juillet 23, 2024 - 1:00pm
En janvier dernier, le gouvernement écossais a annoncé une consultation sur un projet de loi interdisant les ‘pratiques de conversion’. C’est-à-dire, les tentatives de changer l’orientation sexuelle ou l’identité de genre de quelqu’un, ou leur auto-perception de leur orientation sexuelle ou identité de genre. La réponse initiale a été mitigée, certains saluant cela comme une protection vitale pour les personnes LGBTQIA+ et d’autres le dénonçant comme une intervention inutile dans un espace tendu qui pourrait criminaliser une thérapie soigneuse pour les patients en détresse de genre ou conduire les parents en prison pour jusqu’à sept ans.
Au fil des mois, notamment en égard à la publication de la Revue Cass en avril dernier, il est devenu de plus en plus clair qu’une approche prudente et nuancée de ce sujet est essentielle.
Cette semaine, il a été rapporté que le Premier ministre écossais John Swinney est sur le point d’abandonner la proposition du SNP et de soutenir la législation travailliste, annoncée dans le discours du roi de la semaine dernière. Cela représente une opportunité de se retirer de ce qui a été décrit comme une approche ‘extrême’ et de recommencer en coopération avec le ministère de Keir Starmer, déplaçant ainsi habilement la majeure partie de la responsabilité de trouver le bon équilibre loin du gouvernement écossais.
Certaines parties de la proposition du SNP n’étaient pas du tout controversées — en particulier, l’introduction d’une exigence pour les tribunaux de tenir compte du fait qu’un crime existant tel que l’agression est motivé par une tentative de changer ou de réprimer l’orientation sexuelle ou l’identité de genre d’une personne. Une tentative de ‘viol correctif‘ sur une lesbienne est un crime, mais seulement en raison du viol plutôt que de la tentative de ‘corriger’ son homosexualité. Le fait de permettre des peines plus sévères dans des cas comme celui-ci serait soutenu par de nombreux Britanniques.
Le problème est que les propositions du SNP allaient beaucoup plus loin, y compris l’introduction de deux nouveaux délits criminels causant des dommages physiques ou psychologiques — y compris de la détresse — dans le but de changer l’orientation sexuelle ou l’identité de genre de quelqu’un. Ces infractions pourraient survenir soit lors de la fourniture de services tels que la thérapie verbale, soit dans le cadre d’un schéma de comportement coercitif. Bien qu’il y ait eu quelques exceptions pour l’orientation sexuelle dans le contexte d’une clinique de genre, la même exception ne s’appliquait pas à l’identité de genre.
Il semble que le gouvernement écossais était conscient qu’une approche affirmative de l’identité de genre pourrait être classée comme une tentative de changer l’orientation sexuelle dans certains contextes. Par exemple, des enfants vulnérables luttant à la fois avec l’orientation sexuelle et l’identité de genre pourraient avoir intériorisé l’homophobie et préféreraient donc être un garçon hétérosexuel plutôt qu’une fille lesbienne. Cela a conduit certains membres du personnel des cliniques de genre à commenter que parfois, l’affirmation de l’identité de genre ‘semble être une thérapie de conversion pour les enfants homosexuels’.
La proposition du SNP comportait une exemption explicite pour permettre les tentatives de changer l’orientation sexuelle dans une clinique de genre tout en faisant de la tentative de changer l’identité de genre réelle ou perçue un délit. Cela aurait probablement créé un effet dissuasif qui aurait rendu plus difficile une approche prudente pour traiter la détresse de genre, malgré une défense générale de la raison. Le problème ici n’est pas le risque qu’un clinicien se retrouve en prison — bien que cette possibilité demeure — mais plutôt l’impact que cette épée de Damoclès pourrait avoir sur la manière dont ceux qui travaillent avec des enfants en détresse de genre.
Abandonner cette proposition législative proposée transfère la responsabilité au gouvernement travailliste de régler ces détails épineux, si cela est même possible. Cela se fera sur fond de la Revue Cass, qui recommandait la prudence lors du traitement de l’expression de genre chez l’enfant et recommandait une enquête psychologique sur la source de la détresse plutôt qu’une affirmation automatique. Toute politique du parti de Starmer sera sans aucun doute façonnée par ces conclusions.
Cela signale-t-il une nouvelle ère de coopération entre Holyrood et Westminster ? Peut-être. Mais la décision de travailler ensemble sur cette question semble découler davantage de Swinney identifiant une opportunité d’abandonner des propositions extrêmement controversées de son prédécesseur, Humza Yousaf. Bien que ces suggestions aient été émises il y a seulement quelques mois, elles ont déjà été dépassées par les événements — et représentent maintenant plus une menace pour un SNP fragile que presque tout le reste.
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SubscribeWhile I sympathize with the plight of rural towns, lining roads with rows of large, closely spaced trees three feet from the edge of the pavement makes no sense from any point of view. I traveled roads like these while living in France in the 1970s and it was a terrifying experience, knowing that a single lapse of the driver’s attention could prove instantly fatal for everyone in the vehicle. Whatever else is done to bring life back to village and farm in rural France, a return to cars hurtling through tunnels of trees definitely shouldn’t be part of the plan.
I just returned from walking 350 km across central France. I walked through many silent villages, seeing no people. But they were there, their cars parked in the driveway and one or two exterior window blinds rolled half-way up. Inside, sitting in the gloom, a deeply dispirited people. Similarly, although it was high summer, many herds of cows were still in their barns. Have the farmers simply lost the motivation to manage the cows in the open? Entering towns I saw the signs naming them fitted upside down, apparently by farmers expressing their anger.
