'Transing' Children Is Child Abuse
The Free Speech Union (FSU) is a mine of useful, often disturbing information, as in this case of a 15-year-old Swiss girl being taken into care because her parents refuse to consent to her being given puberty blockers.
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Fifteen year-old Swiss girl taken into care after parents refuse to consent to course of puberty blockers
During last week’s King’s Speech, Sir Keir Starmer set out his legislative programme in this Parliamentary session and made clear Labour intends to bring forward a “full, trans-inclusive ban on conversion practices”.
From a free speech perspective, the problem with this proposal isn’t just that no-one yet knows what he or his Government mean by that enigmatic phrase “full, trans-inclusive ban on conversion practices”.
It’s worse than that.
If the difficulties encountered by every other Parliamentarian that has attempted to define the phrase “conversion practices” in a way that doesn’t interfere with a person’s Article 9 (freedom of thought) and Article 10 (freedom of expression) rights under the European Convention on Human Rights are anything to go by, it’s likely Sir Keir and the two Government Ministers with joint responsibility for women and equalities, Bridget Phillipson and Anneliese Dodds, don’t know what the phrase means either.
But if that’s the case, then what is it, exactly, Labour wants to ban?
At the FSU, we fear that if a poorly worded ban is railroaded through Parliament by a Labour Party with a 174-seat majority it will curtail the speech rights of parents, teachers, religious leaders and health professionals wanting to advise gender-confused children to pause and reflect before embarking on a pathway that leads to irreversible, life-changing surgery.
That might seem like an outlandish fear, but in Switzerland, where conversion therapy is banned in some cantons, it recently emerged that a Swiss couple are having to take legal action to regain custody of their 16 year-old daughter, who has been a ward of the state for over a year – i.e., since she was 15, following a disputed diagnosis of gender dysphoria that led to their withholding consent for her to take puberty blockers.
We’ve written about this shocking case here.
The fact that the Swiss state has separated a gender-confused child from her parents because they wanted to explore other treatment options before she took a dangerous course of drugs may well seem like an egregious aberration, but it is in fact the logical endpoint of any “full, trans-inclusive ban on conversion practices” since deviating from the “gender affirmative care” approach – e.g. affirming the child’s self-diagnosis and immediately sending them on an irreversible medical pathway – is exactly what the advocates of such a ban want.
Given the severity of the implications of Labour’s conversion practices ban for free speech, the FSU is urging its members and supporters to voice their concerns by contacting their MP.
Please take a couple of minutes to fill out this form (here) using our automated campaigning tool to send an email to your MP setting out your concerns.
We need to make sure that freedom of speech remains protected, particularly in sensitive and potentially life-altering circumstan
