by Bev Jackson, spiked
Adults could be criminalised if they question a child who claims to have been ‘born in the wrong body’.
What does a governing political party do after a humiliating electoral defeat? Apparently, if you’re Labour, you try to placate your activist flank by reviving one of the most radioactive issues in the UK: a proposed ban on ‘conversion-therapy practices’.
‘Conversion therapy’ is a deceptive term. Many unfamiliar with this topic will hear it and think of gay people being subjected to outrageous practices like electric shocks or medicalisation. But the proposed bill has nothing to do with abuse like this, which has long been a criminal offence anyway. In fact, Labour’s proposal to ban conversion practices is not motivated by concern for gays or lesbians at all.
This is, at its core, about reducing the ability to question children who claim to be the opposite sex. Using language such as ‘bodily autonomy’, those pushing the bill frame any intervention – any failure to accept a child’s chosen ‘gender identity’ – as a violation of rights. Such phrases hark back to slogans that were popular in the 1970s and 1980s, when activists maintained that children’s rights included the right to sexual agency. We hardly need reminding that the people best served by those slogans were paedophiles.