Conversion therapy to be banned - Sunak

[BeetleDeuce]

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/19/rishi-sunak-ban-gay-and-trans-conversion-practices

Apparently Sunak to add this to the King’s Speech, banning conversion therapies for trans and gay people.

This is a potential nightmare for counsellors/psychotherapists/NHS services who want to explore trans people’s experiences of trauma and other sources of gender dysphoria. It basically means “affirming only” as far as I can tell. This is exactly why this was always a bad idea.

Joan Smith has written about it in Unherd

https://unherd.com/thepost/rishi-sunak-has-caved-on-conversion-therapy/

Freudian slip there with conversation therapy OP? Seeing as that's presumably just what they're trying to get banned.

Looks like Paul Brand and his husband (who is a senior civil servant within Downing Street) have pushed hard for this.

I wonder if the EHRC advice was the final push for Sunak? Can imagine it was.

I think the way government works is that the civil service has too much power, and because they've been Stonewalled, they've put a lot of pressure on the government to get this through.

Brand's article suggests that a lot of people lobbied hard to get this through, and even pretended that the Conservatives would lose votes if they didn't push this through.

It's remarkable how they have managed to get their tentacles in everywhere, from the EHRC to Scientific American to the criminal justice system.

The joke in the 70s/80s used to be, voting Tory is like wanking: everybody does it, but no-one admits to it. Now, everyone with half a brain knows this is bollocks (including Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer) but no-one dare say so.

There's a similar article in the Times but imply the pressure is coming from MPs who have been lobbied by constituents as a result of Braverman's comments about being gay.

So as with convertion therapy itself, that fact that the T has been guarded by the LGB
is what is causing the problem.

By making it as though it were one issue, when in many cases they are actually contradictory, yet again the TRAs may get what they want, not because of who they are and their objectives, but because the fight for same sex attraction was so sucessful.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/rishi-sunak-set-to-ban-gay-conversion-therapy-j357hd828

As always behind paywall but can be read by going to https://archive.ph and pasting in Times link.

If Sunak can't see that the T+ is busking an undeserved ride in plain sight on the coat-tails of LGB, he's really effing stupid. He's been told how many times? By how many of his own Party?

But he'd rather listen to captured civil servants, Labour, the Lib Dems, the SNP and the Greens.

Politically hollow. Tactically inept. Strategically disastrous.

Stupid.

Amazing, isn't it. The Tories bring in legislation that you'd have bet Labour would first, gay marriage, now conversion ban.
First female leaders and PMs, first non white PM.
This ban is going to be Sunak's legacy.

Yes, very likely that there has been lobbying all around for this.

Activists have lobbied MPs, and they naively think this is what they're going to lose votes for (rather than losing votes for their handling of the country).

But what MPs should be aware of is that these issues helped bring down Sturgeon, and that they are being lobbied by activists.

Brand and co can say that this is a vote loser, they are clueless.

Effectively this criminalises detransitioning.

The Telegraph opinion piece seeing it as a free speech issue

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/10/19/rishi-sunak-angela-rayner-trans-conversion-therapy/

Not saying I agree with every word, but like the sensible straight forward approach.

We need to think very carefully about how to approach an issue like conversion therapy. We could start by asking what it really means – should it be as serious as a prolonged period of abuse or just an <a class="break-all" href="https://archive.ph/o/cHj4K/www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2023/09/14/conversion-therapy-ban-to-be-delayed-rishi-sunak/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">unsolicited lecture from a priest? A blanket ban could threaten both freedom of speech and freedom of conscience. A tolerant society should afford the same rights to gay people and their religious critics. “Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign”, wrote JS Mill in 1859.

We need to have an open debate about the tension between protecting vulnerable individuals, and the freedom of citizens to talk about contentious issues. It’s time all politicians stopped using LGBT people as a stage army.

https://archive.ph/cHj4K

Well, the Telegraph piece itself is hedging its bets a bit. But at least factual.

Fantastic piece. Sunak will either have a loose interpretation of conversion, meaning that, councillors and therapists, and yes, parents even, will be inadvertently caught up in being deemed culpable in breaking this new law.

Or he'll so arm the legislation with caveats and exceptions that in reality, conversations will carry on, noone will be prosecuted except the most egregious of evangelical preacher/healer types.

I could just about accept this law if there was a parallel move to full transparency in gender teaching in schools. So that parents would know what their kids (especially the ones displaying gender dysphoria) are being taught and if another gender is being affirmed in schools.

