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An LGBT parade in Krakow (Beata Zawrzel/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
A few years ago, there was a huge row about eugenics, abortion and disability. In 2015, the UK became the first country to vote to legalise mitochondrial donation — something which is often, unhelpfully, called “three-parent babies”. In reality, mitochondrial donation simply means taking the healthy mitochondria from another woman’s eggs, and using them to replace faulty ones which could otherwise have disastrous effects: it can cause everything from learning disabilities to early death.
There was backlash from religious groups, calling the move “eugenics”. But was it? The word “eugenics” can be used to refer to things like mitochondrial donation, insofar as it means something like “efforts to remove ‘harmful’ genes from the gene pool”. But the classic example of eugenics are things like the Nazi programme of forced sterilisation; a programme that did awful things to people against their will.
Using the term “eugenics” to refer to both was, I think, a semi-deliberate tactic. Opponents of mitochondrial donation were trying to associate those evil things in people’s minds with the more complex cases. That doesn’t mean that mitochondrial donation is automatically right. But the fact that a loose definition of the word “eugenics” can be used to apply to both it and Nazi murders does not make it necessarily wrong.
A similar sort of tactic appears to being deployed in the ongoing debate over the Government’s proposed legislation to ban conversion therapy.
It was not that many years ago that homosexuality was viewed as a mental illness requiring curing: the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) listed same-sex attraction as a psychiatric disorder until 1973. And as I’ve written before, there’s not much evidence that you can change someone’s sexual orientation, while the methods used to do it have often been brutal: zapping people with electric shocks while showing them homoerotic images; chemical castration; even lobotomy, as recently as 1969.
“Conversion therapy” is, therefore, rightly held up as something unacceptable: the classic example of conversion therapy is a gay man or lesbian woman being forced, against his or her will, to submit to something approaching torture, in an almost certainly unsuccessful attempt to change his or her sexual orientation.
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SubscribeThanks for adding your voice to the growing caution regarding this proposed legislation, Tom. As with so many other subjective terms such as phobias, harm, safe, hate, etc., this proposal to add conversion therapy will become a way that people try to enforce compliance to a particular view. Nowhere is the term sufficiently defined to make it understood – it can be used to refer to whatever one dislikes.
As your link shows, the surveys carried out to give some stats are self-selection ones. Also they mention a problem with non-Christian religions which no one is daring to talk about. In reality some of the loudest religious voices are trying to criminalise not just prayer for those who might request support, but the whole basis of traditionalist sexual ethics and teaching.
The proposed legislation doesn’t appear to cover the huge influence that anonymous internet voices have in affecting young minds in matters of gender identity. Abigail Shrier’s book Irreversible Damage studies this frightening phenomenon in detail. In the end, teenagers, especially girls, are being seduced (converted) online into a mindset which cuts them off from parental love and wisdom. They are obtaining drugs which James Dreyfus describes as the equivalent of chemical castration. This legislation is proposing nothing to deal with this insidious influence.
What no one seems willing to acknowledge is that we are substituting feelings for science and then trying to legislate on that basis. The proposals seem to imply that anyone who attempts to help someone detransition would be criminalised. The examples of conversion therapy abuses listed are assaults and already illegal. This proposal to criminalise professional talking therapies and prayer is taking away individual’s personal choice and freedom to act.
A therapist friend of mine has a 13 year old patient, who is sexually attracted to girls, and only girls. But she says that she wants to transition because being a transexual would ‘be easier’ than being a lesbian. I am glad that my friend lives in Sweden where saying ‘it’s not so bad being a lesbian’ is not something you have to worry about saying. Or where you fear having a patient who, having listened and decided that ‘yes, being a lesbian is not so bad I will try this’ — who then regrets their choice, and transitions, and comes back with the tar and feathers for you because you weren’t immediately pro-transition from the get-go.
How do we protect therapists from such people? Saying that ‘well, only the mentally deranged would do this’ is no help, they are the people we send the mentally deranged to, in the first place. We must not set up a system with perverse incentives, where ‘sure, fine, get yourself chopped up, if you don’t like it, too bad, your decision’ is always ok, while voicing ‘maybe this is not such a great idea’ risks a lawsuit, because we know how this will turn out.
