It's incredibly hard to believe that a government of any stripe would be brought down by a Bill that hasn't even reached the usual processes.
It is utterly gobsmacking!
Is it that at least some of the Tory rebels genuinely think, despite all the evidence, that trans people in the UK are routinely being “exorcised” by religious fundamentalists and subjected to old-style “aversion therapy” as practiced on homosexuals?
I can’t believe that the likes of Crispin Blunt actually think that is true.
Is there a Parliamentary Research Briefing full of the usual bullshit that they are taking as gospel?
On the other hand, I can believe that there has been pressure on MPs at constituency level. There has been a massive push by TRAs to get this Bill though, using “LGBT Groups” in loads of voluntary membership organisations to make statements and encourage all their members to write to their MPs about the horrors that trans people are being subjected to by “conversion therapy”.
With some that I have come across, the “LGBT Group” seems to have been set up purely in response to the Conversion Therapy Bill and that is the only thing they are interested in. When I say “they” it is not clear in some cases whether there is actually more than one person in the “Group” that is setting the agenda for the whole organisation.
It reminded me very much of Quentin van Meter’s explanation of how professional medical bodies in the USA, and then globally, came to publish official positions on “trans issues” that were written by a small committee of activists and then rubber-stamped.
The horrible irony that it is predominantly a handful of gay men (with the occasional lesbian) who are driving this revoltingly homophobic exercise.
There aren’t “GC activists” in the same way because there aren’t GC organisations already funded and staffed to the hilt and then getting paid extra income to run training courses in how to recruit “GC allies”, to influence and lobby, etc.
This whole fucking shit-show is astroturfed to the max.
The actual grassroots is made up of gender critical women’s rights/feminist organisations running on a shoe-string and the limited time and energy of individuals, mostly mums and grandmothers, doing what they can, when they can without the benefit of being trained-up as activists.
We have seen how the “MillionMarchForChildren” across Canada was misrepresented and demonised but at the very least it must have alerted politicians to the scale and diversity of opposition to what is going on in schools - and that all those marchers are also voters.
Maybe we need something like that to wake up MPs getting nervous about hanging on to their seats come the General Election?