Deemed to be an attempt
The Scottish government is on a collision course with the courts again as it prepares legislation criminalising conversion therapy, according to a KC.
But what are they defining as conversion therapy? Oh, only almost everything.
Double silk Aidan O’Neill KC has warned that the proposals would be outside the legislative competence of the Scottish Parliament.
The SNP-Green alliance is considering plans to outlaw any activity – including parental chats, prayer and preaching – deemed to be an attempt to change a person’s sexuality or gender identity.
Just for a start, they shouldn’t put sexuality and “gender identity” in the same law. The two are not comparable. Sexual orientation has nothing at all to do with mutilating the body, while “gender identity” has way too much to do with it. Sexual orientation doesn’t intrude on anyone else’s rights; “gender identity” takes a blowtorch to women’s rights.
The rest of the pieces focuses on religion and its rights, so I’ll stop there.
They’re going to try to criminalize prayers? Good luck with that…
iknklast, it’s the parental talk bit that gets me. Sure, trying to take legal action on the basis of prayer will collide with the heavy legal protections surrounding freedom of belief, but it is hard to get more personal than a kid asking a parent about how to navigate the confusing world.
“…an attempt to change a person’s sexuality or gender identity.”
So, any parental talk in which the parent tells the child that they can be a boy or girl and yet like girl or boy things | that they can defy the expectations placed on girls and boys without ceasing to be one | that there are no required behaviour or habits or […] in order to be a boy of a girl …in short, any parental talk that is not a full-throated endorsement of the child declaring themselves a girl or boy (or other) based on which set of gendered expectations they best match.
I hope they never criminalise prayers anywhere, because as I grow older I find myself resorting to them more and more. My favourite is “God help us.”
Omar, I am fond of the prayer “Jesus Fucking Christ!”
Surely all the Mermaids and other TRA’s, not to mention gender treatment industry engage in exactly the same kind of ‘chat’? Or are we creating a social diode, in which the flow is allowed only one way?
Rob, yes, it is like a diode. In some of the bills in the US purporting to ban conversion therapy, the language spells that out explicitly. For example:
That’s from New Jersey’s revised statute in 2013. Most others after that followed suit, for example Hawaii’s wording:
Is that spelled out clearly enough? In Hawaii, it’s illegal to discourage a child from transitioning from one gender to another. It is specifically not illegal to encourage a child to transition from one gender to another.
It’s a one-way street. And it’s the law.
But do we even HAVE a “gender identity”??? Where is the evidence that this even exists?
We KNOW that same-sex attraction exists and it is not something that can be screamed/beaten/electro-shocked out of you. (And as Ophelia says above, acceptance of same-sex attraction doesn’t require mutilating surgeries or life-long medicalizations.)
We also KNOW that detransitioners exist. We also KNOW that many gay individuals have said that when they were children they wanted to be the opposite sex but they desisted upon reaching adolescence. We also KNOW that puberty-blocking drugs can cause osteoporosis. We also KNOW that the Gender Cultists have come up with the concept of “gender fluid” (so even if you embrace this bullshit it might be illegal to question whether your potentially “gender fluid” child should destroy their genitals, impair their cognitive development, weaken their bones, all to imitate the sex? gender??? they weren’t “assigned at birth …
[This happens every time I try to incorporate all the various strands of insanity of the gender cult into a statement. It becomes a word soup. The kind of thinking that only post-structuralist writers can do justice to.]
That’s the nice thing about idennniny from the point of view of its worshippers: it’s so hard to pin down. Nobody can say they don’t have it because nobody can even say wtf it is.