Links - 8th September 2026 (Diversity [including University Admissions/the SAT])

Steve McGuire on X - "Berkeley math professor:  “Today, the more successful a public high school is at preparing its students, the lower its graduates' chances of getting into top UC campuses like Berkeley and San Diego.”  Berkeley admitted 45% of applicants from a high school where nearly 94% of “students failed to meet the state standards in mathematics.”  It admitted less than 14% of applicants from a school where “nearly 100 percent of its students in AP Calculus BC pass the national exam with a perfect score of 5.”"
Steve McGuire on X - "Another Berkeley professor told the author: “In my second-year engineering class, a student asked me to explain why 1/2 + 1/3 = 5/6…. The lecture had to stop while I explained fractions.”"
Timothy Bates on X - "Same in Scotland since ~2003. In one recent year, 100% (!!) of law school entrants at Edinburgh were selected from the bottom quintile of parental/postcode socioeconomic status. Zero chance for 80% of families and highly capable young people. Private education, home ownership, parental education sum to dwarf any remaining variance in leaving exams which have near 100% pass rates. Probably fine…"
Weird. We're told that high school grades predict college success better than SAT score

Jeffrey P. Clemens on X - "Thinking about this issue as an economist, I think an underappreciated dimension is that the absence of the SAT/ACT in the college application process is itself a cause of K-12 grade inflation.   The absence of the SAT made grade inflation a more powerful lever through which high schools could increase the rates at which their students were admitted to highly ranked UCs. This made grade inflation more attractive both as a matter of strategy and out of genuine sympathy from high school teachers and administrators for their students.   Of course, admissions in the face of fixed college class sizes is a zero sum game. So in the end, grade inflation becomes less a way to "give your students a leg up" and more a way to "avoid holding them back" once "everyone else is doing it.""

Jelani Nelson on X - "One motivation to ban SAT/ACT in UC admissions was to eliminate perceived bias against black and latino students. But the biggest shift by banning the SAT was a transfer of admit seats from Asian students to white: https://t.co/MUDsL2CSk1 E->F, rows 12-19."
i/o on X - "No, the main motivation was to eliminate evidence that could be used in lawsuits against UC when it engaged in anti-Asian and anti-white admissions discrimination.  Since high school GPA is becoming increasingly uninformative as an indicator of intelligence, removing the most reliable indicator (standardized tests) was essential. Because the more colleges rely on measures that strongly correlate to general intelligence, the smaller the representation of blacks and Hispanics in their student bodies — that is, the farther the modern elite university gets from its main mission (to increase "diversity")."
Weird. The "experts" told us that high school GPA predicted college success better than the SAT

New York Post on X - "UC professors forced to teach 'middle school math' after SAT ban"
Liz4SF on X - "Zero common sense, let’s do away with SATs bc it’s racist. UC regents should all be fired, along with/ racist admissions committees, where Asian kid w/ 4.42 Weighted GPA & 1590 on SAT cant get u admissions to UC SD, UC SB, Davis nor Irvine   “More than 500 professors signed an open letter saying they’ve been forced to teach “middle school” math in Calculus and other courses as incoming students are alarmingly unprepared for college-level coursework.”"
Weird. The "experts" told us that the SAT was useless for predicting college performance