The danger, of course, is that becoming a therapist will carry another associated risk. Along with threats hanging over existing practitioners, those currently working in the field may choose to leave and a narrower pool of people will come through in the future. Not a good outcome for patients seeking mental health services.
I’ve heard this a number of times, but I struggle to believe it. Easier in what way, in what context? Which parents are saying “we feared our daughter might be a lesbian, but luckily she only wants to be chemically and surgically transformed into a poor simulacrum of a man!”
Well, I don’t think ‘poor simulacrum’ is what she thinks she would be getting. And if her parents hate her now, because she isn’t what they want in a daughter, the notion may exist that ‘if only I were a boy the very things they hate about me, which are traits they approve of in boys, would mean they would have to love me!’
I don’t think there is a woman alive who hasn’t, at some point in her life, thought ‘life would be a whole lot easier, if only I were a man’. The problem is when these people get the idea that this is something that really can happen.
Personally, I’ve always identified as being six foot four, permenently twenty-nine years old and a combat-hardened veteran of the French Foreign Legion, devastatingly attractive to women — just like every other bloke in the world. Guess what — I’m not. We don’t get to be all the things we want to be, and wanting to be the other sex doesn’t make us so.
Neither does having an appetite for the same sex make us different from other, “normal” men/women. It’s just that — an appetite, a desire, like some men prefer the doggie position and some women like it on top. It doesn’t define your life, which is why this is all so worrying. Because there doesn’t seem to be any acknowledgement that “conversion therapy” works both ways. Why is it not accepted that “affirming” a teenager’s supposed sexuality can legitimately be seen as recruitment?
29? Qeul Dommage! Every time I look in the mirror I see an incredibly handsome 25 year old lad in his prime with a devilish grin, irresistible to women. Been that way for decades!
I was thinking about this recently while contemplating aging. I am in my late 40’s and while my life is lovely, I am definitely not liking many aspects of approaching 50. I’m perimenopausal with all the discomfort that entails, I can’t even look sideways at a piece of cake without putting on ten pounds, just a few glasses of wine gives me a hangover now, and I’m stiff every morning when I stumble out of bed.
I think about all the women who respond to this with exensive plastic surgery and time consuming beauty regimes to turn back the clock, and while I can understand the desire, society tends to look down on this for a reason. I suppose I could spend an enormous amount of money and get tight skin and perky boobs back again, but it would look artificial and somewhat sad. Even if I pulled it off, I’m still 48 on the inside and it wouldn’t really be fooling anyone.
Perhaps this explains why the suicide rate remains high for trans people after transition. Live as you wish, but accept your limitations I say.
This is the first time in all that I have read for months that anyone has made the fundamental point that is often uppermost in my mind, namely the motivation of these callous activists. Why are they so keen for the child not to have help to be normal, but rather proceed to the twilight existence of a pretend person? The answer is that they are desperately keen for more and more recruits to the church of transgender. To go a step further: they want to disrupt our society and replace it with one of their rown choosing. As simple of that. That is post-modernism and critical theory for you.
It could be argued that ‘transgender affirmation’ is actually a form of conversion therapy against same sex attraction. Whistleblowing professionals from the Tavistock have confirmed that many of the young people referred to them for ‘gender’ transition were simply gay or lesbian, and had been bullied for it. Others were diagnosed as autistic and had not absorbed the social messages about sex-appropriate behaviour (or, like me, had simply chosen not to).
In young people, believing that they are ‘transgender’ appears to often be a reaction against bullying for being ‘different’. Professionals must be free to explore that and suggest alternative strategies.
I’ve always been somewhat confused by the statement that someone “feels” like a women (or man). I’m a woman, have been from birth (ok I was a baby then a girl before I became a women, but you know what I mean) however, I can’t tell you what it feels like to be a woman – I have no comparison. So, I’m asking: how can a person say that they are unhappy because they feel like a woman rather than unhappy because of some other life circumstance? I have asked my husband and male friends what it feels like to be a man, and I just get blank looks. Perhaps someone on here can help me please.
