grow up gay were being medicalised to better conform with stereotypical heterosexual paradigms.

This is why Labour’s trans-inclusive ban on ‘conversion therapy’ amounts to a form of gay conversion therapy. Organisations such as LGB Alliance and Gay Men’s Network have painstakingly outlined the reasons why this is such a regressive step. The government has repeatedly been presented with the facts but has chosen to ignore them, seemingly determined to roll back gay rights in the name of ‘progress’.

Even when homosexuality is not a factor, the ‘gender-affirming’ approach fails to address the reasons for feelings of gender dysphoria. Barnes’s research showed that the Tavistock clinic ‘ignored evidence that 97.5 per cent of children seeking sex changes had autism, depression or other problems that might have explained their unhappiness’. With only 2% of the country’s children suffering from an Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD), why did 35% of referrals to the Tavistock fit into this category? Apparently, the government is not interested in the answer.

The forced teaming of the LGB with the TQ+ has meant that gay rights are now under threat from those who pose as allies. A viral TikTok video from June 2024 featured transgender influencer Kelly Cadigan explaining to gay men why they should transition to female and that ‘maybe being gay is an outdated concept’. Trans-identified author Juno Dawson has claimed that ‘a lot of gay men are gay men as a consolation prize, because they couldn’t be women’. In April 2022, an online influencer called Davey Wavey uploaded his attempt at gay conversion therapy in a video entitled ‘How To Eat Pussy – For Gay Men’. Nancy Kelley, former CEO of Stonewall, compared women who were not interested in trans-identified males to ‘sexual racists’.

Coming from those who claim to represent the interests of gay people, this kind of rhetoric is especially dangerous. It means that well-intentioned members of the public are gulled into supporting anti-gay legislation and conversion practices. And while it is no more possible to forcibly change someone’s sexual orientation than it is their biological sex, activists on both the far left and far right believe otherwise. In potentially criminalising doctors who wish to protect gay youth from harm, the Labour government is now aligning itself with those extremists who believe that homosexuality can be eradicated through mental and physical torture.

For many years, the Iranian government has funded ‘sex change’ operations in an effort to eradicate homosexuality. The UK government has taken a different route to the same destination, by funding drugs to ‘heterosexualise’ gay adolescents. We know from the Cass Report and other major studies that there is no evidence for the efficacy of puberty blockers. The risks of sterility, depression, and lifelong regret are now clear. We also know that gay people are disproportionately harmed by these drugs. And still the government persists with its blinkered approach.

We are dealing overwhelmingly here with gay and autistic children, fast-tracked onto a pathway to sterilisation. The UK government is now positioning itself firmly as an opponent of gay rights. It has to be stopped.

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