Neetu Arnold on X - "University of California STEM professors want standardized tests back due to severe math deficiencies among students: “We now observe preparation gaps so severe that instructors must reteach middle school mathematics” “The current admissions metric, based primarily on GPA & essays, can no longer reliably distinguish readiness for university-level STEM majors in an era of severe grade inflation & AI assisted application essays”"
John Loeber on X - "There are several interesting things going on here.
 (1) The UCs were long known for their high standards, in particular UC Berkeley and UCLA as their flagships: in general, if you hired one of their graduates (especially an in-state student), you were getting a smart and ambitious employee. This contract is now broken. The signal doesn't work anymore.  When the world updates for this fact, things get worse for them: out-of-state students will be less likely to want to pay the tuition, employers will be more skeptical, and they will have a harder time getting the best talent. This is a negative feedback loop.  It's weird that this happened because organizations are usually much more self-preserving. Universities live and die by their reputations. Perhaps they thought that dropping the SAT and (this is the subtext) admitting students quasi-randomly would gain them political brownie points, but to what end? Looking back: what was the point of all this?
(2) The SAT was the final load-bearing beam in this entire system. High school grades used to mean something, but grade inflation has wiped this out. Application essays? A whole industry of ghostwriters and now AI has winnowed the signal to zero. Teacher recommendations? When they matter so disproportionately much, they'll be bought and paid for. (The failure pattern is the same: much like how the universities have sacrificed their long-term credibility for short-term gain, I'd wager that many schools and teachers have done the same.)   Parents used to defer to teachers and schools as experts, but the competitive environment has made parents become forcefully involved -- threatening, cajoling, bribing to get their students ahead. Schools never had the resources to defend themselves against this.  Many people -- especially those below the SAT median -- probably thought that they would be better-off in a world of no tests, that they'd be able to get some relative advantage. Nobody would know they're in the 30th percentile, and maybe they could sneak by and pass for 80th. That may have been so in the short term, but the price is becoming clear now: the whole system is broken. (This is frequently the case when people try to turn fair games into rigged or opaque ones: the people who think they're going to win because of their new advantage tend not to see the whole picture, and will overestimate their expected position in the new world.)
Maybe you were an activist parent and managed to help force the UCs to get rid of standardized testing. And maybe your low-test kid got admitted to Berkeley. And maybe they even graduated with a 4.0. But you can't keep stacking the Ponzi scheme forever, eventually you get the reality test: they can't get a job and now you're stuck holding the bag on the student debt. A pointless waste."

Meme - el gato malo @boriquagato: "the university of california dropped the SAT and the preparedness of STEM freshmen plummeted so precipitously that they were having to reteach middle school math. and from this you learn "we should drop the MCAT from med school?" this certainly seems likely to improve the diversity of poor medical outcomes..."
"Removing the MCAT Could Improve Diversity in Medicine I Opinion. TYLER HARVEY, PUBLIC HEALTH RESEARCHER AND HEALTH EQUITY SCHOLAR"

Neetu Arnold on X - " Humanities professors unite w/ STEM faculty, demanding the University of California reinstate the SAT “We call for the UC Academic Senate and the UC Regents to give up the failed experiment of the last 6 years & return to including both the math & the verbal reasoning components of SAT/ACT as part of undergraduate admissions”"

Los Angeles Times on X - "UC Davis favored less qualified Black, Latino med school applicants, Justice Department claims"
i/o on X - ""claims" There has not been, to my knowledge, a single reasonably selective major university in the US in over a half-century that has admitted black applicants who were, on average, as academically qualified (measured by SAT/GPA) as white applicants. Not one."

Steve McGuire on X - "Columbia University has reinstated standardized testing for admissions — the last Ivy League school to do it. “Through a multi-year faculty review, it was determined that test scores, among other factors, were a useful indicator of potential student success.”"
Werner Zagrebbi on X - "Columbia had justified keeping test-optional with an unpublished study concluding that the policy "did not lead to a diminishment of the academic performance of admitted classes or the academic success of enrolled students"—sureeee!  GPA-wise, non-submitters as a group correspond to the bottom 3% of the submitter distribution.   About time."

