TRIGGERnometry - March 29, 2024


The New Gay Conversion Therapy - Andrew Doyle


Episode Stats


Length

11 minutes

Words per minute

166.8707

Word count

1,863

Sentence count

83

Harmful content

Misogyny

6

sentences flagged

Toxicity

21

sentences flagged

Hate speech

12

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Lesbian and gay conversion therapy has long been a controversial topic in British politics. At a Labour Party event in Parliament on the 29th of January, Keir Starmer pledged to implement a ban on all forms of conversion therapy.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.500 One of the more maddening aspects of the culture war is that language has been rendered meaningless.
00:00:06.520 Most of the disputes are destined to remain unresolved because there are few shared definitions among competing parties.
00:00:12.940 We are left with armies of straw men thrashing about on an imaginary battlefield, while most of us look on in a state of bewilderment. 0.99
00:00:20.160 The recent debates over conversion therapy are a case in point.
00:00:23.320 At a Labour Party event in Parliament on the 29th of January, Keir Starmer pledged to implement a full trans-inclusive ban on all forms of conversion therapy.
00:00:34.320 Now, he's likely to find some support among the population.
00:00:37.520 A YouGov poll last year revealed that 65% of voters believe that gay conversion therapy ought to be banned, and 62% feel the same about trans-conversion therapy.
00:00:47.980 And this would suggest that most people do not recognise the difference between the two.
00:00:51.600 A natural consequence of a climate in which discussion of sensitive issues is routinely stymied by both the browbeaters and the browbeaten.
00:01:00.080 Yet, when we wade beyond the messy definitional quagmires, we find that the phrase conversion therapy is only coherent when applied to sexual orientation rather than gender identity.
00:01:11.860 The consequence of this semantic ambiguity means that most people do not understand that in order to oppose gay conversion therapy,
00:01:18.700 one must be opposed to a ban on trans-conversion therapy.
00:01:23.500 Now, this is going to require some explanation.
00:01:25.620 When we hear the phrase conversion therapy, most of our minds leap to a variety of horrific practices.
00:01:30.880 In America, Christian fundamentalists have established programmes to address the problem of homosexuality.
00:01:36.600 This was satirised in an episode of South Park,
00:01:38.900 where Butter's Stotch is mistakenly assumed to be gay by his parents and dispatched to Camp New Grace,
00:01:45.620 whose slogan is Pray the Gay Away. 1.00
00:01:48.540 At one point, the boys attend a presentation by Pastor Phillips,
00:01:51.720 who tells them that he used to have unclean urges,
00:01:54.740 but was healed through the power of prayer,
00:01:57.200 all the while prancing around like Nathan Lane in the birdcage.
00:02:00.360 The episode doesn't shy away from the darker side of these kinds of retreats.
00:02:03.680 Suicides are shown to be common among the boys,
00:02:06.800 all of which the staff are happy to shrug off. 0.92
00:02:09.380 Now, one might argue that praying the gay away is at least a step forward from the brain surgery, 1.00
00:02:14.360 castration and electric shock treatment favoured by the scientific practitioners of the 20th century. 0.94
00:02:19.660 One thinks of the American psychiatrist Dr. Robert Galbraith Heath,
00:02:23.200 whose team implanted electrodes into the brains of patients,
00:02:27.000 which were then stimulated while the victims were shown heterosexual pornography.
00:02:30.860 Heath claimed to have successfully converted a gay man
00:02:35.160 and wrote a paper with his colleague Charles E. Moan
00:02:38.160 called
00:02:38.880 This was happening in England too.
00:02:46.220 In 2014, I performed in a show called Outings at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe,
00:02:51.100 in which verbatim testimonies of coming out stories were dramatised.
00:02:55.240 One of the scenes that had been submitted was by a Liverpudlian man,
00:02:58.720 who as a teenager in the 1960s was referred to doctors to an institution
00:03:03.380 where he was forced to look at pictures of naked men while drinking to excess
00:03:07.640 and being injected with substances that caused him to vomit. 0.99
00:03:11.220 These medical practitioners also applied electrodes to his penis. 0.99
00:03:15.020 Needless to say, it didn't work. 1.00
00:03:17.120 Another form of conversion therapy is the corrective rape of lesbians 1.00
00:03:21.420 to cure them of homosexual tendencies. 0.99
00:03:23.580 I recall one chilling account of a victim, Simpiwe Tandeka,
00:03:28.040 who was interviewed by the New York Times in 2013
00:03:30.160 as part of a piece about the epidemic of corrective rape in South Africa.
00:03:35.020 A tomboy in youth and a lesbian in adult life,
