AIBU to think parents must be allowed to say no to gender ideology? - Petition against the terrible draft conversion therapy ban

[SingleSexSpacesInSchools]

https://stoptheconversiontherapyban.uk

YANBU - this bill is bad and should be binned or rewritten
YABU - we need a ban like this

To be clear - I completely support banning actual conversion therapy.

Nobody wants anyone electroshocked, beaten, threatened, raped, or “cured”. That is vile. But those things are already illegal in the UK. We don't need more legislation.

This new new draft bill goes much further and is so very broad. It does not just cover historic gay conversion therapy. It also covers “transgender identity”, and that is where this becomes very worrying for parents - the risk is that normal parental safeguarding will be treated as trying to “change” or “suppress” a child’s claimed gender identity. So instead of being free to pause, question, challenge, reassure, or say no, parents may feel they have to affirm whatever their child says immediately, and you can be sure those who have encouraged this behaviour with your child over the internet will tell them it's a crime if you do and to report you.

Where does the bill leave a parent whose 13-year-old daughter has suddenly decided, after TikTok/Discord/school/friends, that she is really a boy?

Can her mother still say:

“No, hang on. You are a girl. You always have been.”

“Feeling uncomfortable with puberty does not mean you are male.”

“No, I will not call you my son.”

“No, I will not agree to puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones.”

“No, your body is not wrong.”

That can't be a crime, That is parenting surely, and parenting properly

Teenagers go through phases. Some are autistic. Some are gay. Some hate puberty. Some are traumatised. Some are being influenced online. Some are just trying to make sense of being female in a horrible pornified culture. The vast, vast majority of kids who say they are trans grow out of it with puberty - UNLESS they are affirmed and encouraged.

Parents must be allowed to slow things down, say no, and tell the truth about sex. Not be threatened with FIVE YEARS in jail?!?!

( https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/draft-conversion-practices-bill )

There is a carve-out for healthcare professionals, but not one for ordinary mums and dads.

A law that makes parents frightened to have normal conversations with their own children is a bad law. A child should not be able to weaponise “conversion therapy” because mum and dad will not instantly affirm a new identity.

I am FOR protecting people from real abuse. I am against redefining ordinary parental boundaries, safeguarding, and disagreement as abuse.

Please consider signing this petition asking for the bill to be stopped/rethought:

https://stoptheconversiontherapyban.uk/

It is not a great Bill by any means, but I have some hope that the Lords will send it back with amendments such as the parental one you mention. I am sure Baroness Nicholson has her red pen warmed up already, to name just one of the House.

Absolutely not,I think it is much needed.
How anybody can be against

1. A person commiting an offence if the person carries out an abusive conversion practice on an individual which causes—

• (a) serious harm to the individual’s physical or mental health, or
• (b) serious alarm or distress to the individual which has a substantial adverse effect on their usual day-to-day activities.

is beyond me.

Totally agree. This description of an abusive conversion practice quote clearly excludes any normal parenting. If parents are having this effect on their children they absolutely should be stopped.

More hysteria about perfectly reasonable protections, how on brand for you. Why here? The FWR lot love this shit, are there to whip up an argument? You clearly don't just want everyone to agree with you or you would have posted this in FWR.

Some people claim serious harm to their mental health merely by being misgendered. Do you think this serious harm to their mental health should be taken seriously or ignored for the purposes of the bill?

the humangaymale team have published a quite detailed rebuttal, with some excellent questions and objections. It is an automatic pdf download from their homepage, but here are the section titles for a brief overview of what they have covered:

1. Sexual orientation and gender identity should not be legislated together
2. The Bill does not explain what genuinely new conduct requires criminalisation
3. The Bill introduces a new statutory concept of "transgender identity"
4. The Bill creates a false equivalence between sexual orientation and gender identity
5. The definition of "conversion practice" lacks sufficient legal certainty
6. The healthcare exemption is overly broad
7. Conversion Practice Protection Orders are exceptionally broad

They conclude with:

We therefore call upon the Government to:

1. Withdraw the current Draft Conversion Practices Bill and reconsider the policy relating to sexual orientation and gender identity as separate policy questions, allowing each to be considered on its own evidence base, legal framework and safeguarding considerations before any legislation is brought forward.

2. Demonstrate that any new criminal offences are necessary by identifying the specific conduct not already adequately addressed by existing law.

3. If legislation is ultimately proposed, ensure that it is narrowly drafted, legally certain and confined to clearly defined abusive conduct, including objective statutory tests, rather than relying upon broad discretionary concepts, evolving professional standards or subjective identity-based terminology.
www.

The problem is that alarm and distress is quite easy to cause when someone is in the grip of a delusion or belief.

Try convincing someone with anorexia that they are underweight. Should you agree with them that they are fat?

Try telling someone who is in pyschosis that what they are seeing is not real. Should you agree that they should go ahead and do what the voices tell them to?

Try telling someone with dementia that the person they truly believe is alive, died years ago.

All of these things would cause serious alarm and distress - and those providing healthcare might attempt to work round them to reduce this, but ultimately they would not tell people it's true, when it is not.