Holistic Admissions Criteria Favor the Rich - "while it is true that children from the richest families have better academic qualifications than the population overall, it is not true that this fully explains their greater representation in the top universities. After controlling for test scores, the richest kids are admitted at more than twice the rate as the population overall. Notably, this admissions boost is found among the 12 Ivy-Plus schools analyzed in the study, but not at flagship public universities. Despite what some think, the overrepresentation of the rich at the top universities is not driven solely or even primarily by legacy preferences. According to the paper, after controlling for test scores, legacy preferences explain about 30 percent of the surplus rich attendees, while higher application rates, higher matriculation rates, better nonacademic credentials, and athlete preferences explain the remaining 70 percent. If you take application rates and matriculation rates out of the equation, leaving only the factors related to how universities make admissions decisions, legacy preferences account for 46 percent of the surplus rich attendees while better nonacademic credentials account for 30 percent, and athlete preferences account for the remaining 24 percent.  A debate has raged for many years about how much weight to put on test scores versus grades and nonacademic factors. One popular view that has emerged on the left is that test scores should be augmented, if not entirely replaced, by more holistic considerations like personal statements, extracurricular activities, recommendations, and things of that nature. This view appears to be primarily motivated by the belief that such augmentation will benefit kids from poorer families.  The alternative view is that these holistic considerations actually favor the rich more because the rich will tend to accumulate better recommendations, more extracurricular activities, and even better grades because they have more information and are more strategic about preparing a college resume.   This study suggests that the alternative view is the correct one. When comparing students with similar test scores, every other consideration — including academic ratings (grades), non-academic ratings (extracurriculars), guidance counselor recommendations, and teacher recommendations — favors the rich, with extracurriculars and recommendations especially favoring the rich. If the goal is to eliminate the extent to which rich kids are overrepresented at top universities relative to their test scores, the study points to the existence of some fairly straightforward ways to do so. Legacy and athlete preferences can be zapped immediately. Non-academic factors like recommendations and extracurriculars could be hugely down-weighted or eliminated entirely. Other targeted encouragement could increase the application and matriculation rates of the non-rich.  But this is really not the goal of top universities. These schools already have vastly more qualified applicants than they have seats. If they wanted to create classes that were more socioeconomically balanced, they could already do so from their current applicant pool. They choose not to because their goal is, in part, to run the nation's elite families through their institutions in order to increase their endowments and power in society... many people seem to be interested in these institutions because they think that they are important pieces of our higher education system when that just is not the case. According to the study, the 12 Ivy-Plus schools have an average admissions class of 1,650 and admit around 157 more rich kid than they ought to based on test scores alone. This means that, between these schools, there are around 1,884 seats being misallocated to the rich every year. By comparison, around 4 million kids are admitted at undergraduate institutions in a given year.  The kids who are elbowed out by the 1,884 non-deserving rich kids still attend college, just at a 98th percentile institution, not a 99th percentile institution. The quality of the educational services they receive does not differ, though the prestige, status, and career opportunities made available by their institution does."
Clearly, since we know that standardised test scores just reflect socio-economic status, the solution is to let people in by a lottery

A Personal Case for College Admissions Exams - "Expensive test preparation basically consists of taking practice exams and then reviewing what you got wrong. This can be done inexpensively on your own and it's not clear that it actually increases scores all that much...   Low-income kids are underrepresented at the top of the test-score distribution just as they are underrepresented at the top of pretty much any other indicator of educational attainment and academic ability. Being poor is disadvantageous in a lot of ways when it comes to excelling academically.  But the top of the test-score distribution is not completely devoid of low-income kids. There are fewer of them than there would be in a random draw, but they do exist. For those kids in particular, the test is often the best and sometimes only way that they can prove their abilities and show that they actually are more capable than their richer peers...   There is a reason why the scandals surrounding the SAT and ACT generally take the form of rich people paying a ringer to fraudulently take the test for their kid. It's because dim rich kids can't outcompete brighter poor kids in that specific arena."

Tyler Austin Harper on X - "I go back and forth re standardized tests, but like Matt I benefited greatly from the SAT/GRE as a working class kid. The rich are great at throwing money at every element of the admissions process, but it’s probably right that SATs are the most privilege-proof of the criteria."
Steve Sailer on X - "We need to invest in making the SAT/ACT more Tiger Mother-proof. There's evidence that the SAT before they started fiddling with it in 1995 was much better than it is now. Practically every change made since then to benefit the Diverse has instead rewarded Asian test preppers:"
Charles Murray on X - "More precisely, it rewarded systematic test prep, period, and it turns out that the people who work the hardest on test prep are Asian students and the white children of the affluent who want to get into elite schools.   Want to know what the hardest-to-prep-for kind of question is? Analogies. Vocabulary is a close second. Yes, you can try to memorize vocabulary lists, but the real edge goes to young people who reflexively try to figure out what an unfamiliar word means when they encounter one. It's a strong signal of...you guessed it...cognitive ability. The College Board dropped both analogies and vocabulary."

