Conversion Therapy Prohibition (Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity) Bill [HL]

Lord Blencathra Excerpts

Friday 9th February 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Blencathra (Con)]

My Lords, it is a tremendous pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Hunt of Bethnal Green. I deeply respect what she has said here today and the course that she has taken in her life; she is to be commended for it. Nevertheless, I consider this an insidious little Bill. Kind, loving and caring parents could get unlimited fines for looking after the interests of their young children. Prison could await them if they refuse to pay the fine, and they will be in contempt of court.

A 14 year-old girl tells her mother that she wants to be a boy, and her mother says that she should wait until she is a bit older—that she has been a girl for 14 years and that remaining a girl for a few more years is the best thing to do. The girl tells her teacher and the next second the police are at the mother’s door. She is charged under Clause 1(2), for making the assumption that being a girl is preferrable, and under Clause 1(2)(b), as she has supressed her daughter’s expression of gender identity. Then there is the 10 year-old boy who tells his dad that he wants to be a girl and that the school have said he can get puberty blockers. His father says that, if he does that, he will be chemically castrated and never have children, and he should not do it. The father discusses it with him in detail but the boy, egged on by schoolmates, tells his teachers, and the next minute that father is also prosecuted. Unamended, that is the sort of sick society that this Bill would bring about.

What is the problem that the Bill is seeking to fix? I understand that, in the United States, there are, or have been, some religious nutters who have tried to convert people from one sexual orientation to another and to exorcise their so-called demons. That is as futile as it is misguided, and utterly wrong, but it is not happening here. There is not a credible reported incident of anyone doing that in recent times in this country. There is a case quoted of a woman being strapped to a chair in a psychiatric hospital and given electric shock treatment to discourage her from having thoughts and feelings about other women. But that was way back in 1964, when thousands of people had their brains fried by psychiatrists hoping to change some behaviour that they considered abnormal. All we have are bogus, self-selecting surveys, dating back years, of a handful of people saying that they felt that they were getting conversion therapy, when in many cases no one even said a word to them.

However, this is not the full story. We have had the most despicable conversion therapy foisted on our children and sanctioned by the NHS. I am referring to the gross abuses inflicted on children by the Tavistock clinic and GIDS. Perhaps it was scrapping the words in the Hippocratic oath, “First do no harm”, that led to doctors neutering thousands of children, or perhaps they were captured by the ideologues of the transgender cult, led by the discredited organisation Mermaids, which advocates the cruel breast-binding of girls—it is currently under investigation by the Charity Commission, following safeguarding allegations. I exempt the courageous whistleblowers at the Tavistock who exposed this scandal and were vilified for it.

Only cult capture by the trans zealots can explain why 138 children were referred in 2010 for genuine gender dysphoria but that this had rocketed to 3,585 in 2021, as the fad for converting children from one sex to another took hold. Of course, these poor kids have not been converted from one sex to another. Boys have been chemically castrated, but they will never be women. Girls have been put on the drug Lupron, and some have had double mastectomies, but they will never be men. These children will never have children of their own; they are stuck in a sex limbo, neutered by doctors who should have given them proper counselling and advice, but instead put them on a fast-track to destroying their sex.

The Cass interim report has exposed what was utterly wrong with the Tavistock and GIDS. They made an assumption that one gender was preferable to another, with the intended purpose of attempting to change a person’s gender identity. Does that sound familiar to your Lordships? It is exactly what this Bill is seeking to do. The abuses done to children in the Tavistock, which Cass criticised, are the same abuses that this Bill would legalise. If we could make this Bill retrospective and prosecute all those at the Tavistock who did this to little children, then I would be the first vote for it. A principal criticism of the abuses at the Tavistock were that no proper counselling or psychiatric advice was given; it was all peremptory and rushed. If this Bill becomes law then anyone—parents, doctors, psychiatrists, teachers—seeking to give proper advice would be guilty of an offence. That is why I call this an insidious little Bill, and why it should never reach the statute book.