Alex Phillips: We really need to talk about conversion therapy

Unless you are a medieval brute or ardent religious fanatic, you probably wholly agree that Gay Conversion Therapy was a whole world of wrong.

Gay people being encouraged to self flagellate, agree to be tortured, even raped, often drugged and performing superstitious exorcism like rituals is the stuff of witchcraft, not modern medicine in a tolerant society.

And so we should all applaud the Government’s enthusiasm to rush through legislation outlawing the barbaric practice. Or should we?

Because the Government have apparently become so eager to wokely appease the new Bete Noire of a truly tolerant society in the form of Stonewall, the once pioneering organisation for gay equality that has latterly become the blinkered blight on long held women's right's, that it has foolhardily slashed legal consultation time for a sleight of new laws from a full twelve weeks to just six, forcing what may turn out to be critical small print to be swept along with the rising tide of vacuous virtue signalling.

As so much of their slapdash policy seems to do. But this time, it’s tragically serious.

Because the new legislation also includes valid treatment of the 21st century’s trendiest condition, body dysphoria. Why does this matter?

Well, unlike permitting perverse quack therapies that purport to somehow make homosexual people straight, the treatment for patients presenting with questions about their gender identity is, quite rightly, initiated psychologically, given that the matter is an entirely mental one.

The NHS already mandates that anybody who questions their sex should be automatically affirmed and encouraged to begin the pathway to transition rather than undergo counselling to explore the psychological landscape of their condition and seek to reverse it.

If this becomes enshrined in law, any therapist who wishes to assist a patient with counselling to treat their dysphoria with the end goal of being at ease with their sex at birth could be accused of committing a crime.

Now add that into a context where despite historically the incidence of gender dysphoria being three times more prevalent among men than women, an astronomical spike in online encouragement of young women to bind their breasts, reject their gender and solve their problems by physically transitioning to become male, means that a worldwide phenomenon has very recently occurred where the three quarters of patients presenting with rapid onset dysphoria, or a sudden conviction that you're in the wrong body - are now girls.

Without being able to psychologically treat the condition, which often comes with a tapestry of other concerns from anxiety and depression, autism to self harm, patients who say I think I was born the wrong gender will only be allowed treatment that essentially affirms this belief and starts them on an irreversible pathway to cutting off their breasts, breaking their voice, developing permanent body hair and likely rendering themselves infertile.

While there are many patients for whom transition may be the answer, when treated psychologically, a staggering 80% of those with dysphoria will come to terms with their natal sex without having to resort to major and permanent, dangerous and invasive surgical procedures to treat what is a mental and not physical condition.

It seems to me we are pushing vulnerable girls to the brink of sanity, where culture and society forces them to question their developing bodies, where in an increasingly sexualised and misogynistic world reinforces that it is far better to be a man, while then yanking away the only lifeline they had to getting the help they really need by instead pushing them in the direction of permanently becoming men.

It’s not a sick dystopian dream, this is modern Britain, and decisions the government makes right now could condemn a whole cohort of young people to a life of suffering.

As the consultation on the conversion therapy ban comes to a close in a matter of days, today, we really need to talk about conversion therapy.