Labour's Conversion Practices Bill 'sneaks gender ideology into LAW' - Barrister's chilling warning

Under landmark new proposals parents, teachers and doctors could face up to five years in prison if they are found to have engaged in conversion practices relating to transgender identity or treatment. Campaigners argue that the draft conversion practices bill could risk criminalising conversations with concerns it may penalise parents and teachers for discussing or questioning a child's decision to pursue gender-related medical treatment. Well joining me now to discuss this is the barrister Dennis Kavanagh. Welcome to the show. Thank you very much. Dennis this bill has been around for a long time since sort of Theresa May days. It's now actually getting closer to reality. Yeah it's terrifying. This could be Labour's section 28 Josh. This is pure Stonewall law. Clause one of the bill is one of the widest clauses I've seen in a criminal statute. It says a person is guilty if they engage in any conduct, just any conduct at all, not abusive conduct. Ministers have been lying about this and saying it has to be abusive. Clause one doesn't say that. Any conduct if they have an intention of changing what the bill calls a transgender identity and the minister who promoted this bill, Olivia Bailey, who posted a picture. Is it them lying or is it them just not understanding their own bill? Who knows, who knows. I think the ministers are trying to put a spin on it to make out that it'll only catch abusive practices. It's not what the bill says. It says any conduct at all and the minister Olivia Bailey who posted a picture of herself with Stonewall and then deleted it from Twitter after the public reaction to it cited a Gallup report that said if a parent didn't use pronouns or a new name for a child that could under the bill. This is terrifying, absolutely terrifying. We have all sorts of cases, particularly before the family courts, where parents don't agree, for example, about whether or not a child should have irreversible medical treatments like puberty blockers or like cross-sex hormones. Now, query under this bill, if you said oh I'm not going to pay for puberty blockers, would that be economic pressure under the bill which is criminalised? If you said I'm not going to use your new pronouns, I'm not going to send you to gender GP, would that be controlling behaviour? We think yes, the bill is wide enough to do that because as I say, while ministers are going out and saying oh it's only abusive conduct, it's only the worst stuff will be caught, that's not what their own bill says. Clause one says any conduct and so that's wide, but it's also wide in that it sneaks gender identity into law but it calls it transgender identity and what it does, again in clause one, it says a transgender identity is anything that would qualify under the Equality Act, so what we would recognise as the protected characteristic, but then it's quite sneaky, it says but it's not limited to that. In addition to that, it says one of the identities it's protecting is someone saying they're neither male nor female, so it also sneaks non-binary into law, so it's pure identity politics, it's pure stonewall and we can laugh at it because it's quite a badly drafted bill, I don't think it's compliant with the human rights, but this is going to be terrifying for parents. If a child comes home and says I want you to call me they then, well according to the minister citing Gallup for support, failure to use pronouns could qualify under the bill and even if it didn't frankly, even if a jury didn't find you guilty, is this really what the Labour Party want to do? Do they want to drag parents through a criminal prosecution? Do they want to put parenting on trial? Do they want to be known as the government that imprisoned parents for not parenting the way they wanted to? Using the internet without a VPN, a virtual private network, is a bit like taking to the road without car insurance. All it takes is one unlucky moment to cost you a lot of cash. This video's sponsor is Private Internet Access. They are the VPN to help keep you safe. Click the link in the description below to find out why over 30 million people have downloaded PIA to protect themselves online. A virtual private network is an app that hides your IP address and helps keep your data private. 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Click the link in this video's description and you'll get a massive 83% off PIA. That's under two pounds a month, the price of a coffee and you'll get an extra four months completely free on top. Also there's a 30-day money-back guarantee too. Visit piavpn.com forward slash gbnews to start protecting yourself digitally today. Well isn't it that if there's a criminal case open that then social services have to step in. So there could be other children that would then potentially be taken away from their parents because of this. Yeah that's an excellent point Josh. As you probably know the barrister Sarah Fillimore, who is a family law expert, thinks yes that would happen. And her reasoning is this a local authority have to act under the Children Act where a child is at risk of significant harm. Now if one parent is accusing the other or if someone at school or a teacher or even if the child is the child themselves. Let's pass an act that turns children against parents shall we. If they do that and say that someone is committing a criminal offence against them that's causing them harm, which I'll say something about in a moment if I may, then a local authority in Sarah's opinion would have a duty under statute to intervene to either get a supervision order, which is where the local authority intervene in the children's life to check what's going on, or a care order which is where you would remove children from the parents. This is mad and just if I may circling back to the harm concept, ministers have been saying oh we're only going to catch serious harm. But if we look at clause two of the bill under you have to cause serious harm it then says or serious alarm or distress that has a serious substantially adverse effect on a person's day-to-day activities. Now look if you deny a child puberty blockers and this is very serious children are turning up to these clinics and they're desperate for them because they've been told online this is the solution to all their unhappiness. If you denied a teenager puberty blockers in those circumstances I think it's entirely possible that they would say I was seriously distressed by that and you know what I think I believe them that they probably were seriously distressed. That's enough to trigger this bill. That's enough to land you with a criminal prosecution. Well my son was seriously distressed my eight-year-old because I didn't allow him to go on a sleepover. Well Clive and how many how often does saying no particularly to a teenager cause serious distress? You know it's in the essence of parenting that you you do have to make decisions that are controlling. This bill says oh we're criminalising controlling behaviour and we've just taken that from the Controlling and Coercive Behaviour Act and that's not entirely true. Ministers have been saying that because the Controlling and Coercive Behaviour Act relates to adults in relationships. Parents are expected to control children some aspects of children's life and we call that safeguarding. If you're not controlling the medicine your child is getting off the dark web right as a parent you're probably failing as a parent but this bill says no that's controlling behaviour. I think the general public might see this go oh the conversion bill yes I think it's bad that that gay young men are told that they're evil and that they're being whipped because to sort of get the sin out of their skin or whatever it is those