Double standards at heart of sexuality debate

‘Conversion therapy’ raises hackles when offered to gay people, but it is fine if used in gender transition

‘Conversion therapy” is a phrase for psychological courses which purport to help people jettison their homosexuality. Gay rights groups want them banned. The Government says it would like to do so. Although I have always assumed – without knowing much about them – that such therapies are usually misguided or bogus, two notes of caution occur.

The first is a point of principle. It is one thing to disapprove of something, quite another to make it illegal. Many people, even nowadays, would prefer not to have homosexual feelings. Why should they not be entitled to seek escape? And if that is what they really want, why should others not be free to try to help them, whether for commercial, religious or friendly reasons? It would be oppressive if this were a criminal offence.

The second is that there is a big confusion here. LGBT activists who vehemently oppose the rights of those who wish to get rid of or suppress the inclinations with which they are born take an almost directly opposite attitude when speaking of those who wish to change their original sex.

In a culture like ours, which puts a premium on being “who you really are”, you might think that the sexual organs and identity you have at birth would be an even more important part of that personal reality than your sexual inclinations. Yet this is passionately denied by many supporters of “transitioning”. They advocate that, in your voyage of self-discovery, those organs should be replaced and your identity altered. Officialdom agrees, so the job can be done on the National Health. LGBT activists also welcome therapies which assist this transition: you could call them “conversion therapies”. Why are these evil in relation to homosexuality but virtuous in relation to “gender fluidity”?

Surely the commonsense view is to be somewhat sceptical, in both cases, about such therapies, but to permit them. The present Government is so terrified of displeasing the militant lobby that it seems to have lost its own power of independent judgment.

Boris Johnson, who is relentlessly briefed against these days, is accused of uttering an obscenity when he reportedly compared Mrs May’s proposed EU deal to “polishing a turd”. This is unfair. A turd is an unpleasant thing, but is no more a swear word than is a boil or a scab.

Besides, Boris’s image is distressingly apposite. It should gain wider currency. What we are being offered after the Chequers meeting is the Turd Way. Like Tony Blair’s original, differently spelt concept, it doesn’t really go anywhere.

My eldest godson, Felix, got married on Saturday afternoon in the riverside church in Wales in which he was baptised 30 years ago. The service was at 4pm, and a football match which began at 3pm threatened to overwhelm it. There had been high talk among some of Felix’s generation of slipping out in the middle, covertly studying mobiles, or even not coming.

As we walked towards the church, through the car park of the nearby pub, a shout from two girls listening to their car radio alerted us to the first goal. This helped calm the wedding guests down. Once we were all inside, the officiating clergyman skilfully avoided mentioning football, but simply urged people to turn their mobile phones off and “not to give in to temptation”.

I had been fearful of a World Cup-related sermon (“Jesus scores the winning goal, you know”), but in fact his words were admirably theological, and the service was beautiful, serious and happy. Come to think it, a 2-0 victory well describes the marriage of Felix and Harriet.

I was better placed than the rest of the congregation to concentrate, because the groom’s uncle, the great science writer Matt Ridley, had whispered to me, moments before the arrival of the bride, that England had got a second goal. How he knew this I cannot understand, since it was a full 10 minutes before the goal was actually scored. He is a very clever man.

Correspondents to the letters above this column have recently contributed much lore and learning to the question of Gareth Southgate’s waistcoat. I will add only that the problem of modern waistcoats is that they are too short, or the trousers are too low-slung. The point of trouserwaistcoat combination is to be neat and snug, secured by braces, and therefore unsuitable for this weather. Thus arrayed for the wedding inside that hot church, I nearly passed out.

I have noted before the way that invasive animals or plants attract a sort of transferred racism which society no longer attaches to people. The latest example is Asian hornets, which are said to be pillaging our bees. In a classic oriental stereotype, they are identified by their yellow legs.

Where we live, we have fine, upstanding British hornets. They look attractive and have much milder manners than wasps. I have read that they also play their part in the lifegiving process of pollination. It must, however, be reported that they are as predatory as their despised Asian cousins. Each morning, as my wife pores over the trap which contains the night’s haul of living moths which she catalogues (and then releases) in the interests of science, the hornets buzz round. A moment’s inattention from her, and they descend for the kill.