Can UK Government Reject Gender?

Why gender identity cannot be included in any ban on conversion therapy.

On 5th December 2018 a group of parents met to establish peer support for families with a child who thinks they are transgender. This group, Our Duty, grew, other parent support groups based in UK, the Bayswater Support Group and the Gender Dysphoria Support Network, emerged which can trace their origins back to that meeting.

There is, therefore, without doubt a clear demand for help and support for families with a gender incongruent child, one which is not being met by the Government. Instead, the government is seeking to enact legislation in the proposed bill to ban conversion therapy that could stop families receiving this sort of help.

When a child tells their parent that they are transgender, the parent has two main options.

The first is to take the child’s declaration at face value, to follow Government advice (promoted via the NHS and the Department of Education), to enlist the support of gender affirming lobbyists such as Mermaids, GIRES, Allsorts Youth etc. and convert their child from a healthy young person into an imitation of the opposite sex, reliant on medication for the rest of their life and victim of unnecessary surgery to sexual organs. Their child could become infertile.

Why is this the Government’s position?

The second is to follow their gut instinct. Any rational loving parent would not wish to see such horrific harm befall their child. Parents will find out that sex is binary and immutable, that opposite sex imitation medicine is ill advised and harmful, that detransition is a real phenomenon and that regret is common. These parents discover that the organs of the state have been ‘captured’ to the extent that their concerns are dismissed as ‘transphobic bigotry’. The truth is that being transgender is, for the adolescent cohort, just a feeling, a deeply embedded belief. A social craze.

Parents seeking support do so to know that they are not alone, to know that despite the crazed utterances of the devout at the Despatch Box, men who claim to be women remain men – regardless of what procedures they have had inflicted upon them. We know our little girls remain our daughters, they grow into women with low voices, five-o-clock shadows and lost breasts; corrupted by the state.

Once, our children might have thought that they didn’t look right, not enough people told them they were fine as they were.

It is these practices that the government should be legislating to halt. Opposite Sex Imitation Medicine is a group of elective and cosmetic procedures which should only be undertaken by sufficiently mature adults who are of sound enough mind to give truly informed consent (is that even possible?) and can finance it themselves. There is absolutely no clinical justification for these procedures whatsoever.

If we could find a way, a magic bullet, a twelve-step programme, anything, to help our children reject their transgender ‘gender identities’ and reconnect with the reality of their sex, then we would employ it without hesitation. It defies all reason that any government would wish to hinder our mission, let alone seek to outlaw it.

We cannot have a law designed to stop parents doing the right thing by their child; and there is a genuine risk that any bill to ban conversion therapy would outlaw our parents and our work to support them.

Sadly, there is no known talking therapy proven to help someone reject a transgender identity. However, should such a therapy be discovered, I would wish to employ it and promote it, and teach it, and spread it so the whole world might benefit from an end to the misery of ROGD.

In reality, we have to play a waiting game, we wait for the penny to drop. This wait is not helped by the prevailing narrative in the NHS, in schools, in the media, being that transgenderism is somehow wholesome and normal and to be protected and celebrated.

It really is none of these things.

The proposal to include ‘gender identity’ in a bill to prohibit conversion therapy is as misguided an initiative as it is possible to imagine.

How did we get here?

We must first understand that there are different cohorts of people claiming an incongruent gender identity. We have pre-pubescent children, who are most likely victims of Munchausen’s by Proxy. Then we have the adolescent cohort – sufferers of so-called Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria – this is the cohort which we are striving to protect. Then there are homosexual transsexuals, mainly gay men who enjoy female role play, and historically have never claimed to be the opposite sex. And then we have the autogynephiles. Men who choose an incongruent gender identity instead of a Harley Davidson in midlife crisis. These men have wealth and power. In addition, they claim to be the opposite sex. In making such an outrageous and easily dismissible claim, they then require ‘validation’. Another cohort consists of those who do not fit neatly into any of the previous categories, adults who have convinced themselves that they are transgender to alleviate inner turmoil; maybe homophobia, maybe, sadly, just being the wrong sex for the one they truly love.

Those who seek the approval of others that they are indeed the opposite sex and must be treated as such have made enormous inroads reshaping public policy. It was a massive political mistake to accede to their demands.

The idea that gender can be equivalent to, but opposite from, sex, should never have been entertained. And yet now, the momentum behind the gender ideology movement is such that it has the backing of the United Nations and Canada is the latest state to have passed a law which supports it. The impression we are left with is that nobody in power has had the time or inclination to take a long hard look at the facts.

Any embedding of gender ideology in any law anywhere gives credence to the idea that one can be medically transgender. Our children look at such laws as giving legitimacy to their incongruent gender identities. This veneer of respectability deprives our children of the truth that could help them reject their transgender ideation. The truth that they are not and can never become the opposite sex. The truth that employing the word gender to fudge the issue is a deliberate ploy by those desperate for validation. The mothers with Munchausens and the fathers with wigs.

Obviously, gender identity, cannot be included in any bill to ban conversion therapy. Nobody needs a gender identity and enshrining the notion in law would open the floodgates to even more unnecessary, egregious, and risible legislation.

In recognising that the word gender has already been used to obfuscate the reality of sex in law (see s.9 of the Gender Recognition Act), then a better use of parliamentary time would be to legislate against the word.

Gender need not appear anywhere in statute – it creates grey areas which will only be resolved by costly and lengthy litigation.

Government must legislate to expunge the word gender from all statute and bar its return.

This would result in repeal of the Gender Recognition Act, a dropping of ‘gender reassignment’ as a protected characteristic in the Equality Act (already being used as Self-ID by the back door), and a Conversion Therapy Bill which protects homosexuals but does not stop parents from being the best parents they can be.