Use the right word
But “conversion therapy” is the wrong label. Why does the BBC keep using it?
More than 100 organisations have pulled out of the UK’s first ever global LGBT+ conference over the government’s stance on conversion therapy.
The UK government had promised to ban conversion therapy but last week decided to exclude conversion therapy for transgender people in the ban.
Probably because it’s not conversion therapy. Sexual orientation is not the same as “gender identity.” The two are different. The most noticeable and consequential difference is that sexual orientation entails no surgical or pharmaceutical interventions at all. This discrepancy is why medical professionals need to be very cautious about agreeing with the self-diagnoses of adolescents who say they are trans: agreeing could be the first step to drugs or surgery or both that will cause irreversible changes to the teenage bodies that get them. Being lesbian or gay? Not so much. Literally speaking, not at all. No drugs, no surgery, no nothing, just live your life.
This is why the BBC really needs to report on the subject truthfully.
But who are the reporters on this story? Josh Parry, LGBT producer, and Lauren Moss, LGBT correspondent. Is it the LG part or the T part? Here again, the two need to be uncoupled. T isn’t the same as LG, and it isn’t much like it, either.
According to NHS England, conversion therapy tries to change someone’s sexual orientation or gender identity.
Then NHS England is wrong, because that’s apples and oranges.
But the LGBT+ Consortium, an umbrella body for LGBT+ community organisations, has issued a statement branding the government’s U-turn on conversion therapy “abhorrent”.
Eighty-two member organisations of the consortium have signed an open letter, which is written by LGBT+ charity and campaign group Stonewall, pulling out of the conference.
Stonewall is not the solution here, Stonewall is the problem. Mashing the T together with the LG is a mistake.
A Terrence Higgins Trust spokesperson said: “Trans rights are human rights – progress without or at the expense of trans people is not progress. We stand together and will not be divided.”
But it’s not at the expense of. Not rushing to provide surgeries or puberty blockers is not an injury to trans people and people who think they’re trans but change their minds. It’s first do no harm.
Boris Johnson has previously called the practice of conversion therapy “repulsive and abhorrent” and had promised plans to outlaw it on a number of separate occasions. However the plans to do so have since changed; meaning the legislation will mean conversion therapy to attempt to change people’s sexuality will be outlawed, but those practices carried out to try to change people’s gender identity will not.
But what if there’s no such thing as “people’s gender identity”? What if there’s just a spectrum of feelings about one’s sex or gender or both? What if some or most or even all such feelings are highly malleable and temporary? What if they’re social and cultural rather than physical? What if they’re not actually a good reason to make drastic irreversible changes to one’s body? What if it really is better to be slow and cautious rather than speedy and reckless?
Responding to the legislation on Friday, Nikki da Costa, a former director of legislative affairs at No 10, said elements of the law would have had “profound consequences for children struggling with gender dysphoria”.
She told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “Doctors, therapists and parents would be deterred from exploring with a child any feelings of what else may be going on for fear of being told they’re trying to change a child’s identity”, adding that it was “deeply concerning”.
And she’s not wrong. Even if she’s one of Boris Johnson’s very best friends, she’s not wrong.
It seems to me this am intended goal of the forced teaming of LGB with T. Conversion Therapy applied to LGB kids is horrific, and purposeful conflation with a “therapy first” approach is easy. Two completely different concepts are seen as the same process. And the T are outraged and everyone raises the hue and cry as allies (they/them.)
Yes I think it’s very intended but surely the BBC should be able to see that, or at least to see the difference between the two and word accordingly.
I think LGB and T can be seen as completely separate categories, I see them that way, but the blurred lines come in because T’s also have sexual orientations, and LGB’s also have ‘identities’ (for lack of a better term). If conversion therapy was only seen as an effort to reverse sexual orientation in homosexuals it would be pretty cut and dried, but since T’s have been piggybacking on LGB’s so long, it muddies the whole thing. Of course the effort to make that simple distinction causes the T’s to kick and scream like babies being dragged from their mothers.
And never mind that trans is being used as conversion therapy in some families; gay son? Would you rather have a straight daughter? Most of my life, gay men were referred to as “girly” men or even “girls”, so it seems a natural extension, right?
twiliter, I love that image of babies dragged from their mothers; it invokes the extremely juvenile tendencies of the T community.
The conflation and forced teaming would have been a lot harder if people hadn’t started using “gender” as a euphemism for “sex.” I’ve seen “gender” used in reports or stories about other species when they clearly mean “sex” but are too squeamish to write the word. Unless the writers in question actually knew the creatures’ preferred pronouns.