00:03:37.940 Simpiwe was raped on three occasions by an uncle 0.99
00:03:40.420 who then paid a friend to rape her multiple times and take her as a wife. 1.00
00:03:45.740 She was left pregnant by this man and HIV positive from her uncle. 0.95
00:03:49.420 Her mother and grandmother encouraged her to keep it a secret,
00:03:52.820 saying that it was a family matter and not to be spoken of again.
00:03:56.460 Now, such practices are, of course, already illegal in the UK.
00:03:59.620 So why are there so many calls for bans on conversion therapy,
00:04:02.780 even from members of the Conservative Party?
00:04:04.980 In the past, we've seen Labour politicians holding placards
00:04:07.760 calling for this trans-inclusive ban.
00:04:10.500 And now Starmer has confirmed that this is the official Labour position.
00:04:14.200 But what precisely does that mean?
00:04:15.980 In her book, Time to Think,
00:04:18.240 Hannah Barnes revealed that between 80 to 90% of adolescents
00:04:21.300 who were referred to the Tavistock Paediatric Gender Clinic
00:04:24.200 were same-sex attracted.
00:04:26.640 We have known for a long time that there is a strong correlation
00:04:29.300 between gender non-conformity in youth and being gay in adult life.
00:04:33.920 Members of staff at the Tavistock joked 0.81
00:04:36.320 that soon there would be no gay people left.
00:04:39.640 And whistleblowers revealed that homophobia was endemic. 0.95
00:04:42.600 In other words, children who are likely to grow up gay 0.52
00:04:45.380 are being fixed by medical practitioners
00:04:48.000 to better conform with stereotypical heterosexual paradigms.
00:04:52.700 Starmer's proposed trans-inclusive ban on conversion therapy
00:04:56.060 is therefore based on a misunderstanding.
00:04:58.760 It conflates the state-sanctioned torture of gay people in the past
00:05:02.540 with the important work of paediatricians
00:05:04.880 that support children who are struggling with their feelings.
00:05:08.620 Moreover, Barnes's research shows that the Tavistock Clinic
00:05:11.580 ignored evidence that 97.5% of children seeking sex changes
00:05:17.120 had autism, depression, or other problems
00:05:20.220 that might have explained their unhappiness.
00:05:22.580 With only 2% of the country's children suffering
00:05:25.040 from an autistic spectrum disorder,
00:05:27.000 why did 35% of referrals to the Tavistock
00:05:30.200 fit into this category?
00:05:32.200 In almost all instances, children who are prescribed puberty blockers
00:05:35.380 go on to cross-sex hormones,
00:05:37.100 which in some cases leads to irreversible surgery.
00:05:41.180 We're dealing overwhelmingly here
00:05:42.580 with gay and autistic children 0.97
00:05:44.560 fast-tracked onto a pathway to sterilization. 0.90
00:05:47.980 The Scottish government has already charged down this regressive path
00:05:51.460 via its consultation on banning conversion practices.
00:05:55.220 As Dennis Kavanagh has written,
00:05:56.600 It seeks to introduce a new criminal offence
00:05:59.640 which imposes liability for practices
00:06:01.940 that seek to change or suppress
00:06:03.960 a person's sexuality or gender identity.
00:06:07.400 This risks the criminalization of medical practitioners
00:06:10.040 who do not automatically take the gender-affirmative approach
00:06:14.240 and could see parents refer to social services
00:06:16.680 if they fail to support the social transitioning of the children,
00:06:20.680 that is, the practice of allowing children
00:06:22.500 to dress as the opposite sex 1.00
00:06:24.140 and be referred to by different names and pronouns.
00:06:27.080 Social transitioning has already been criticized
00:06:28.940 as not a neutral act in the interim Cass report,
00:06:33.280 whose conclusions led to the decision to close the Tavistock,
00:06:36.440 and could risk exacerbating feelings of gender dysphoria
00:06:39.200 that in most cases will just naturally resolve themselves.
00:06:42.560 The gender-affirmative approach favoured by clinics
00:06:45.140 across the Western world has already been widely debunked,
00:06:49.200 most notably in an open letter last July
00:06:51.080 to the Wall Street Journal by 21 leading experts
00:06:53.920 in paediatric gender treatment.
00:06:55.460 They were writing to oppose the view
00:06:57.500 that gender-affirming care is best for children
00:06:59.700 and pointed out that the common claim
00:07:01.660 that puberty blockers reduce the risk of suicide
00:07:04.040 is simply not backed up by the evidence.
00:07:07.000 Unsurprisingly, this letter went largely unreported.
00:07:10.240 And as for puberty blockers,
00:07:11.940 well, the interim Cass report found
00:07:13.480 that there's a lack of secure evidence for their safety.
00:07:16.620 Finland, Sweden and Norway have already implemented some restrictions,
00:07:19.720 and in March of this year,
00:07:21.840 the NHS announced that puberty blockers for children