kind of things happen. I believe that sort of behaviour is already illegal but what they're doing is they're by putting the sort of TQ plus on to the LGB then they're basically really as you said making this more about trans ideology and legitimising it. This isn't about us as speaking as a gay man right there was a survey to try and find evidence of gay conversion in the United Kingdom. There was also a report by Coventry University that Malcolm Clarke has written extensively about they found three cases in 20 years and I have to say I do resent as a gay bloke quite often the trans activists will take our pain and our history right lesbians have in the past been correctively raped or married off or had their children taken away from them by family courts gay men like Alan Turing were chemically castrated with drugs that we now call puberty blockers which are given to we have a real history of pain here this has happened to us but yet again we're allowed nothing under this government we can't have anything of our own it has to be trans inclusive and I need the government to tell me well what is transgender conversion because if my child comes home and I think she's a lesbian for example and she says actually dad I want to cut my breasts off and I want cross-sex hormones and if I say to my child look I want you to grow up to be a happy lesbian right I don't want you to be a lifelong medical patient am I then guilty of committing any act with an intention to change her quote transgender identity I think I could be at risk under this act and you can see can't you that we know that in the 2012 patient survey the Tavistock 80 to 90 percent of the kids there were same-sex attracted so either gay lesbian or bi identifying 30 were autistic we shouldn't forget how this affects autistic children in all of this what's going on at the Tavistock or what went on at the Tavistock in my opinion was gay conversion therapy and as I think I've said to you before that was the view of lots of the staff there the Times famously reported there was a dark joke among Tavistock staff soon there will be no gay people left it's kind of stuff these guys joke about apparently but that sort of stuff now is this government going to remove the last line of defense when Sonia Appleby the head of safeguarding said I'm concerned that most of these kids seem to be just to be simply gay or when Dr David Bell said I'm concerned that mermaids are potentially convincing gay kids that they actually should be a straight impression of the alternative sex Dr Hilary Cassidy I believe made a speech just the about about a two and a half year old who is basically their parents kind of uh her parents basically trans this baby this this toddler yeah I mean we're through the looking glass here aren't we Josh and I understand that Baroness Cass spoke about that as if it was some sort of good thing um is there some sort of some sort of desirable thing I haven't watched it but that would be abusive behavior to me that would seem like that's abusive behavior that's the kind of legislation the government should be writing to prevent happening yeah well you know what sense of coherent identity does does a two and a half year old have Josh uh this is extraordinary and look at what this bill potentially does if you did anything to try and stop those parents bang you're guilty of a conversion practice so an act that says that it's going there to defend gay people is actually there to stop gay people being defended and not only is this act wide in terms of the terms that it uses I want to emphasize this as well two points if I may one this can be privately prosecuted right the government could have put in a failsafe called attorney general's permission to stop organizations like stonewall and other appalling gender organizations going after people but there's no safeguard here this could be privately prosecuted by activist groups who can go after people they could go after parents and more worryingly it contains a section further on in in the draft bill that says you can go after organizations as well and you can prosecute their directors or their part the members of the partnership or whatever and I think that's specifically been put in place to go after fantastic organizations that try and look after detransitioners and look after children I think that that is what it is about and I am deeply deeply deeply concerned that what we're going to do is take the gender debate and we're going to drive it into criminal courts and we're going to turn criminal courts into a battleground about this ideology and in the process bang up a load of parents ruin their lives set their children against their parents well the government you had the gut you had people from the government or and people MPs this week talking about asexuals talking about are they there but they genuinely seem to believe that they were doing something good here but this is the argument I guess would be that this is a legitimization as you said of of this ideology yeah but do you see that there could be any way this be this bill could be if if those clauses that you had talked about if they had if they tightened up the language is there any way that this bill could be saved that could do that it could do good I just don't see how you make it compliant with human rights Josh because we have an article 8 right yeah which is to private and life right and the way that that is interpreted generally by the family courts because we don't use it much in crime right is to say as long as you aren't harming your children there's a big there's loads of different ways to parent your kids I don't see how you make this act article 8 compliant I also don't see how you make it compliant with free speech if you're going to go after organizations who are exercising free speech in this area I also don't see how you make article 5 compliant which is just a quality of law about having definite terms and finally I don't see how you make it compliant with most religions to be honest now look I'm a gay bloke I'm not you know I'm not a fan of religions who have you know homophobic views but at the same time I'm not a fascist and I'm not going to go into synagogues and mosques and you know evangelical churches and tell them what to say this act potentially is completely removing religious freedom and ministers have not told the truth about that they've said you'll be free to practice your religion but there's no carve-out in this bill for religion so I don't think they'll be taking mosques to court well who knows who knows what happened what happens if there's a report I mean I guess you're right you've got to situate this I mean they might take out other religious institutions as well they might do and I guess if we put this bill into reality it's more likely one side will be arrested all the other well thank you so much and the interesting other point which you haven't really covered is why are they doing it now yeah that's another point there well big round of applause please for Barrister Dennis a government spokesperson said our proposed ban will categorically not prevent parents from choosing how to raise their children this is about preventing a very specific severe form of abuse not dictating how a parent or teacher supports a child's identity we are clear that health care providers will only be within the scope of the offense and if they fall far below the standards reasonably expected of a person in their position this will ensure they have clarity to work with confidence and mitigates against unintended chilling effects across wider health care provisions such as therapeutic or counseling spaces the critical threshold for conversion practices is abusive acts that aim to change someone's sexual orientation or transgender identity and seriously harms the victim later