I used to think trans activists wanted safety and health for gender dysphoric, gender questioning etc. people, but their stance against counsel has forced me to revise this stance. Counsel is a method of alleviating distress, and while they support counsel in the general sense (to their credit, they will often be on the side that calls for greater mental health care, not less), time and time again they oppose its use for the specific case of GD.
This puzzled me at first, because surely the activists could sympathise with a person experiencing discomfort caused by their body being a particular sex? Counsel is one weapon in the arsenal to grant relief from this, so why must it be shunned in favour of transing and grand announcements of queerness? I can only speculate, and of course reasons will vary from person to person, but I wonder if there is some discomfort at the fact that counsel is a tool for psychological issues, and so their effectiveness against GD is reminder that GD is a psychological issue.
Whatever the reason, it sure isn’t an abundance of care for gender dysphoric people.
#4 iknklast
Not just in some families, but also in nations – those with muslim theocracies often have laws requiring homosexuals either be executed, or have sex change surgeries.
I heard a couple of trans-related bits of Radio 4 programs yesterday while I was working. Woman’s Hour had a bizarre few minutes where Emma Barnett was really insisting on getting answers from someone from the EHRC about the issue of “people” wanting to exclude other “people” from certain spaces based on their appearance, as if mean girls were going to be bullying women out of changing rooms because their eyebrows aren’t on fleek or something. Rather than, you know, women being alarmed at a man who looks like a man barging into the women’s facilities.
Then I think at mid-day there was a piece about conversion therapy with someone talking sensibly about the need to work out why a troubled young person thinks they are trans and if that’s really what the problem is.
And finally, an extremely sensible and polite Tory MP defined women as adult human females in the face of the mixture of incredulity and condescension I have come to expect from Evan Davis.
So, a mixed bag, but at least the GC views are being represented.
There’s something shocking about the way they seemingly cannot grasp the notion that this relentless flood of ‘affirmative care’ is, ITSELF, a form of conversion therapy.
Oh that’s a good point.
John @8 Right, so the trans lobby is for a ban on ‘conversion therapy’ for trans people, but only as it applies to detransitioners, not the initial transition… I was wondering yesterday how muddled that would be to try and legislate. Also, what about LGB’s who are troubled by their sexuality? Would they no longer be allowed to seek counseling, or would the counseling have some kind of limits set on it?
Funny how “watchful waiting” sounds a lot less sinister than “conversion therapy,” yet the backwards-world version of non-conversion therapy for dysphoric children is mutilation, lifelong medical dependency, and mental and physical debilitation. WAITING IS DEATH YOU BIGOTS! CUT OFF MY BITS RIGHT NOW!! There was a critique I saw online (twitter I think) of an article where the (male) writer downplayed or ignored the dangers of puberty blockers and compared puberty as “an approaching asteroid.”
I remember writing to my MP at the time highlighting this very distinction, but it did no good. She was “proud” of her work and ignored the conflation of two very different things into the term “conversion therapy.”
twiliter @ 10
I don’t think that’s an accurate way of phrasing it. They believe that a person who “is”¹ trans says he or she “is” trans, and should not be dissuaded from that view, no matter what the consequences. This is kinda sorta similar to someone saying “I’m gay” and no attempt is made to dissuade that person from that view, including even broaching the topic that the person might change his or her mind.
But that’s where the similarity ends. Some who is gay and changes his or her mind later on just changes potential partners and perhaps some social situations, not much else. Someone who claims to be trans is setting up for severe medical interventions. Even the social changes are significant, if pronouns are demanded and access to the resources of the opposite sex are demanded. Imagine a student winning a girl’s athletic trophy or essay contest and then deciding that, no, he’s still a boy after all.
But of course the boy will never actually be a girl, he will at most be a boy who is altered to resemble a girl and who pretends to be a girl.
There are medical interventions that people have tried with the aim of changing someone from being gay. At the least, the medical interventions to turn a gay boy into a straight “trans girl” should be considered similar.
Re ” WAITING IS DEATH YOU BIGOTS! CUT OFF MY BITS RIGHT NOW!!”: There are also cases where someone suspects maybe possibly they might “be” trans, and that’s it, they ARE trans, let’s start them on hormones or hormone blockers and schedule surgery ASAP, while their own inclination is to wait and see.
¹ Scare quotes because I don’t think there is a good coherent definition of “trans”.
Sack, I think it’s a terrible way of putting it. Let’s look at it this way though, if a person *is* trans, how did they get that way? Surely it was some process or other, possibly only in their minds, but still. A true ‘transition’ or ‘conversion’ to the opposite sex is not possible, so it’s all pissing in the wind anyway… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
@13 I meant my way of phrasing is terrible, I agree, not yours. I have been trying to aim at clarification when I communicate about these things, but the trans cult’s rampant illiteracy is not easy to navigate. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