You get blank stares because the question is meaningless. As you say yourself, you have no comparison. Neither do the “trans” community. They no more know what it feels like to be a woman/man than natural born women or men do, so whatever is driving this, it isn’t any awareness of being in the wrong body. How could it possibly be?
Precisely, this is what I think. Maybe for some there is a problem but if they are so unhappy then they need to find out what the problem really is rather than going through drastic (and almost always irreversable) surgical procedures. Therapy may be something that is needed.
Incidentally I have just been reading an article in The Economist which is addressing why this proposed new law is wrong; it argues mostly along the same lines as Tom Chivers. Let’s hope others speak out before it’s too late
There are some people, and you and I are not one of them, who always have a little voice in their heads saying ‘act like a man’ or ‘act like a woman’. Whenever they have to decide to do something, that’s the little voice that wakes up and tells them what to do, and how to do it. They are incapable of ‘just being a human being’ — they don’t have a baseline for ‘decent human being’ — in their world there are only men and women, and no ‘people’. ‘People’ is too abstract for them. And men and women are supposed to behave differently.
Now imagine what happens when people like this are getting the message of how to act from a little voice that isn’t what their genetalia says they are? It’s a mess. ‘Your little voice is sexist when it says, for instance, that men can’t be caring and women can’t be brave, and far from revealing your ‘true gender’ all we are seeing is the depth of your sexism/mysogyny/misandry’ is one harsh message to swallow. ‘I’m just trapped in the wrong body’, really is easier.
This is a major issue with a lot of the discussions around gender identity, it is rather intolerant; it says men have to behave in a certain way and women in another, never allowing for the spectrum of behaviours. Femininity and masculinity appear, at least to me, to be a kind of spectrum from (and forgive this rather crude characterisation) hairy club wielders at one end to skreeching on a chair wanting to be rescued from a mouse at the other end. Most people are somewhere in between, some women more “butch” some men more “feminine”, but this doesn’t make the man a woman or the woman a man, and it is intolerance of differences that can lead to people questioning their sex. and it does seem to be their sex that they are questioning rather than gender. If a man wishes to wear a dress and feels comfortable in one that’s not issue for me, it becomes an issue, though, when he wants others to think of him as a woman, and, of course, the same goes for women. Women have been dressing in what was once traditionally thought of as men’s clothing (trousers, shirts for example) for decades without self-identifying as men, I am happy for men to dress in women’s clothing and perhaps this is what they should be concentrating on, this acceptance, not normalising stereotypes..
This won’t work for the people I am talking about. Their problem isn’t –‘I want to be accepted in myself for being the person I am, irrespective of my biological sex’ — which would entail that some people who have rigid gender role ideas get the metaphorical boot, for not being capable of accepting them. Nor is it a matter of dress-up.
Their problem is that ‘I am one of the people with the rigid gender role ideas, and who I want to be cannot be done by somebody with my sort of genetalia’. Or, ‘you people treat men and women differently. I want to be treated like an X, instead of a Y.’
This is a real problem. There are people who don’t treat women with respect because they are women and should a man demonstrate vulnerability they don’t treat them with respect either. For some people getting their bodies chopped up so they don’t have to confront this issue, and these people, really seems the way out of their personal hell.
I really cannot disagree with the girl growing up, with a jealous and hating mother and absent father in a throwback-traditional Muslim home that ‘all my problems would go away if only I were a boy’. (You’d have a new set, my dear, but not the set you have now.) The problem is that transitioning does not make you the sex you wish you were. This is not the science fiction world of Iain M. Banks where you can get a new full-functioning body of the other sex, just by asking. And go back with no side effects at all. For free, like everything in ‘the Culture’. In that fictional world, I think that everybody around here on unherd would change their sex out of understandable curiosity. I know I would. Wouldn’t you love to know what sex feels like with a different set of genetalia? Do men or women have better sex?
