In 2012, California was the first US state to ban ‘conversion therapy’ for minors, the better to stop the forcible brainwashing of gays and lesbians into fancying the opposite sex. Picture kidnappings, violent fundamentalist interventions, gruelling electric shock treatments and Clockwork Orange aversion therapy. But here’s the rub: most of this stuff was 1) already illegal and 2) not really happening. A solution in search of a problem, then.
Successive UK governments have also entertained a conversion therapy ban. Yet among 108,000 respondents to a governmental LGBT survey in 2018, just 5 per cent claimed to have been ‘offered’ such therapy, while only 2 per cent said they’d undergone it. Even there, the survey didn’t define what constituted ‘conversion therapy’. Did it include an earnest dinner table talk with Dad or a hectoring preacher on Speaker’s Corner threatening eternal damnation? Or being shanghaied, zip-tied to a gurney and zapped with lockjaw-inducing high voltage while being shown racy gay porn? Respondents provided no details.
When a 13-year-old girl announces that she’s really a boy, talk therapy should be the first line of defence
The Conservative government commissioned Coventry University to explore the prevalence of this practice and the subsequent report noted: ‘Aversive techniques were not reported by interviewees.’ Believe it or not, it was the NHS that offered electric shock aversion therapy to ‘cure’ homosexuals between 1965 and 1973.
Revived by Labour a year ago but not yet finalised, a UK conversion therapy ban is not merely a dated, belated exercise in brown-nosing the alphabet people. Its probable prohibition of attempting to change someone’s ‘gender identity’ makes this issue pressing in the present.
The state of Colorado forbids mental health counselling that attempts to influence the sexual orientation or ‘gender identity’ of minors. Last week, the US Supreme Court ruled that the ban violates a therapist’s freedom of speech. The case was brought by a Christian counsellor who offers only talk therapy – the only electricity involved goes to the lamp – sometimes to help reconcile younger patients to their sex (which they were not only born as, but are chromosomally stuck with for life).
The Supremes’ majority opinion asserts that the law ‘censors speech based on viewpoint. Colorado may regard its policy as essential to public health and safety. Certainly, censorious governments throughout history have believed the same. But the First Amendment stands as a shield against any effort to enforce orthodoxy in thought or speech in this country.’
Capable of affecting similar conversion therapy bans in 21 other states, the decision was 8-1, endorsed by two liberal Democratic appointees. (Baffled by the definition of the word ‘woman’, the single dissenting justice is an idiot.) The majority sensibly characterised talk therapy – speech – as speech, not merely professional ‘conduct’. They also objected to the asymmetry of a law that prohibits questioning patients’ conviction that they were supposedly born in the wrong body, but doesn’t apply to therapists who eagerly ‘affirm’ the delusion. This constitutes state discrimination based on viewpoint – aka wokey authoritarianism.
Trans activists are keen to use conversion therapy bans to silence sceptics of their ideology and to threaten counsellors who haven’t drunk enough Kool-Aid with prison time. Yet left alone to get used to the idea that they are male or female, roughly 80 per cent of ‘dysphoric’ children outgrow discomfort with their sex without medical intervention. Thus when a 13-year-old girl announces that she’s really a boy, talk therapy should be the first line of defence.
We don’t want to criminalise gentle prodding to think more deeply: ‘What is it about being a girl that you so dislike? What do you think will be different about your life if people treat you like a boy? Explain to me exactly what you mean by “feeling like” a boy. Why do you think a girl can’t feel like that? If you have your breasts cut off, you do realise that you can’t just have them put back, don’t you? Do you by any chance have problems with your schoolmates or your parents that we might talk about – problems unrelated to your sex – before you do anything drastic?’ If my daughter were launching down a path towards lifetime infertility and sexual dysfunction, I wouldn’t want a therapist who asked her such questions arrested.
Conversion therapy for same-sex attraction has been widely discredited as both ineffective and harmful. But the conversion therapy that constitutes the real contemporary quackery is the industry of ‘gender transition’ itself. The elaborate, expensive protocol is certainly ineffective; no one can change sex, and offering the underaged the illusion of doing so is fraudulent. The process of aping the opposite sex through puberty blockers, wrong-sex hormones and ofttimes surgery is no neutral lifestyle choice, either, but invites no end of harms: osteoporosis; raised risks of cancer, stroke and cardiovascular disease; stunted stature; genital atrophy; inability to orgasm; chronic pain; the grotesquerie of surgery gone wrong… A comprehensive list is far longer.
In due course, we’re likely to recognise this fetishisation of fake sex change as a medical scandal of historic proportions. For there’s one form of a conversion therapy ban I’d support. Make it illegal to pretend to ‘transition’ minors who may be disturbed mentally but have nothing physically wrong with them. Prohibit scientifically illiterate teachers and counsellors from inculcating children with the idea that sex is anything other than permanent and that there are any more sexes than two. This issue tends to focus on minors, but if it were up to me I’d also ban all cosmetic surgeries on adults that result in loss of function, which would preclude elective mastectomies and vaginoplasties. I’d stop as well the issuance of cosmetic prescriptions for cross-sex hormones to adults in demonstrably damaging dosages. Let’s encourage the ‘dysphoric’ to go back to playing dress-up – harmless, painless, reversible fun.
My version of a conversion therapy ban remains a distant prospect. In the absence of the politically infeasible, then, let’s at least nix a law that would get anyone who urges caution – you know, ‘Sweetie? I know that five of your friends have also just decided they’re “trans”, but doesn’t that strike you as a wee bit suspicious?’ – thrown in jail.
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