Trans rights are human rights!
by Hester Brown
SELHuG were outside Downing Street with Humanists UK and thousands of protestors on Sunday 10th April to protest at Boris’s cowardly policy – to ban conversion therapy for gay, lesbian and bi-sexual people but not for trans people.
It is not difficult to work out that if conversion therapy – aimed at making LGBT+ people renounce their sexuality and gender identity and ‘convert’ to being heterosexual and cisgender – is horrible and misguided for some people, it is for everyone.
As one trans protestor put it: “If it’s torture for them, it’s torture for us.”
This comes in the wake of a series of u-turns by the government – first to ban conversion therapy, then to allow it, and then to ban it for everyone except trans people.
The last decision led to over 120 LGBT+ and HIV groups withdrawing support for the government’s flagship LGBT+ rights conference, Safe To Be Me, leaving ministers with no choice but to cancel the event. And Iain Anderson, Britain’s LGBT+ business champion, resigned, accusing the government of fighting a “woke war”.
Johnson tried to argue that the issue was ‘complex’ but that is just bluster. His argument tries to elide conversion therapy with the sensitive discussion that needs to take place when children want to transition. There is no comparison.
PinkNews reported that the policy change was the brainchild of Andrew Griffith, the Tory MP brought in to replace Munira Mirza as head of the Downing Street policy unit.
