The SNP leader is on a collision course with Westminster over her Bill, but this is no longer a party political issue – it’s about safety
Source - Daily Telegraph 16/01/23
A clash between the UK and Scottish governments looms over legislation passed by Holyrood, which would allow Scots to change their gender from the age of 16 and remove the need for a medical diagnosis of gender dysphoria for a Gender Recognition Certificate.
Rishi Sunak is so “concerned” by these reforms that he has blocked the Bill, while Sir Keir Starmer declared that 16 was too young for anyone to legally change their gender. So this is no longer a party political issue; the right and left are in agreement and the specific point on which they – and any rational individual – agree is that we’re talking about children here. Trans rights have been ignored for too long and need to be upheld – but this has become an issue about the rights, and safety, of our children.
The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child defines anyone under the age of 18 as a child. So, to be clear: Nicola Sturgeon is proposing to allow a person whose brain and body is not yet fully formed to take irreversible puberty blocking drugs and have irreversible surgeries.
In fact, she has already allowed some of this to happen. Back in November it was revealed in a report published by the European Journal of Pediatrics that children as young as nine had been prescribed puberty blockers at a Scottish gender identity clinic described as “Sturgeon’s Tavistock”. The SNP leader used words like “unconscionable”, “indefensible” and “really quite disgraceful” in a speech when she outlined why it would be “an outrage” for the UK Government to block her “self-ID” Bill.
These are also the words and tone used by someone ideologically convinced that she is right. Back in the late 1800s, a German psychiatrist named Albert von Schrenck-Notzing was also ideologically convinced that he was right when he bragged that, using 45 hypnosis sessions and a few trips to a brothel, he had managed to turn a gay man straight.
His findings led to the concept of conversion therapy, a vile practice now finally – and rightly – set to be banned by the Prime Minister. According to the UK Government’s own research, 7 per cent of the LGBT community have been offered or undergone some form of conversion therapy and are often left depressed or suicidal after their “treatment”.
Is what Nicola Sturgeon is proposing with her Bill really so different? After all, it involves children – who may be questioning their gender identities for a whole variety of reasons – being directed towards the “right” (dominant) ideology of the day.
Stonewall asks on its own website: “Is supporting a person to socially, medically and/or legally transition not a form of conversion therapy?” Its answer is a bolded-up “no”. “It is important to note that a gender transition is not a process that changes a person’s gender identity – it is a process that supports and enables a person to live in their gender identity.” Agreed. If that person is an adult and therefore by definition “consensual”.
Make no mistake – if this Bill is not blocked and children are allowed to change their gender without any of the necessary steps needed to make such a life-changing decision, then we will be failing generations of youngsters.
Both Sunak and Starmer have been careful to acknowledge that this is a “sensitive” area. All too often now, any sensitivity means that, fearful of straying from the accepted narrative, we remain silent. But on this issue it would be criminal to do so – and Sturgeon’s Bill is worth sparking a constitutional crisis over.
Beyond “how can I wangle that second Jaffa Cake and another half hour of telly”, kids don’t have an agenda. But adults do. And when children as young as three are being encouraged to question their gender, when a third of the children referred to the NHS’s Tavistock Clinic between 2011 and 2018 have been revealed to be autistic and when, after a series of failings and lawsuits, the NHS gender clinic is being shut down, it’s very clear what that agenda is.
A nine-year-old cannot possibly know their own mind. Neither, in my view, can a 16-year-old. Just ask 25-year-old Keira Bell, who was, she says now, “an unhappy girl who needed help” but instead “was treated like an experiment” by the Tavistock Clinic.
Stonewall’s FAQs go on to state: “Gender affirming therapy starts from the premise that there is no predetermined expectation.” But for Bell, who suffered menopause-like symptoms after taking puberty blockers at the age of 16, has permanent nerve damage to her chest and, since her surgery, will never be able to breastfeed her children, there was a predetermined expectation. And the only thing being affirmed was her “naive hope that everything could be solved with hormones and surgery”.
Sixteen-year-olds are allowed to be naive. But adults, doctors and lawmakers are not. And if we allow Sturgeon’s “self-ID” gender laws to pass, history will judge us harshly.
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