Hadley Freeman skewers conversion bill

[Apollo441]

https://www.thetimes.com/article/20cad621-b24b-491b-9c74-6ef5a251815e?shareToken=145b6dd79c05ce9d6199839e1fde5bea

Hadley Freeman who's repeatedly defended Woody Allen and called the woman who accused him of child abuse a fabulist, right.

That Hadley Freeman.

Anyway, she's spectacularly inaccurate and knows it. This Bill closes a loophole in child abuse law which allows 'Christian' groups to cause kids lifelong cPTSD by offering fake cures for being LGBTQIA+.

And makes sure abusive parents can't call harming their queer kids a 'belief '. While reminding those kids that all child abuse is illegal and can never be excused.

It is already illegal to verbally terrorise your child and harm them.

Anyone opposing this, is part of the grifting, abusive 'cure' scene (i.e. rich Christian groups) or an abusive parent. Or a terf whose conscience about how they treat trans children is being pricked.

It does not criminalise parents for conversation. Police and social services will still only turn up when a child is being terrorised - and still likely do absolutely nothing.

They will still look stern, fill in forms and do absolutely f*ck-all to remove children from abusive homes in the vast majority of cases, because they prioritise keeping families together.

Terf parents on here are being reminded that treating their trans child like s*it for being trans is a form of abuse. And that they were meant to respect, protect and nurture the kids they rejected and now furiously post about for clicks. Good.

It’s a great article.

TPA continues to prove exactly why the Bill needs to be binned, because there are zealots lurking around every corner who would seek to criminalise normal parenting and discussions by therapists by hyperbolically calling them “abuse”.

TPA seems to be just itching to report someone under this Bill if it was passed.

Thanks for the share token, @Apollo441 . A great article by Hadley.

The bill would also criminalise parents who don't want gay children and who transes them straight so works both ways.

Great article. Thank you for sharing, OP.

It is already illegal to verbally terrorise your child and harm them.

Exactly.

The point here is that "verbally terrorise" and "harm" get redefined with new meanings.

To use the breast binding example:

A parent saying no to a breast binder, because it can cause permanent disfigurement is now "harming" their child. My daughter never asked for a breast binder, but she hated (still does) her breasts as they started to develop. I bought her lots of different sports bras until she found one she felt right in. I told her that the reason we were going for sports bras was because, until she had fully explored her understanding of gender identity, it was important that we didn't introduce anything that moved her away from the reality of being female. This would now be "verbal terrorism" or "abuse".

Or have I misunderstood your point @TransParentlyAnnoyed ?

Great piece by Hadley, as usual. This government seems determined to unleash the horrors of gender ideology on us, despite the fact that most people are opposed to it.

We can see how activists just deliver zealotry and absolutely hyped emotional exaggeration. It comes across as coming from a not mentally balanced place. Suggesting and insinuating that we should effectively cancel her is typical of the intolerance of zealots who will grasp at any straw to discredit anyone who criticises their ideology.

Hadley’s article is great, and she has always written good, thought provoking articles. I also appreciate her excellent work on anorexia. I’m interested in what she has to say.

“Queer kids”? Why are you insistent on sexualising children and using homophobic slurs whilst doing so?
The current laws that are in existence serve exactly the purpose to deal with the situation you’ve written. Just a quick reminder though, the proposed Bill in its current state could lead to parents complaining to police that their adult children who insist they’re now the opposite sex and that they’re now a daughter not a son is abusive. Same with partners of trans identifying adults who now want their partner to describe themselves as same sex attracted.
Transwidows are delighted about this avenue!

I think that you are well aware of the thread below- the reality of what puberty blockers do. How is this not child abuse that you write you are so worried about?

www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5597213-living-the-dream-puberty-blockers-at-11-estrogen-from-15-and-now-a-sex-worker-whose-penis-is-too-small-at-20

Thanks for the share token. Thanks to Hadley for exploring this harmful bill.

This bill is a sledgehammer trying to crack a sesame seed.

Child abuse is well legislated against - all types including emotional harm. If parents are using physical force, pyschological pressure or social isolation to harm their children then that can be dealt with within the current law/safeguarding practices that every person who deals with children are aware of (and most of the general public who also can report).

As well as being totally unnecessary this is intrusive to family life and values, to parents trying to support their children through the difficulties of modern life and social media pressure where their child can be trapped by ideological individuals who do not have the best interests of their child at heart.

I know it's been said many times but the conversion therapy that is really happening in plain sight, with the support of the government and law is gay conversion to trans ideology. This was clearly noted at the Tavistock that there were homophobic parents preferring to medicate and mutilate children than to have a gay child.

The world is upside down and we need people like Hadley and Helen (Joyce) as well as all the other people fighting this to be supported.

Weird take, but what you're suggesting is simply one reason why transing kids should be banned.

When the "gender affirming" model was out of control, homophobic parents were taking their kids to the Tavistock to get them transed "straight". Thankfully that can't happen so easily anymore because transing kids is getting more difficult thanks to the same terfs who oppose this stupid conversion bill. It does underline that therapy is super-important before any kind of transing is done, so if any parent does try that then it will be revealed during therapy before any puberty blockers are used or transing is done.

Your point is simply an argument to ban puberty blockers and stop transing kids.

TPA is indeed well aware of that thread and posted on it early on claiming that we are all obsessed with the genitals of children for sexual reasons. MN deleted that post. If anybody reports this post MN will no doubt be able to review their records and confirm that what I am saying is accurate.

