Scotland is abandoning children to trans extremists

Encouraging the young to think they should change gender is surely itself a form of conversion therapy

Imagine this: not very far in the future, an 11-year-old boy comes home and says he’s a girl. He dresses to go out with friends wearing a padded bra and micro-skirt, along with a face full of make-up. When his parents tell him he can’t go out looking like that, he says it’s his way of expressing his gender identity and threatens to call the police.

In a sane country nothing more would happen, beyond perhaps a brief temper tantrum. If the boy is in Scotland, however, under new proposals that have a real chance of being enacted, the story could one day end quite differently.

There, the police take the call seriously. When they arrive at the house, the parents are arrested, and threatened with up to seven years in jail for refusing to affirm their child’s gender identity.

It sounds absurd, but the Scottish National Party appears to be working hard to make this reality. The party has proposed a new law that could criminalise parents for refusing to fully validate their child as transgender.

Among the actions that could be criminalised are preventing someone from “dressing in a way that reflects their sexual orientation or gender identity”, even if that decision were to be taken by a parent acting to protect their child from gender ideologues.

This abominable law is being proposed in the name of stopping “conversion therapy”, though it is nothing of the kind. I should know the difference. In 2014, while researching a book on lesbian and gay culture, I went undercover to a Christian conversion therapist in the US.

The ensuing week of being told that I was broken, evil, and unlovable was, despite me having adopted a fake persona, horrific. A loving parent, worried about the influence of gender ideology and concerned for the wellbeing of their child is a very different matter.

After all, they have good reasons to be concerned. Over the past decade, the number of children claiming to be transgender or non-binary has rocketed, as has the number accessing gender clinics.

The facts are shocking. A high proportion of children attending gender clinics have some form of autism; puberty blockers almost always lead a young person on to irreversible cross-sex hormones once they reach the age of 18, and the serious mental-health issues and trauma that the child may well be experiencing are often overlooked in favour of simply validating (labelling) them as transgender.

The interim Cass Review into the NHS Gender Identity Development Service was very clear that there is both a distinct lack of evidence about the effects of puberty-interrupting drugs on children and a great deal of confusion as to their purpose. Parents have not just the right, but a duty, to prevent their children from becoming immersed in a dangerous fiction that will affect them for the rest of their lives.

The Scottish law is targeted at the wrong group. It is not parents who are practicing conversion therapy, and it is not parents who should be penalised.

It is not conversion therapy to speak the truth to your children and say that there is no such thing as being trapped in the wrong body. Adults have a duty of care to the young, and sometimes that means stopping them from doing something they are desperate to do because we know the harm it will cause them.

Instead, “conversion therapy” better describes the actions of those who tell children that identifying as the opposite sex will solve their problems, and who proceed to push them down medicalised pathways, despite the growing mountain of evidence showing the true costs of the approach.

It is a parent’s job to do what is best for their child and shield them from harm. This includes protecting them from the gender industry, which is busy pumping out propaganda – not only from activists and impressionable young people on social media, but from private gender clinicians advertising their services on social media.

In my view, some of these clinicians – who ignored the many whistleblowers (both within the Tavistock and elsewhere) that laid bare the terrible consequences for children of being “affirmed” in this way, who have continued to treat children with puberty blockers, and who sent them on a pathway to “changing sex” – should be under investigation.

Indeed, if the SNP’S law were to be fairly and evenly applied, then they very likely would be.