TRIGGERnometry - The New Gay Conversion Therapy - Andrew Doyle

Episode Date: March 29, 2024

The ignorance of politicians is putting gay people at risk. Andrew Doyle on the “conversion therapy” debate. Adapted from Andrew’s Substack. This and other articles will be made available there first. https://andrewdoyle.substack.com/ Join our exclusive TRIGGERnometry community on Locals! https://triggernometry.locals.com/ OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here:  Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Buy Merch Here: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Join the Mailing List: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/#mailing... Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media:  @triggerpod Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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One of the more maddening aspects of the culture war is that language has been rendered meaningless. Most of the disputes are destined to remain unresolved because there are a few shared definitions among competing parties. We are left with armies of straw men thrashing about on an imaginary battlefield, while most of us look on in a state of bewilderment. The recent debates over conversion therapy are a case in point. At a Labour Party event in Parliament on the 29th January, Kirstama pledged to implement a full, trans-inclusive ban on all forms of conversion therapy. Now he's likely to find some support among the population. A you-gov poll last year revealed that 65% of voters

believe that gay conversion therapy ought to be banned and 62% feel the same about trans conversion therapy. And this would suggest that most people do not recognize the difference between the two. A natural consequence of a climate in which discussion of sensitive issues is routinely stymied by both the brow beaters and the browbeaters. Yet when we wade beyond the messy definitional quagmires, we find that the phrase conversion therapy is only coherent when applied to sexual orientation rather than gender identity. The consequence of this semantic ambiguity means that most people do not understand that in order to oppose gay conversion therapy, one must be opposed to a ban on trans conversion therapy. Now this is going to require some explanation.

When we hear the phrase conversion therapy, most of our minds leap to a variety of horrific. practices. In America, Christian fundamentalists have established programs to address the problem of homosexuality. This was satirized in an episode of South Park, where Butter's Stotch is mistakenly assumed to be gay by his parents and dispatched to Camp New Grace, whose slogan is, pray the gay away. At one point, the boys attend a presentation by Pastor Phillips, who tells them that he used to have unclean urges, but was healed through the power of prayer, all the while prancing around like Nathan Lane in the birdcage. The episode doesn't shy away from the darker side of these kinds of retreats.

Suicides are shown to be common among the boys, all of which the staff are happy to shrug off. Now one might argue that praying the gay away is at least a step forward from the brain surgery, castration and electric shock treatment favoured by the scientific practitioners of the 20th century. One thinks of the American psychiatrist Dr. Robert Galbraith Heath, whose team implanted electrodes into the brains of patients, which were then stimulated while the victims were shown heterosexual pornography. Heath claimed to have successfully converted a gay man and wrote a paper with his colleague Charles E. Mohn called septal stimulation for the initiation of heterosexual behaviour in a homosexual male. This was happening in England too. In 2014, I performed in a show called Outings at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, in which verbatimates of coming.

coming out stories were dramatized. One of the scenes that had been submitted was by a Liverpoolian man who as a teenager in the 1960s was referred to doctors to an institution where he was forced to look at pictures of naked men while drinking to excess and being injected with substances that caused him to vomit. These medical practitioners also applied electrodes to his penis. Needless to say, it didn't work. Another form of conversion therapy is the corrective rape of lesbians to cure them of of homosexual tendencies. I recall one chilling account of a victim, Simpew Tandeca, who was interviewed by the New York Times in 2013,

as part of a piece about the epidemic of corrective rape in South Africa. A tomboy in youth and a lesbian in adult life, Simpewe was raped on three occasions by an uncle, who then paid a friend to rape her multiple times and take her as a wife. She was left pregnant by this man and HIV positive from her uncle. Her mother and grandmother encouraged her to keep it a secret. saying that it was a family matter and not to be spoken of again.

Now such practices are, of course, already illegal in the UK. So why are there so many calls for bans on conversion therapy, even from members of the Conservative Party? In the past, we've seen Labour politicians holding placards calling for this trans-inclusive ban, and now Stama has confirmed that this is the official Labour position, but what precisely does that mean? In her book Time to Think,

Hannah Barnes revealed that between 80 to 90% of adolescents who were referred to the Tavistock pediatric gender clinic were same-sex attracted. We have known for a long time that there is a strong correlation between gender non-conformity in youth and being gay in adult life. Members of staff at the Tavistock joked that soon there would be no gay people left. And whistleblowers revealed that homophobia was endemic. In other words, children who are likely to grow up gay are being fixed by medical practitioners

to better conform with stereotypical heterosexual paradigms. Starmes proposed trans-inclusive ban on conversion therapy is therefore based on a misunderstanding. It conflates the state-sanctioned torture of gay people in the past with the important work of paediatricians that support children who are struggling with their feelings. Moreover, Barnes' research shows that the Tabastock Clinic ignored evidence that 97.5% of children seeking sex changes had altered. depression or other problems that might have explained their unhappiness. With only 2% of the country's children suffering from an autistic spectrum disorder,

why did 35% of referrals to the Tavostock fit into this category? In almost all instances, children who are prescribed puberty blockers go on to cross-sex hormones, which in some cases leads to irreversible surgery. We're dealing overwhelmingly here with gay and autistic children, fast-tracked onto a pathway to sterilisation. The Scottish Government has already charged down this regressive path via its consultation on banning conversion practices. As Dennis Kavanaugh has written, it seeks to introduce a new criminal offence which imposes liability for practices that seek to change or suppress a person's sexuality or gender identity.

