Britain’s next moral panic
Half a century after abandoning state-backed “treatments” for homosexuality, Britain risks replacing one coercive system with another
There was a time when doctors knew best. When gay men were chemically castrated with drugs to suppress their testosterone and lesbians were subjected to psychological torture in British psychiatric hospitals. Today, we flatter ourselves that we know better, that in Keir Starmer’s “stronger, fairer” Britain we have learned from such cruel mistakes. To this end, the King’s Speech confirmed that Labour intends to press ahead with its manifesto pledge to ban conversion therapy.
Britain is, by historical and global standards, an extraordinarily tolerant place for lesbians and gay men. Outside a few fundamentalist nutbags, hardly anyone cares who you sleep with or live alongside. When the government commissioned an investigation into the prevalence of conversion therapies the data were so sparse the researchers had to look to the US. Yet activist groups are desperate to get a conversion therapy ban onto the statute, and they are determined to make sure it is ‘trans inclusive.’
Today, effeminate boys who will probably grow up to be gay, and tomboy girls who will in all likelihood become lesbian, are at risk
Today, effeminate boys who will probably grow up to be gay, and tomboy girls who will in all likelihood become lesbian, are at risk. An army of activists, influencers and middle-aged transvestites are online and in classrooms, eager to guide them towards a lifetime of medicalisation. Data from the now-closed NHS Gender Identity Services make this abundantly clear: 89 per cent of girls referred, and 81 per cent of boys, said they were same-sex attracted. Questioning them about why they believed themselves to be trans, rather than affirming them, would have saved many from medicalisation and potential sterilisation.
Michael Kerr knows this firsthand. A young gay man who, while struggling with his sexuality and trauma following sexual assault, became convinced that he was, in some existential sense, female. He was affirmed in his delusion by the trans-inclusive community around him and given puberty blockers then oestrogen by clinicians at the Sandyford clinic in Glasgow. He has since detransitioned and is angry that professionals didn’t ask why he believed himself to be trans, or what the root cause of his discomfort might be.
He fears the legislation will further entrench an affirmation-only culture around gender identity: “It will leave young, confused LGB people vulnerable to being transitioned when they may simply be LGB. Affirmation is the government’s own sanctioned conversion therapy, and stopping anyone from questioning these thoughts has led to a rise in detransitioners in the UK.”
Should the bill go through, simply asking questions about an individual’s belief that they are trans could be illegal. Though whether it will progress is uncertain; the point, so far as activists are concerned, is forging a link in the public mind and law between sexual orientation and gender identity. But anyone willing to follow the logic of trans activism to its conclusion cannot fail to see that it is fundamentally antagonistic to sexual orientation itself. The claim that a man can have a female body, or vice versa, collapses the very category of sex on which homosexuality depends.
That Britain is pursuing a conversion therapy ban half a century after such practices disappeared from state medicine, and at a time of unprecedented tolerance, suggests the legislation serves another purpose.
As the charity LGB Alliance notes, there is already a robust legal framework in place to deal with assault, coercion, harassment, abuse and safeguarding failures: “The question Parliament must answer is why new legislation is needed when existing laws already protect people from abusive conduct,” says its CEO Kate Barker.
“Our concern is that this legislation is increasingly being used to pursue a more nefarious objective — creating an affirmation-only framework in which lawful therapeutic exploration is effectively shut down.”
Moves have also been afoot across the continent. Yesterday the European Commission announced that while “conversion therapy” would not itself be criminalised at EU level, member states would be encouraged to introduce their own bans. Opposition is often characterised as coming solely from religious or conservative groups, but increasingly feminists, lesbian and gay rights groups, parent organisations, and a growing number of clinicians and therapists are raising concerns about the unintended consequences of banning conversion therapy.
History does not repeat itself neatly. The doctors who once strapped electrodes to gay men and pumped them full of hormones believed they were acting compassionately, too. Every age congratulates itself on its enlightenment while finding new ways to punish people for failing to conform. The danger today is not that young lesbians and gay men will be told they are sick, but that they will be told they were born in the wrong body, and that anyone urging caution is not only a bigot, but potentially, should the bill go through, a criminal. Half a century after Britain abandoned state-backed conversion therapy, we risk replacing it with a new orthodoxy every bit as coercive and pseudoscientific.