But no. The law is tightening in favour of the TQ+ lobby, but there is no counterbalancing transparency for the rest of society.

Part of me is also cynical in thinking that Sunak wants one legacy he can say he left to the country. Thatcher broke the unions and created the home owning/share buying class, Blair codified human rights and broke the socialists in his party, Cameron brought in same sex marriage, May legislated against domestic slavery, Johnson got Brexit done.

This will be Sunak's historic legacy. To add to the Tories being first ahead of Labour on female and non white PMs and gay marriage.

But if it's affirmation only or you fall foul of this law, then the medical escalator can continue to 'trans the gay away' as clinicians at GIDS were concerned about. I.e conversion? It's really confusing. Hopefully the law will be tightly written to avoid large numbers of same-sex attracted kids being transed and sterilised.

It's not likely, is it? We all know Sunak has been bounced into this. He gave clear unequivocal signs he viewed all this as toxic, impossible to get right, mixed messages to the electorate.

Now he's been backed into a corner, on one hand by Paul Brand in the media, captured civil service, and likely LGBTQ group in his party headed by Blunt, Mordaunt and May, and by ECHR advice on the other.

Knowing this, and knowing the power imbalance on lobbying, do any of us have any real confidence he'll get the legislation right which would mean no criminalising "watchful waiting" therapy, and robust discussions with parents?

If the LGBTQ lobby have a hand in the writing of the legislation, I fear for the future of teens councilling in the UK re these matters.

Transitioning a potentially gay child, is the very definition of gay conversion therapy. Therefore transitioning of children should be illegal.

Exploring with a child who claims they are a transexual, the reasons for their discomfort around their body, perhaps due to being autistic, or gay, or having suffered unwanted sexual attention, is helping them on the pathway to adulthood-helping them get through puberty when in most cases the feeling of awkwardness will settle down.

We have an alarming number of young adults, age 18-25 who are also caught up in this ideology, sadly because they are over 18 it might be more difficult to protect them.

If Sunak can't see that the T+ is busking an undeserved ride in plain sight on the coat-tails of LGB, he's really effing stupid. He's been told how many times? By how many of his own Party?

I honestly think for many, lumping T with LGB betrays their lack of acceptance of LGB.

For most of us, same sex attraction is totally normal. It's not unnatural or something to have to get your head around intellectually, it's just a thing some people are.

I think the people who see T as "similar" to LGB are showing us they find same sex attraction as incomprehensible as a woman who is really a man on the inside. It's not that they really believe both so much as they really believe neither.

Where the fuck is Cass.

I've said this on the other thread, but this keeps on coming back, and it needs getting out in full sunlight, unpacking and discussing with all the little hidden corners and implications in plain view, while being even more thoroughly unpicked in the press. And I'd rather this happened now, under the current parliament, than with a Labour majority all busy being cool and groovy misogyny on crack. Time to start writing to MPs and laying it all out in very small words, and it will be thoroughly kicked around the HoL if it makes it that far.

Also very important to insist when writing to people that a diversity of LGB voices are heard in this as opposed to just purely TQ+ political voices.

Well Sunak is just a weak leader. But we already knew that.

This is the problem with tacking T (and all
the other letters with it) on to LGB - and of course why trans activists have pushed so hard for that. It means that we can’t actually have sensible debates about issues relevant to same-sex attracted people any more.

The other thing that this legislation does is to enshrine gender identity into law.

The equalities act is clear about transsexuals (people who have had medical intervention), but gender identity is deliberately ambiguous so that it can include stuff like "non-binary" as an identity that can't be altered.

It just baffles me that instead of changing someone's thinking, it is much better to alter someone's entire body (because that's the apparent opposite of conversion therapy 🙄).

As someone else has posted, better the Conservatives pass this with we hope as good as possible a series of safeguards for exploratory councilling.

That will mean Starmer will have pre existing legislation when he assumes power, that he will be reluctant to change. He will have 1001 more pressing priorities, and just like the Tories never returned to the GRA 2003 and EA 2010, I can't see Starmer wanting the hornets nest of reopening a Sunak conversion ban.

So, the best we can hope for is that Sunak gets this mainly right, and hands a competent law to Labour that will stand.

The battle needs to be now, to make sure Sunak gets this right, or at least doesn't get this badly wrong.

How feisty are ladies of MN feeling, to ensure Sunak is under no illusions this is the most critical legislation he'll work on ahead of the GE?

I don’t imagine Sunak intends to create any legislation. This is probably just more bullshit to try to look like the government is not utterly dysfunctional.