Alas, what we can offer people now is such a shabby substitute. And for some people this is better than the alternatives. I don’t want them dead, killing themselves out of despair and the like. But I also don’t want them to go around preaching that they are normal, indeed less abnormal than being born with six fingers or webbing between their toes.
I quote from the article:
“Conversion therapy” is, therefore, rightly held up as something unacceptable: the classic example of conversion therapy is a gay man or lesbian woman being forced, against his or her will, to submit to something approaching torture, in an almost certainly unsuccessful attempt to change his or her sexual orientation.
What if it’s not “against his or her will”? What if it doesn’t involve “torture”?
It still won’t work!
That’s not the point, is it? Tarot readings may not “work” but people should be free to practise them. Take young Chivers’ attitude and you not only misrepresent – with talk of “force” and “torture” – but actually criminalise conversation.
I don’t think that’s actually empirically the case for many. Also, as others have pointed out here, it is very much about finding out about the reasons for wanting to change and not just the feelings, and also recognising that so much changes physically and psychologically prior to and even post 18. Some of the reasons I have been told why the teenager wants to change have little if anything to do with ‘feeling’ that they are a different ‘gender’ from the ‘sex’ they actually are. Bullying, peer pressure, etc a HUGE influence in my experience.
Misery will still result if people are persuaded to try and live premanently in opposition to their actual sexual orientation.
Very possibly. But it is their business; not the state’s, not the law’s and not yours. Take again my example of Tarot readings. These can be profoundly damaging; they can set off chain reactions of deep anxiety – are you going legislate against that, too?
Your analogy is a good one because it underscores how unscientific this branch of medicine has become. In theory, we have different expectations and standards for medicine than for tarot cards. But the reality is that these clinical interventions are initiated on grounds that are just as flimsy as a tarot card reading. Just look at how we determine a ‘gender identity’ disorder requiring medication and surgery. These diagnoses and recommendations are often contested among experts (imagine doctors arguing about whether someone has cancer!) because there is no real scientific standard. It is entirely predictable that this field has been captured by ideologues given its inherent instability.
Ah here: “In reality, mitochondrial donation simply means taking the healthy mitochondria from another woman’s eggs, and using them to replace faulty ones which could otherwise have disastrous effects: it can cause everything from learning disabilities to early death.”
Oh you know just stealing another woman’s eggs so that Mr and Mrs Bourgeois can have a nice cute baby accessory to fit in with the new curtains and keep up with their neighbours, by pretending it is their biological child.
As though the reality is somehow better than calling it eugenics. All forms of dahr should be banned
Otherwise Chivers is right to sound alarm bells on conversion therapy though I’m sorry he can’t see that justifying DAHR really leaves him with little moral authority on conversion therapy.
I also have to challenge this
“Lots of my patients are not questioning; they are very assertive that they are trans”
Assertive because they have been propagandised and led to believe that being put on hormones and having unnecessary surgeries will make up their spiritual emptiness and feelings of deracination. You will find that anorexics can be very assertive too
From ages 3 to 7, my then best friend and I wanted to be boys, wore boys clothes and boy haircuts, tore around the places on our mini bmx’s. We even made toy willies out of rice krispies cardboard boxes and sellotspe to see what peeing would be like.
My friend grew up to be a dancer: willowy, elegant and feminine, and sadly died too young of cancer.
I’m still a tomboy, though the bmx was exchanged for a mountain bike and the hair is a bit longer now.
My heart breaks for kids these days.
My heart breaks, too. Especially for the Muslim girls.
I’m a psychotherapist with qualifications in autism spectrum disorders. It is understood that individuals on the autism spectrum are often ‘different’ and unconventional. I have been asked, by parents, to see young people on the spectrum who had ‘suddenly’ announced they were trans. I agreed to see one boy and one young woman who, in both cases, spent every waking hour online. The girl had been prescribed testosterone but hadn’t yet started taking it. She was petite, with long hair and a ‘feminine’ appearance. She claimed to not like her small breasts. I asked how she would feel when she sprouted a beard and potentially went bald. The boy was a gangly 6ft+ teen. The prospect of these already socially isolated young people transforming themselves physically was terrifying. I was, however, very aware that I was taking enormous risks trying to counter any of the online coercion they were being subjected to. When lockdown came, and they could no longer visit, I was reprieved. Heaven help them and their parents though. Oh, and the young woman had ‘tried’ being a lesbian but was heterosexual.
