The Times - UK - 04.12.2021

the times | Saturday December 4 2021 31

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Conversion therapy ban shouldn’t be rushed

Troubled girls will be the losers again if a law intended to end cruelty strays into the minefield of gender confusion

atrophy, probable infertility and

uterine problems that often end in

hysterectomy. Transition will be

necessary for some but any girl

embarking on this path should be

fully informed and utterly certain.

In government, those driving anti-

conversion policy are all men. Besides

Mike Freer there are Lord Herbert,

who will chair Safe To Be Me, and

Crispin Blunt MP, head of the LGBT

all-party parliamentary group, forced

by the parliamentary standards

commissioner to apologise for trying

to secretly influence government

policy on gender self-ID and

conversion therapy. Most influential

is Henry Newman, a No 10 adviser,

who as Nikki da Costa, herself a

former adviser, recently told The

Times, ensures Stonewall has the

PM’s ear. Their reluctance, even

refusal, to meet therapist and feminist

groups questions their empathy for

vulnerable women.

Rather they think of their key

address, Stonewall gong, being on

the “right side of history”. But that

magical line is shifting in Europe,

and even in the US, leading gender

surgeons including Dr Marci Bowers,

a trans woman, now say publicly

young people suffer under an

affirmation-only approach.

If a conversion therapy ban is

rushed through, its legacy won’t be a

conference ovation, but the damaged

bodies of more teenage girls.

old girls are not “questioning”: rather

they are categoric they are trans.

Will the gentlest unpicking of their

feelings be classed as conversion

therapy and thus criminalised?

Jayne Ozanne, a leading anti-

conversion campaigner, dismisses

them as “misguided and wrong”. She

says: “They don’t want trans people

to exist.” She believes “we should

trust our medical profession” and

thinks only treatment that has a

“predetermined purpose”, rather than

that which is open-minded, would be

banned. Yet therapists fear they could

still be sued, especially if a client

relationship breaks down.

The absence of rigorous gender

therapy has been condemned by a

growing number of detransitioners,

mainly women, including Keira Bell,

who brought a judicial review against

the Tavistock. Why, they ask, were

their mental health and family

problems briskly brushed aside in

favour of propelling them towards

irreversible hormones and double

mastectomies they now regret?

It is seldom acknowledged that

transitioning is more physically

dangerous for girls than boys. Not

only does breast-binding damage

growing tissue and cause breathing

problems, but testosterone’s effect on

the female body is far more

damaging than oestrogen for males.

A girl will have a permanently

deepened voice, facial hair, vaginal

trans. A responsible therapist would

first examine their mental health

history, tease out why they feel male,

create therapeutic space for

discussion. Left unmedicated, about

80 per cent of dysphoric adolescents

come to terms with their natal sex.

But therapists are already impeded

by their own professional bodies,

including the NHS, who have signed

a “memorandum of understanding”

(MOU) prohibiting therapy that

challenges a client’s avowed gender

identity. Rather, they must only

“affirm” their belief and help to

facilitate transition, via referral for

hormones and perhaps surgery. In

four years writing about this subject, I

have frequently been contacted by

desperate relatives seeking a therapist

for a troubled girl whose prior

problems are dismissed by clinicians

who care only about gender.

A group called Thoughtful

Therapists fears the government

conversion ban will enshrine this

MOU in law. Proposals state law

shouldn’t “override the independence

of clinicians to support those who

may be questioning their LGBT

status”. Yet often, distressed 13-year-

L

egacy is an underestimated
force in politics. Those in
power have one eye towards
history books and future TV
retrospectives: what law,
what piece of progress, can I claim as
mine? But that impulse can become
a bulldozer, flattening complexity,
squashing inconvenient facts and
contrary views.
Next Friday the government
consultation on banning conversion
therapy will end. It lasted just six
weeks, where normal practice is a
minimum of 12. Why the urgency? In
June, London will host the first global
LGBT conference entitled Safe To Be
Me. Its agenda should be packed,
given the Taliban’s resurgence and
nations such as Hungary and Poland
drafting vicious homophobic laws.
A large government team working
on the conference, led by Mike Freer,
the LGBT equality minister, hopes to
announce a legacy achievement. Cue
applause for a progressive, modern
Conservative Party that finally got a
ban on the statute book. The
consultation is “relatively quick”,

Freer says, because it addresses not

whether to ban, only how.

Freer is right: opposition to

conversion therapy is universal. That

young people were once tortured,

raped, drugged and subjected to

exorcism-like religious rites to make

them heterosexual seems not just

abhorrent but absurd. How could our

hardwired desires be changed?

Indeed, such practices in Britain are

now, thankfully, vanishingly rare

and, as the consultation states,

“physical violence in the name of

conversion therapy” is illegal already.

Yet the proposed ban applies to

both sexuality and the more

nebulous concept of gender identity.

This has led to grave concerns, not

from social conservatives but liberal,

compassionate therapists, some

LGBT themselves, who for a decade

have noted a drastic rise in young

female clients, typically same-sex

attracted, mostly with profound

mental problems such as depression,

anxiety, undiagnosed autism or self

harm. Many have suffered

homophobic bullying, some sexual

abuse. Now 75 per cent of referrals to

the Tavistock GIDS clinic are female,

a phenomenon reported worldwide.

A growing body of research on

these “rapid onset gender dysphoria”

cases suggests girls are influenced by

peer pressure and online forums to

attribute unhappiness with their

developing female bodies to being

Transitioning is more

physically dangerous

for girls than for boys

Janice

Turner

@victoriapeckham