Anyone who remembers 'awkward' adolescence should be alarmed by Greens' push for 'conversion therapy' bill
SNP ministers must be less catastrophically stupid on this issue than they were on gender self-identification
I’ve lost count of the number of times people have said to me they’re fed up with the gender wars. “How is this still happening?” is a repeated refrain.
I commiserate. Even those intimately involved in the clash between material reality and gender ideology sometimes wish they could switch off entirely, secure in the knowledge women – in the UK anyway – have now firmly won the legal arguments.
Of course, exhausting people into submission is just one tactic used by genderist lobbyists.
It’s precisely why the ideology got as far as it has in upending social norms.
Losing the legal arguments, following the Supreme Court’s ruling in favour of For Women Scotland last April, hasn’t stopped genderists continuing to ride roughshod over women’s boundaries, or reacting to perfectly ordinary views about women being females as some kind of heresy.
Globally, the push for ‘queering’ reality continues. Scotland, often referred to as ‘the Canada of the UK’ (this is not a favourable comparison) has been ground zero for much of the UK battle.
Self-ID laws, and subsequent bans on ‘conversion therapy’, are two of the most common ways gender ideology has successfully captured parliaments in countless countries this past 15 years.
Self-ID is defeated in the UK. But, it was wearily predictable the emboldened Scottish Greens - a party now as similar to the one led by former MSP Robin Harper as an ashtray is to a fruit bowl - would chance their arm to bring it in via an alternative route.
Newly-elected MSP Q Manivannan brought the motion last week; a far-reaching policy proposal to outlaw conversion therapy “in all settings.”
Don’t be fooled into thinking this motion has anything to do with outlawing torturous practices aimed at changing someone’s sexual orientation. As ever, this is about everything after the ‘B’ of the activist grouping of ‘LGBTQIA+’, in itself a thoroughly contested, incoherent initialism.
When most people hear the words ‘conversion therapy,’ they think of torture chambers, electric shocks, and beatings. Though already illegal in Scotland, this is what activists want you to think when they say conversion therapy is ‘legal in Scotland.’
It’s not. In practice, what is legal - and would be outlawed under the Greens proposal - would be any discussion with a young person who is struggling – as so many are – with their sexed bodies, gender stereotypes, and the bombardment of confusing messages about ‘gender identity’ in our culture.
‘Awkward’ teenage years
Do you remember your ‘awkward phase’ as a young teenager? We all go through it. It’s that tumultuous period where girlhood or boyhood starts to end, not overnight, but via a series of changes that can feel alarming. As well as physical changes, you start to experience sexual attraction. You’re a hormone bomb of sometimes uncontrollable emotions.
That’s always been difficult. Now add in social media. Add in the pressure to turn yourself into an online ‘brand’, with a set-in-stone identity, broadcast to the world, with an intense awareness of your peers ‘content’ too.
As 27-year-old author Freya India describes in her fantastic and horrifying debut book GIRLS, since 2010, this is the culture adults have made for our young people. And we wonder why there’s a mental health crisis?
Though she’s very forgiving, India makes the salient point that adults had no good advice for her generation, who struggled to manage identity-formation in an age of addictive online fora where competing ideas jostled for adoption; some cultish, some faddish, most harmful.
We adults hardly navigated it well ourselves. None of us would wish to re-do our teens in the age of Instagram. Yet, we handed kids smartphones and expected them to get on with it. I coped reasonably well with puberty in the mid-1990s, though my mother might remember it differently. Certainly, I was moody. Though disappointed to develop a figure the opposite of the ‘Justine Frischmann of Elastica’ I coveted, I dealt with it.
A best friend, however, received so much unwanted male attention she flattened her chest by wearing tight-fitting kids T-shirts. She also developed an eating disorder.
“I’d have been all over this,” she said recently, referencing the rise of non-binary identification among teenage girls. “They sound just like I did,” she added, about trans-identifying YouTube influencers, documenting their “gender journey”.
And they do. Body-hatred. Self-harming. Chest-binding. The distress is real and shouldn’t be downplayed. But is adopting a trans identity the answer?
As India documents, these identities are broadcast online, validated with clicks and likes – sometimes monetised - for an audience buying into that branded ‘you.’ As we all know, young people then imitate their idols.
Bid to outlaw counsellors
What to do? The Scottish Greens would have us ‘validate’ all trans-identifying teens unquestioningly. Ignore de-transitioners telling us how harmed they’ve been by online radicalisation via compelling, ‘inspiring’ trans influencers. They’d have us outlaw counsellors who explore the many possible causes of a young person’s ‘gender’ distress.
This includes being same-sex attracted, which approximately 90 per cent of trans-identifying young people who used the Gender Identity Development Service at the disgraced Tavistock centre have been. Conversion therapy? There it is writ large.
Getting through the ‘awkward phase’ – something borne out in every study conducted – is the best way to come to terms with one’s sex.
The damage has been enormous. We shouldn’t forget this because we’re fed up with the fractious gender wars. On no other issue is diligence so constantly necessary.
Instead of proscribing alternative routes than social and medical transition for young people understandably struggling, the SNP government must, frankly, be less catastrophically stupid than they were over the - thankfully defeated - ‘self-ID’ agenda of genderist lobbyists.
They must resist the Scottish Greens ongoing zealotry. Not doing so will prolong serious damage. There’s enough unaddressed harm to deal with already.
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