00:07:24.180 in the treatment of gender dysphoria would be banned.
00:07:27.260 The risks of sterility, depression and lifelong regret are now clear.
00:07:33.300 But the Scottish government, of course, is doubling down,
00:07:35.960 and we are nowhere near banning these dangerous treatments
00:07:38.100 throughout the rest of the Anglosphere.
00:07:39.840 But why not?
00:07:40.660 Why are medical experts willing to experiment
00:07:43.700 on the most vulnerable in society
00:07:45.600 on the basis of intuition
00:07:47.420 that flies in the face of the evidence?
00:07:49.860 Studies show that in the vast majority of cases,
00:07:52.580 feelings of gender dysphoria in youth
00:07:54.340 are resolved by puberty.
00:07:56.560 So why are so many blocking the cure?
00:07:59.360 Thankfully, more and more people
00:08:00.500 are waking up to the scale of this problem.
00:08:02.700 Recently, there was a debate in the House of Lords
00:08:04.460 in which many of these concerns were raised.
00:08:06.180 And this debate was on the Conversion Therapy Prohibition Bill,
00:08:09.480 being championed by the Liberal Democrats.
00:08:11.540 Baroness Clare Fox was particularly strong 0.98
00:08:13.260 on the point of gender identity
00:08:14.640 and how the proposed legislation fails to define it.
00:08:18.340 Can I ask the noble Baroness Bert 0.70
00:08:20.640 how she defines gender identity
00:08:22.900 before she tried to embed it in UK law for the first time?
00:08:26.380 Is at best a contested concept?
00:08:28.880 I appreciate a precise fixed definition
00:08:31.120 might be tricky when this particular identity
00:08:33.580 can cover 100, 300 genders.
00:08:36.680 Transgender, gender fluid, gender queer,
00:08:39.620 gender variant, gender less, non-binary.
00:08:44.080 Were it not for the inherent austerity of the House of Lords,
00:08:47.040 she might well have added the identity category 0.93
00:08:48.980 of gender fuck, defined on LGBTQIA plus wiki 0.98
00:08:52.700 as a gender identity and or gender expression 0.98
00:08:56.100 where gendered expectations are deliberately played with
00:08:58.880 to combine gender-specific signals.
00:09:01.840 Make of that what you will.
00:09:02.900 And also recently,
00:09:04.420 the Equalities Minister Kemi Badenoch
00:09:06.040 wrote to the Commons Women and Equality Select Committee
00:09:08.840 about her discussions with former clinicians at the Tavistock.
00:09:12.260 And the conclusion?
00:09:13.520 So-called gender-affirmative care 0.98
00:09:15.360 amounts to conversion therapy for gay kids.
00:09:19.680 Crucially, she cited a survey of detransitioners, 0.55
00:09:22.840 those who are pressurised into transitioning
00:09:24.440 and later regret it,
00:09:26.220 in which 23% of respondents
00:09:27.940 put their experiences down to homophobia.
00:09:30.000 homophobia.
00:09:31.460 Badenoch quoted a gender clinic in Germany,
00:09:33.300 It must be understood that early hormone therapy
00:09:36.400 may interfere with the patient's development as a homosexual. 0.71
00:09:40.240 This may not be in the interests of patients who,
00:09:42.740 as a result of hormone therapy, 0.97
00:09:44.320 can no longer have the decisive experiences
00:09:46.420 that enable them to establish a homosexual identity.
00:09:49.720 It is profoundly disturbing that Starmer's Labour Party 0.56
00:09:53.040 is now officially supporting gay conversion therapy 0.97
00:09:55.880 in the form of a ban on trans-inclusive conversion therapy.
00:10:00.880 And in spite of the likes of Badenoch,
00:10:02.860 this is also the official policy of the Tory party.
00:10:06.380 In other words,
00:10:07.120 the promotion of gay conversion therapy 0.94
00:10:08.840 has cross-party support
00:10:10.660 from the likes of Alicia Kearns on the Tory side
00:10:13.440 and Lloyd Russell Moyle of Labour.
00:10:16.620 Kearns has even tabled an amendment
00:10:17.980 to the criminal justice bill
00:10:19.300 in the hope of criminalising doctors
00:10:21.280 who don't automatically affirm children's claims
00:10:24.360 that they are born in the wrong body.
00:10:26.300 A charitable interpretation
00:10:27.420 is that politicians like Kearns,
00:10:29.380 Russell Moyle and Starmer
00:10:30.440 simply do not understand the issues
00:10:32.880 behind these dangerously anti-gay proposals.
00:10:36.560 Homosexuality was removed 1.00
00:10:37.760 from the World Health Organisation's list
00:10:39.560 of psychiatric disorders in 1993.
00:10:43.460 And I'm pretty sure
00:10:44.200 that our likely next Prime Minister
00:10:46.100 doesn't sincerely believe
00:10:47.640 that gay people require medical treatment. 1.00
00:10:50.820 But if his policies are enacted,
00:10:52.800 his good intentions will count for nothing.
00:10:55.320 With all the information now freely available,
00:10:58.080 ignorance is no longer an excuse.
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