On December 2nd last year, the day after the court judgment was handed down in the Keira Bell & Mrs A v Tavistock case, Transgender Trend received an email from the CEO of the UK Council of Psychotherapy (UKCP). Coincidentally, we had been composing a long letter of concern to the Chair, CEO and all Board members of UKCP on the subject of the development of the most recent version of the Memorandum of Understanding on Conversion Therapy. This letter we eventually sent on December 8th.
The content of the email surprised us in one way (they had read our blog post about the court judgment or someone had alerted them) but the request about the blog content within the email did not surprise us at all:
“We refer to your article at https://www.transgendertrend.com/keira-bell-high-court-historic-judgment-protect-vulnerable-children/. For the purposes of clarification the Memorandum of Understanding on Conversion Therapy is a joint document signed by 20 health, counselling and psychotherapy organisations. UKCP is one of the 20 signatories.
In view of the above, we trust you will remove the inaccurate reference to it being “the UKCP Memorandum of Understanding on Conversion Therapy”?”
We were not surprised at this request because we already knew that UKCP were trying to hide any connection with the Memorandum of Understanding on Conversion Therapy version 2 (MOU2) which included ‘gender identity’.
We wrote ‘the UKCP Memorandum of Understanding’ because we were well aware of UKCP’s central role in organising the review at which the decision had been passed to include ‘gender identity’ in the MOU. It was to UKCP that we directed our correspondence at the time because of their leadership of the Review. Indeed UKCP had proudly boasted on their website that they had brought all the signatories together. This web page has since been deleted, along with all others referencing involvement with MOU2 on the UKCP website.
Transgender Trend had been involved with this issue since we first heard of the proposal to add ‘gender identity’ to the existing Memorandum of Understanding. The original MOU of 2015 had established a professional code in opposition to gay conversion therapy. We were very concerned at the proposal to add ‘gender identity’ to a document designed to protect gay and lesbian people from conversion therapy because we knew that the addition of ‘gender identity’ would put gay and lesbian children and young people at risk of exactly that.
Already we were seeing stories in the press about effeminate boys being ‘affirmed’ as girls when the greatest likelihood would be that they would grow up to be gay as adults if left alone in childhood.
We knew that gay and lesbian adolescents were particularly susceptible to the idea that they may be ‘trans’ because of their gender non-conformity and the fact that they may be experiencing homophobic bullying while struggling themselves to accept their sexual orientation.
We knew that the addition of ‘gender identity’ to the Memorandum of Understanding would effectively mandate ‘affirmation’ as the only approach towards children with gender dysphoria within the counselling professions. We were already hearing from parents that counsellors and therapists would only ‘affirm’ their child while necessary mental health support was denied them as soon as they declared themselves to be ‘trans.’
Our fears were well-founded.
With the addition of ‘gender identity’ the Memorandum of Understanding on Conversion Therapy is no longer a professional code to protect gay and lesbian people from conversion therapy, its original purpose. A code to protect gay and lesbian people is now a code that puts them at risk. The new MOU (MOU2) in fact is not about conversion therapy at all.
The function of the Memorandum of Understanding on Conversion Therapy now is:
- To ensure no other outcome but ‘transgender’ for all young people with gender dysphoria, through outlawing any approach except ‘affirmation’.
- To silence all opposition
And it doesn’t stop there. The evolution of the Memorandum of Understanding continues to develop further towards the extremes of the trans/queer activist manifesto.
The story of how a semi-legal document binding all practitioners within the counselling professions became an activist mandate designed by an unaccountable network of trans/queer theorists with no professional qualifications can now be told.
Researcher Shelley Charlesworth has painstakingly put together all the pieces of the jigsaw. The story is shocking. The result of this report must be an open transparent enquiry into how UK professional bodies allowed themselves to be captured by an activist network pushing an extreme ideological and political agenda.
Lessons must be learned to ensure that this can never happen again.
Far too many young people like Keira Bell have been harmed already.
Read the full shocking expose here. Click on the image for your FREE PDF DOWNLOAD.
WOW! well done for putting this together and bringing it to public attention –
these people promoting this homophobic and willful destruction of young peoples bodies is criminal.
I hope they are sued.
Yes, and given that genital mutilation is a criminal offence, I hope they are prosecuted.
The term ‘conversion therapy’ makes sense for sexual orientation. It does not make sense for the mental dysfunction of gender dysphoria. Do we collude with other forms of gender dysphoria, e.g. do we refuse to treat the anorexic, but instead help them to eat less and less? Do we encourage the self-harmer to cut more? I don’t think so. All these contemptible medics have washed their hands of helping the gender dysphoric person, crying as they do ‘Primum nocere’. Why? Are they mad, bad or scared? Some of each, I guess.
Thanks Shelley Charlesworth! Thanks Transgender Trends! So much hard work – and I bet they keep intimidating everyone with lawsuits… yet you still won’t be quiet. You keep lawfully using the democratic system to stop these unsafe practices and dangerous ideology. Well done!