More people need to know that identity formation is something that autistic children really struggle with. You may have heard of a specialist in Japan called Yuko Yushida who wrote a book called “Raising children with Asperger’s Syndrome and High Functioning Autism: championing the individual”. Not considered the correct terminology now, but nevertheless, in the book the author raises her observation that a key part of autism is a lack of identity development. The children often have no idea who they are, no clear sense of themselves; they just know they don’t fit in. I’ve seen it mentioned in other reports as well but it seems to be fairly neglected in the research, as far as I can see.
Now, I just imagine being a young person who is struggling to form their own identity, struggling with not fitting in, perhaps having the common spectrum trait of being easily set up because of a lack of understanding of social situations, and then coming across this group of extremely persuasive people online who tell you that it’s probably because you were born “in the wrong body”, as if it were even genetically possible for any individual to be born into a body that is not genetically the right one for them. The whole idea is scientifically illiterate. It really is quite dangerous to allow autistic children and young people to physically change their bodies based on how they may feel about their identity. Not that this will stop people out to make a name for themselves. More research is needed – perhaps they could make a name for themselves in that direction.
I suspect we underestimate the difficulty that therapists are placed in when a person comes to them asking for help in suppressing unwanted same sex attraction. The patient may be married with children, in which case the effect of leaving the family in order to pursue a homosexual relationship will be devastating to those left behind. The patient may have good reason to avoid giving free rein to their same sex attraction. The current strictures against “conversion therapy” mean that the therapist has to tell the patient that they cannot be helped. No doubt the therapist could provide counselling for suppressing heterosexual attraction without getting into trouble.
The perjorative term ‘conversion therapy’ has been deliberately chosen to engender an emotive knee jerk reaction to violent, abusive, coersive practices that are already largely illegal already and conflate them with practices that aren’t. LGBT activists and their acolytes – many of whom consider prayer, pastoral care, preaching and Christian sexual ethics as conversion therapy – are disingenuously muddying the waters in an ideologically driven effort to extend legislation which c[w]ould catch – ie parents who use software to prevent their gender identity confused 15year old daughter interacting with the Mermaids website, tearfully tells their teacher, who reports the parents; the pastor praying with an at-the-time consenting adult about gender identity confusion, who years later decides that it was the wrong kind of prayer and reports to the police; a gender confused individual attends church where Lev20:13 or Rom1:26 etc is being read to the congregation and decides this is offensive and/or abusive and reports the lay-reader…
It’s not just GPs who are concerned about talking, let alone with children: add to that list counsellors and therapists of all stripes, pastors and others who hold to Biblical sexual ethics, etc for fear of being labelled intolerant, transphobic, hateful, and worse. The rhetoric has already been sharpened into action (Scottow 2019; Forstater 2019; Miller 2020). The law is being weaponised to silence free speech..and many seem oblivious. Or complicit.
It happened today in Canada with the passage of “Bill C-4” which adds conversion therapy to the Criminal code. This definition will include treatment to “change gender identity to cisgender”
I just cannot vote up this horrible news, despite it being very much worth noticing. ‘I am very glad you told me this unhappy thing’ has no unherd button. Possibly I can be one here
For my work, I am required to notice things that I would happily ignore. Frankly, I am saturated with the subject of “trans” and I would gladly never think about this issue again.
The language inflation continues. On my LinkedIn feed this week a trans woman announced they would be boycotting the government’s upcoming ‘safe to be me’ conference because the government is endorsing torture for trans people. From counselling to eugenics to torture, it only takes 2 steps and enough hysteria. Of course, lots of people hit the ‘support this’ emoji.