transgender conversion therapy ban

The Government consultation on its proposal to "ban conversion therapy" ends on 4 Feb 2022. While it may sound like good sense to ban “conversion therapy", in this case the danger is that the ban will criminalise parents, teachers and therapists who may wish to tell children that they are not “born in the wrong body”. Consider this thought experiment by Naomi Cunningham from her speech, Conversion therapy: the path to good law, on 17 Nov 2021:

Say you’re a therapist. You see an unhappy 10-year-old girl. She wears baggy clothes, and has short hair. She says she’s sure she’s a boy really. She hates her developing breasts, and dreads the onset of periods. She despises all things “girly.”

Your duty as a therapist is clear. You need to get to the bottom of the child’s distress. Is she struggling to come to terms with the beginnings of same-sex attraction in a homophobic environment? Is she traumatised by exposure to porn? Have her parents let slip that they’d have preferred a son? Has she suffered abuse or other trauma? The heart-breaking stories of detransitioners should be enough to make it clear how important it is to let you do that duty carefully and conscientiously.

The proposed law contains a safeguard for therapists treating people questioning their gender identity. But it won’t help you: this child isn’t questioning, she’s telling you she’s sure. So the government’s proposals threaten to lock you up for doing what your conscience and your professional duty both tell you must do. 

 As Maya Forstater writes, 30 Dec 2021 in thecritic.co.uk/the-second-gender-war: 

Amnesty International, Stonewall, Mermaids, Gendered Intelligence and Chair of the College of Policing Nick Herbert — the same organisations that tried to make it dangerous to say men are not women — now want to criminalise parents, teachers and therapists who tell children they are not “born in the wrong body”. 

This is almost a carbon copy of the move to equate disagreement with gender ideology with racist hate speech. Except this time the bait-and-switch move is with sexual orientation.

“Conversion therapy” (or “practices”) is proposed to be a perception-based crime, with a self-appointed victim. It will put “gender identity” (that concept Kathleen Stock called “ill-conceived as a potential object of law or policy”) into law and criminalise adults who try to steer children away from being sterilised and medicalised for life because of teenage unhappiness.

As with “hate”, there may be few prosecutions, but enough police visits and HR calls to make people nervous for their livelihoods. The number of prosecutions will tell us little about the extent of the chilling effect on professionals.

The policy targets people with careers to lose, with a specific focus on people whose job it is to safeguard children. Doctors, teachers, therapists, social workers, youth workers and charities will feel the chilling effect of the long arm of the law. Parents will be threatened with losing their children.