This cannot turn out well.
I don’t know any people that are deeply dispirited……where did you get that from?
Some people are annoyed about the election results, but then, some aren’t.
It’s much the same as England.
The farmers are always angry.
I live in a small village in SW France.
Up the road on the way into town is a row of 62 Plane trees. Only on one side of the road tho.
I hadn’t heard of that move to cut them down to improve road safety.
Went to the Petanque club July 13 meal …fireworks at midnight!
Over a hundred people, including members of the ‘old’ families .
Only three English people.
It was a brilliant evening.
Our area returned a Republican.
RN came second.
I sympathise with this article to a considerable degree. One of my best holidays was a drive around Italy and France a few years back, and I recall well the twin rows of trees either side of the roads: they create a beautiful effect as one drives through them, and can be quite spectacular from a distance too. I had no idea that they were popularly regarded as a menace and that so many of them had been deliberately destroyed. How tragic.
As to the rest of the article, there are one or two points where I disagree.
“If Paris and the Left wanted to derail its opponents, and if it had sufficient common sense and humanity, it would aim to bring work and life back to rural France. It would see people as more important than automatic machinery and superficial technological efficiency.”
This problem is actually not the sole fault of metropolitan technocracy as implied, it is a longer-running problem in France that has applied for almost 50 years: the near-impossibility of firing employees due to France’s onerous employment laws, with the consequence that the job creation rate is tiny, and business investment has instead for decades been targeted at automation as much as possible.
A common political attitude in France is that businesses exist primarily to provide jobs to people. This might look good on a placard at a demonstration, but it is obviously nonsense: a business exists for whatever reason its investors decide it exists, and anyone else’s opinion on the matter is irrelevant. It is investors, acting in accordance with the incentives resulting from France’s regulatory landscape, who set the pace of job creation in France, not Paris-based policymakers, who have no power to improve the situation without reforming French employment rights.
And we know what would happen if that was attempted.
Inevitably, superfluous jobs cost money, and either the customer pays higher prices, or higher taxes to finance the subsidy, or pay decreases, or the job disappears. It’s how people’s skill are deployed most efficiently (when not hindered by government policy). Even if the jobs were within the state sector, the financial mechanics would be the same, and we would be complaining about paying for the inefficiencies, or job losses.
Investors, by definition, look for a return on capital, even if it’s an unexciting 1% in a building society.
There’s also investing in skills: I can remember when school leavers gained skills useful in wealth creating jobs in the oil industries, car manufacturing, and even the nuclear industry but, in the future, in Britain at least, utilising those skills will likely require moving abroad.
Some things are best made by large organisations, like petrol, computer chips and cars, while other products can gain quality when made in smaller quantities, like many food products, including cheeses and beer. The moderately wealthy could spend their spare cash to improve their own lives. Just think of all the DIY we do, or attempt to do.
And why are we in this situation? It’s because the State skims off so much money as it’s circulating around the economy. If my neighbour and I did jobs for each other, we would likely send half of our income to the Treasury, what with Income Tax, VAT, National Insurance, etc.
One must not forget the huge changes in agriculture over the past 60 years – farm amalgamations, mechanisation (machines today are huge), and greatly reduced need for labour. Today there might be one farm where formerly there were ten (or more). Much as I regret this change, one cannot create a living museum in the countryside except at enormous cost. And who wants to live in a museum anyway? The young certainly don’t. But some rural areas still thrive as do some small towns. Try visiting Aunay sur Odon, obliterated in the war by the RAF, rebuilt in more thoughtful style than anything in the UK, and quite a thriving community with boulangeries, doctors, vets, small Supers, cafes etc, in fact, all local services, including, when I lived close by, a cottage hospital (though there were plans afoot when I left to close it down in the name of “rationalisation” a la the NHS)
I worked for a French manufacturer in the 1990s and was struck by the risk aversion. The idea that they might take on staff and tool up for a new product terrified them – the product might fail and you’d be stuck with a workforce with nothing to do.
Junior staff in Paris had to go after a year before they could acquire employment rights.
A couple of years we drove from Calais to SW France. We relied on Google maps and mainly stuck to the autoroutes, but every so often Google would decide that an hour through France Profond would be quicker and would take us off the highway and through silent ancient villages, empty agricultural landscapes, twisty roads through woodlands. It was beautiful, huge, and rather intimidating. Like a giant hidden world that tourists rarely see. There just didn’t seem to be many people around.
Too easy to criticise as a Peter Mayle derivative, but there is an important cultural issue at stake.
Apologies Geoff W
Written after long hot drive back home through France, and England.
But no excuse.
Names will be corrected.
Best wishes
JG
What beautiful English, so different from an increasing number of articles in UnHerd, consisting of ‘university speak’ drivel of the type you find in student essays. An unusual cause of the accidents were epileptic fits in those prone to fits caused by the regular flash of sunlight through the trees
The flashing of sunlight through trees. I am not an epileptic but it gives me a headache, breaks my concentration and could easily cause an accident if I did not hold a hand up to shield me from the flashing. It’s particularly dangerous in spring when the sunlight is bright and the trees are not yet clothed in leaves
Well known stroboscopic effect.
Beautiful but not precise enough to tell us the length of time that elapsed between the pair lentement dégusté that bottle of wine and the car crash. It might have been informative.
I doubt the expertise of someone who refers to Marine “La” Pen and “Jason” Bardella.