International Women’s Day
Debate between Wera Hobhouse and Jackie Doyle-Price(1 year, 9 months ago)
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Jackie Doyle-Price
I think that point is actually a very good one. To guarantee the quality of these tools and the content there needs to be a degree of inspection. We know we will find bad actors everywhere in society, and perhaps in schools we need to make sure that we do have that protection.
Wera Hobhouse
Very briefly, because I know there is a lot of pressure on time, is it not also important that the people who deliver these courses—the teachers in the room—have to be specialist teachers, rather than leaving it to a maths teacher?
Jackie Doyle-Price
I actually have less sympathy with that point. I think we should all understand what standards of good behaviour are, and it should be intrinsic. Frankly, no teacher should be allowed in a classroom if they do not understand respect. It comes down to that ultimately, and I think all teachers should be equipped with that.
Transgender Conversion Therapy
Debate between Wera Hobhouse and Jackie Doyle-Price(2 years, 6 months ago)
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Jackie Doyle-Price
Puberty blockers are not irreversible—the hon. Member is right. The fact of blocking puberty may mean that the individual does not subsequently go through it, but she is right in the sense that puberty blockers were invented for a different purpose than the treatment of gender dysphoria. They absolutely should be dispensed where appropriate, but they should not be used as a way of treating gender dysphoria without someone’s having gone through the therapeutic care pathway.
The real issue here is the provision of hormone treatment, which is now routinely dispensed to people from the age of 16. Again, the impacts of those things are irreversible. We see a generation of trans men who have desisted and will now have a loss of sexual function, permanent facial hair and male pattern baldness. A more sophisticated way of allowing them to explore their gender would mean that they do not go through such things.
Wera Hobhouse (Bath) (LD)
Is the hon. Member not making a mistake by confusing what we are here to discuss banning? We are here to discuss banning pseudo-practices. We are not aiming to ban NHS therapies and practices that are conducted by professional medical experts; we are looking at banning conversion therapy, which is pseudo-scientific, often takes place in private settings and is not controlled.
Jackie Doyle-Price
I think the hon. Member is actually agreeing with my general thesis, which is that we should not use the term “therapy” in the Bill. Legitimate care pathways are exactly the things we should be ensuring that people can access, so that they get the right decision for them. As we know, if people cannot access those pathways through the national health service, there is a wild west out there on the internet, and people will start getting very harmful interventions that are not properly supervised.