As for the pitiful attempt to say that we should all ignore everything Hadley says because of one view she holds which many others disagree with, that is not how adults function, or at any rate it isn't how we used to function. Nobody agrees with everyone in the world on everything. We go issue by issue. Sometimes it happens that someone's view on one issue is so awful and so much at odds with our own view that it taints everything else. That should be very rare. Hadley's views on Woody Allen don't reach that threshold for me.

regrets you have about affirming the trans identity of your son/daughter are played out here in thread after thread after thread.

Just wanted to highlight these two paragraphs for any overseas readers who can't access the article:

"The bill aims to criminalise anyone who attempts to change a person's sexuality such as by threatening or abusing them. This is obviously reasonable — so reasonable, in fact, that it is already against the law. Grievous bodily harm, coercive control, child abuse, homophobic hate speech: these are already criminal acts. Which would make this bill seem rather redundant until you read on and you realise that the bill is, in fact, a bait and switch: it is not actually about protecting gay people from abuses, from which they are already protected. It is about banning anyone — parents, teachers, spouses, doctors, employers — from asking questions when a person, even a child, says they believe they were born in the wrong body and are transgender.

This is not an exaggeration: the bill defines conversion therapy as “any conduct carried out by a person towards an individual” which questions their “transgender identity”. Yes, “any conduct” — not abuse, not threats. Parents refusing to buy their daughter a breast binder. A therapist asking why a teenage boy is so certain he is a girl that he’s started buying untested hormones over the dark web. A wife expressing astonishment that her husband of 20 years claims to be a woman. These would all be criminalised by the bill. Phillipson wrote last month that parents who, for example, refuse to use their child’s preferred pronoun won’t be criminalised — but that is exactly what her bill allows for. Just the risk is chilling, making already difficult conversations a lot more so. The bill is so vague it makes no distinction between therapists and journalists. It also — tellingly — makes no distinction between children and adults, meaning your teenage daughter who says she wants to cut her healthy breasts off to become a boy should not be questioned any more than if she were an adult woman unrelated to you."

I thought puberty blockers are now blocked for children, no? That would make this line of complaint completely irrelevant.

The NHS is no longer prescribing puberty blockers to children to delay puberty for gender, i.e. psychological reasons. (Children experiencing extremely early puberty still get blockers for as short a time as possible.) Gender clinic child patients were given them in the past in the belief that it would give them time to think about their gender issues in a less time-pressured way. Some might have been expected after that pause to stop taking the blockers and go through puberty in the normal way. However, in practice children almost always progressed straight from blockers to cross-sex hormones, not least because their brains had not matured enough for them to be able to understand the consequences of what they were doing. Of course, they also had not had a chance to come to terms with having a body more like an adult's than a child's. (In the past, children and teenagers referred to gender clinics almost always came to terms with their sex and their sexed body by the time they were well on the way through puberty.)

However, the government is letting a trial go ahead so a few hundred more children will be getting them. Other children are obtaining them illegally by ordering them on the dark web or getting them posted by overseas suppliers. Given the known problems from prolonged use of these drugs and also from the use of cross-sex hormones, this is a massive failure from everyone involved.

I'm really disappointed that was Freeman's stance on Allen and Farrow. I hadn't been aware and had to look it up to confirm it's true.

That said because someone takes a position on something we disagree with, doesn't mean every single other thing they say is wrong on principle.

So, outside of the trial, not a problem.

The trial is time limited and not available to everyone who asks; this will only change if the trial provides evidence they are safe enough to use, so again not a problem that needs solving in this proposed legislation

(Safe enough because no substance is completely safe in the wrong quantities.)

Not just parents, any sibling over the age of ten could be criminalised too. Or children of adult ‘transitioners’. There is nothing on the bill to say only adults can be prosecuted

The trial cannot provide that evidence - it is too short and does not look at a range of variables that have been previously shown as where harms have occurred.

So it will end and then these drugs will no longer be in use: not a problem that needs solving.

Except over 200 children would have been harmed by a trial that cannot be used to prove anything.

There’s some potentially massive unintended consequences with the proposed bill, that I doubt it’s vociferous supporters, busy dreaming of ways they can weaponise it, haven’t considered. A glaring one is discussed on the most recent This Isn’t Working podcast, which relates to the section on corporate responsibility. Sounds great to the short sighted, but there’s a very real possibility that it’ll make trans people and their more obnoxious allies virtually unemployable.
No sensible company would want to risk potential trouble, especially as the proposed bill in its current form creates a clash between the recent single sex space legal clarification and the new bill. How do you balance, for instance, telling a trans employee they can’t use the opposite sex changing room as per the Equality Act clarification, with the same employee’s new ability to report their employer to the police because the exchange made them feel like it denied their gender identity?
HR nightmare. Best to shuffle them out in the next wave of redundancies or just not take them on the first place with a nice, bland, boilerplate rejection letter that provides no potential ammunition, or go with the awful new trend of just ghosting them altogether.
In light of recent studies showing CVs with declared pronouns are already more likely to be filed into the bin, it could be a big own goal for trans activists.

This legislation won't stop that - it's an irrelevant distraction.

This Bill is even more badly thought out and worded than the Assisted Dying Bill, luckily that was euthanized successfully.
Now onto this one.