Another elderly gentleman gets in a muddle:
Boris Johnson’s LGBT adviser is dismayed at the shelving of a ban on transgender conversion therapy and has called for a royal commission to recommend policies free from political interference.
Last week the prime minister U-turned on a promise to outlaw conversion therapy. After a backlash, he reinstated the policy, but only for lesbian, gay and bisexual people — not trans.
There have been concerns that banning conversion therapy for people questioning their gender identity could inadvertently criminalise counselling.
Concerns? Inadvertently? That's the whole point of it! Criminalising counselling - or indeed any attempt to talk about gender dysphoria beyond immediate and unconditional support for the full medical transition - is precisely what the efforts by Stonewall and other campaigning trans groups are all about. But yet again we see an elderly man - pace Rowan Williams and Philip Pullman - reach for the smelling salts as soon as they hear the words "conversion therapy", without making any effort to inquire further.
However, Lord Herbert of South Downs, the prime minister’s special envoy on gay rights, warned ministers against conflating helping people with “reactionary ideology that can do irreparable harm”.
One assumes he means by "reactionary ideology" here the entirely sensible requirements that young people have a chance to discuss transition - many will be gay, after all - before taking the puberty blockers. In other words he's swallowed the Stonewall doctrine, even though he goes on to criticise them:
Speaking for the first time since the controversy, he also criticised the LGBT lobby’s reaction to Johnson’s decision to exclude trans people. Herbert, 59, singled out the charity Stonewall for stoking the anger, which resulted in the cancellation of the UK’s first international conference on LGBT rights. The Safe to Be Me conference in June would have brought together politicians, businesses, activists and faith leaders to discuss how to advance LGBT rights globally. Herbert accused Stonewall of orchestrating a boycott.
While the controversy had been “damaging to the government and to the UK’s global reputation”, Herbert said it was also an “act of self-harm” by the boycotters. “Having orchestrated the boycott which brought the event down, Stonewall now claims to be ‘truly sad that the government does not feel in a position to run the UK’s first global LGBT+ conference’, adding that this shows a lack of concern for equal rights.
But then:
However, he also urged ministers not to make the mistake of conflating discussions around gender dysphoria with deliberate attempts to suppress someone’s identity. “Helping people come to terms with who they are is not the same as setting out to take them in one direction or the other — that is not therapy, it is ideology, and it can do irreparable harm,” he said.
Which , as I read it, is straight out of the Stonewall playbook with the talk of "suppressing someone's identity". It is of course the suppression of someone's gay identity by pushing them towards transing that is the real ideological move here. Maybe that's what he means - but I rather doubt it.
A comment from Bev Jackson, of the gender-critical LGB Alliance:
Lord Herbert, the prime minister’s special envoy on LGBT (not “gay”) rights, warns ministers against “conflating helping people with ‘reactionary ideology that can do irreparable harm’.” But this is what is happening to gay and lesbian teens right now. If Lord Herbert had not refused to talk to LGB Alliance, which offered an international network of experts to help plan the conference, he would have understood the problems. He would also have heeded the warnings in the interim report from the Cass Review. Instead, he ensured that the gatekeepers to the conference planning were all adherents to the same narrow belief. Which led to the fiasco of those who were supposed to be chairing the extraordinarily expensive conference boycotting it. How does that help LGB people worldwide?
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