This risks the criminalisation of medical practitioners who do not automatically take the gender affirmative approach and could see parents refer to social services if they fail to support the social transitioning of the children, that is, the practice of allowing children to dress as the opposite sex and be referred to by different names and pronouns. Social transitioning has already been criticised as not a neutral act in the Interim Cast Report, whose conclusions led to the decision to close the Tavistock, and could risk exacerbating feelings of gender dysphoria that in most cases will just naturally resolve themselves. The gender affirmative approach favoured by clinics across the Western world has already been widely debunked. Most notably in an open letter last July to the Wall Street Journal by 21 leading experts in paediatric gender treatment.

They were writing to oppose the view that gender affirming care is best for children and pointed out that the common claim that puberty blockers reduced the risk of suicide is simply not backed up by the evidence. Unsurprisingly, this letter went largely unreported. And as for puberty blockers, well, the interim cast report found that there's a lack of secure evidence for their safety. Finland, Sweden and Norway have already implemented some restrictions, and in March of this year, the NHS announced that puberty blockers for children in the treatment of gender dysphoria would be banned. The risks of sterility, depression and lifelong regret are now clear. But the Scottish government, of course, is doubling down. And we are nowhere near banning these dangerous treatments throughout the rest of the Anglosphere.

But why not? Why are medical experts willing to experiment on the most vulnerable in society on the basis of intuition that flies in the face of the evidence? Studies show that in the vast majority of cases, feelings of gender dysphoria in youth are resolved by puberty. So why are so many blocking the cure? Thankfully, more and more people are waking up to the scale of this problem. Recently, there was a debate in the House of Lords in which many of these concerns were raised, and this debate was on the conversion therapy prohibition bill, being championed by the Liberal Democrats. Baroness Claire Fox was particularly strong on the point of gender identity

and how the proposed legislation fails to define it. Can I ask the noble Baroness Burt how she defines gender identity before she tried to embed it in UK law for the first time? Is that best a contested concept? I appreciate a precise, fixed definition might be tricky when this particular identity can cover 100, 300 genders, transgender, gender fluid, genderqueer, gender variant, gender less, non-binary. Were it not for the inherent austerity of the House of Lords,

she might well have added the identity category of gender fuck, defined on LGBTIQIA plus wiki as a gender identity and or gender expression where gendered expectations are deliberately played with to combine gender-specific signals. Make of that what you will. And also recently the Equalities Minister Kemmy Badenock wrote to the Commons Women and Equality Select Committee about her discussions with former clinicians at the Tabistock. And the conclusion, so-called gender affirmative care amounts to conversion therapy for gay kids. Crucially, she cited a survey of detransitioners, those who are pressurised into transitioning and later regret it, in which 23% of respondents put their experiences down to

homophobia. Badenock quoted a gender clinic in Germany. It must be understood that early hormone therapy may interfere with the patient's development as a homosexual. This may not be in the interests of patients who, as a result of hormone therapy, can no longer have the decisive experiences that enable them to establish a homosexual identity. It is profoundly disturbing that Starmes' Labour Party is now officially supporting gay conversion therapy in the form of a ban on trans-inclusive conversion therapy. And in spite of the likes of Badenock, this is also the official policy of the Tory Party. In other words, the promotion of gay conversion therapy has cross-party support from the likes of Alicia Kearns on the Tory side and Lloyd Russell Moyle of Labor. Kearns has even tabled an amendment to the criminal justice bill in the hope of criminalising doctors who don't automatically affirm children's claims that they are born in the wrong body.

A charitable interpretation is that politicians like Kearns, Russell Moyle and Stama simply do not understand the issues behind these dangerously anti-gay proposals. Homosexuality was removed from the World Health Organization's list of psychiatric disorders in 1993. And I'm pretty sure that our likely next Prime Minister doesn't sincerely believe that gay people require medical treatment. But if his policies are enacted, his good intentions will count for nothing. With all the information now freely available, ignorance is no longer an excuse. This video is available as an article on my substack, and this and other articles, other articles will be available there first, so make sure to head on over there and subscribe now. Some follow the noise. Bloomberg follows the money, whether it's the funds fueling AI or

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