In terms of belief - try telling someone in a cult that they are being controlled and lied to - they won't listen to you.

Telling the truth is not conversion therapy.

Surely if the stated aim is to eliminate conversion therapy then it should exclusively apply to therapists or those delivering stated therapeutic aims. And everyone who wants that ban ought to be happy with that. Unless they really do want this bill to chill free speech. 🧐

Mostly though it seems as out of date as banning supermarkets from selling snuff.

I am really concerned that young people, in the grip of enthusiastic adherence to gender ideology will use the threat of this bill to coerce their parents into doing what they want - either forcing parents into affirmation or to agree to social transition in school, or even to force parental consent to harmful and dangerous healthcare procedures.

So many parents have gone along with affirmation due to fear, which was deliberately created and fed using false information about suicidality.

I think this will do the same - and this is incredibly harmful to parents, their children and their whole family.

@IrnBruAndDietCoke How could a therapist explore with someone who has body dysmorphia, specifically gender dysphoria without challenging their thoughts?

They would need to seek out the roots of the discomfort - considering any previous trauma, any neurodivergence, possible family discomfort with sexuality or family expectations of gendered behaviours and so many many more possible threads to what has led to this way of thinking.

Applying this to therapists would prevent them doing their job properly.

Why is it ok for a therapist to challenge a young person's thoughts, but not their parents?

@noblegiraffe I was assuming the therapist was working with the young person who was having difficulty accepting their body, or its changing during puberty. In this case their thoughts are the most important.

A therapist might challenge the parents thoughts if the young person demonstrated this was an issue - if they said their parents had told them it was sinful to be gay, that could be explored or if they had been told that girls could not play football. A therapist would challenge these assumptions, which might be sincerely held by the young person if that's the way they had been brought up.

No, I mean, why can't the parents challenge their child's thoughts in the same way an exception has been carved out for therapists?

I guess in practice you'd need to prove materiality (ie: a person HAS been harmed, conversion HAS taken place) but I see the concern.

Oh - absolutely. I suppose the issue is that the young person may perceive their parent's challenging of their thoughts to be hostile, to cause them significant distress or to consider that the challenging was a form of conversion therapy.

Young people may have unhelpful dynamics with parents which means that people like therapists might be more helpful when exploring difficult issues.

Sure, but is it reasonable to potentially criminalise a parent challenging a young person's thoughts about themselves?

Not everyone can afford a therapist and waiting lists are incredibly long. And parents may be actually well placed to talk to their child.

At this rate I think I'd genuinely rather have a Reform government

It will allow a) bigoted parents to convert their gay kids into trans kids (that's been done before, and quite publicly) and b) prevent parents from being able to stop their struggling / autistic child from taking health damaging hormones to "change" their "gender".

By all means stop the mental religious nuts who try and drive out evil spirits in gay children and the sexist parents who won't accept a gay child. Just don't let kids have hormones and surgery.

@noblegiraffe I think we're both in agreement.

The issue is that a distressed child, whose parents were trying to explore their discomfort could accuse them of attempting conversion therapy.

Whilst many parents would love to explore the issue, a child who was already distressed may perceive any challenge to their beliefs as hostility, as an attempt to change what they truly believe, to deny what they believe to be true (that they are the wrong sex) - ie. an attempt to convert them

Ah right, yes, we agree. I thought you were saying that a parent talking to a child would best avoided, however it's that bill that makes that the case. In some cases it could actually be very helpful to the child. However the potential prospect of having the police called on you by a child who turns out to be unreceptive may well put the parents off from even trying.

We already have people on the internet convincing these troubled children to cut contact with their 'unsupportive' families, they would love to be able to also tell them to get them put in prison.

A parent who can see that their child has been groomed should be able to at least try to tackle this with their child without fear of criminalisation.

Problem is @noblegiraffe those who are grooming these children are adept at planting ideas in the young person's mind that aims to isolate them from their family, to make them more amenable to the love bombing of the groomer. 'We understand you, your parents are trying to deny who you are, it's like conversion therapy - and that's illegal'

Yes, it's extremely insidious, they get their defence in first.

I think unfortunately, the move to petitions and activism has killed the thread , although I suppose it is the right place for it to be.

Activism?

Name of the topic.

Well we need some clear, objectively demonstrable definitions of ‘abusive conversion practice’ that do not include: having a conversation, disagreeing with someone, challenging someone’s beliefs.

The two thoughts that occur to me immediately are:

A robust, testable definition of gender identity is required. One that is demonstrably consistent over time. This is a new concept in law, it doesn’t exist in the Equality Act for example.

There is a lot of scope for detransitioners to use this act to bring prosecutions against people who coercively transed them. People who took the exploratory discussions of a minor, wrongly inferred an intrinsic, fixed gender identity and followed an affirming pathway that did not explore other perspectives or potential causes for the young person’s ideas and behaviour. Then encouraged them into actions including medical interventions that the young person later concludes harmed them. That ‘one track pathway’ reads as textbook abusive conversion practice to me.