Progressivism and the police - "In 2021, the Metropolitan Police recruited new officer, PC Cliff Mitchell, who they knew had previously been accused of raping a child. Part of the reason he was able to slip through vetting was because of the colour of his skin. Mitchell would later be convicted of 13 counts of rape, including six against a child... Mitchell was far from the only beneficiary. Of the recruits whose cases were reviewed and had their original vetting decision overturned, more than a fifth went on to commit misconduct or be accused of a criminal offence... there are only really two options at play: either the Met believes their vetting officers are racists, or the force is willing to lower its standards for ethnic minority recruits. Which is it?   In a sign that this was not an aberration confined to the Met, a document issued jointly by the Home Office, the College of Policing and the National Police Chiefs’ Council in September 2021 pronounced the Panel to be “good practice”...   In the decade following the Macpherson report, progressivism within policing progressed relatively slowly... It was the arrival in 2010 of the Conservative-led coalition government which placed rocket boosters under the diversity, equality and inclusion agenda within policing. Keen to present themselves as no longer the “nasty party”, with David Cameron having advocated a more loving approach to youthful miscreants in 2006...   It was David Lammy’s review which would later lead to two-tier sentencing proposals that would have made it less likely for certain “disadvantaged” groups to be given a prison sentence after being convicted of a crime. As prime minister, Theresa May launched a government audit to “tackle racial disparities in public service outcomes”. The announcement included reference to her project as Home Secretary to reduce the number of black people who were stopped and searched by the police.  It was also during this period that the institutions that would become the cultural homes of the diversity, equality and inclusion industry within policing were created...   Several police forces started to show themselves willing to break the law in the drive to advance the cause. In 2017 an applicant to join Cheshire Police, who was praised following his interview as being particularly “well prepared”, was rejected because he was a white, heterosexual man. The Force claimed the Equality Act 2010, the last hurrah of the Labour government, gave them the right to do so under the “equal merit provisions”.  An employment tribunal disagreed, declaring the approach to be unlawful and stating that the force approached the recruitment process with a “radicalness” that was “stark”. Thames Valley Police lost an employment tribunal because in 2022 it had passed over three white officers for promotion in favour of a female ethnic minority officer. One senior officer told another to “make it happen” despite being warned about the risks of not holding a competitive process.  It is difficult to believe that these cases are rare exceptions. Such legal rebukes appear to have done little to stymie the careers of those involved. The acting chief constable at the time of the Cheshire case later went on to become the national programme director for the recruitment of 20,000 police officers by Boris Johnson’s government. At least one of the senior officers directly involved in the Thames Valley case has since been promoted.   Neither was this isolated to merely internal issues — the progressivist agenda expanded into operational policing, too. The growth in the recording of Non-Crime Hate Incidents, which led to the police vigorously investigating incidents which Parliament had not prohibited whilst apparently ignoring burglaries and shoplifting, is perverse but was just one of the consequences of the new doctrine.  Similarly, embedding in policing practice the prioritisation of certain “communities” above a focus on serving the wider public — with the secretive consultation of “community leaders” considered sine qua non in the planning of any operational police activity — was no less malignant. The recent West Midlands Police–Maccabi Tel Aviv scandal, which led to the departure of the force’s chief constable, demonstrates the disastrous consequences of such an approach...   Post-BLM policing represents the ultimate victory of progressivism over any vestige of British policing’s traditions of impartiality and acting “without fear or favour”. It applies in every domain of policing — including who gets recruited, promoted, searched, arrested, prosecuted or consulted. No longer is diversity merely one consideration amongst several. Any disproportionality is considered evidence of discrimination.   In some cases, it appears the pre-eminence of those from “under-represented” groups, whatever the impact, is considered a moral imperative. Any failure to demonstrate sufficiently enthusiastic levels of “allyship” by those in policing is deemed proof of an individual’s personal, and potentially racist, deficiency. There is little room for dissent, with those in policing who are ambitious to progress knowing they must acquiesce to the new rituals.   At the heart of determining what is legitimate in the post-BLM policing world, alongside many of the most corrosive developments of the last two decades, are policing’s human resources departments. Detached from the realities of the operational frontline yet steeped in the doctrines of diversity, equality and inclusion these bureaucrats have become the internal arbiters of the “right values”.   The diversity, equality and inclusion industry promised a fairer form of policing. What it has delivered is a weaker one. It can be seen on our high streets and in our villages, towns and cities that we now have a police force that is less confident, less capable and less trusted by the public... Most police chiefs over the last three decades have been one of a combination of enthusiastic supporters, sycophantic careerists or so weak in their opposition to the progressivist cult as to be irrelevant.  The police do not exist to manage “community cohesion” or to perfectly represent society. They exist to protect it by impartial service to, and enforcement of, the law."
We are still told that the Tories were right wing and that DEI is to ensure anyone who is not a straight white man can get a job

Lydia Moynihan on X - "SCOOP: Woman who emptied Knicks trashcan on street— then stole it — fired from JPMorgan Chase, was DEI exec"
Matt Walsh on X - "Well obviously. One look at this woman and you knew there were only three options: unemployed, DEI executive, or government employee. She was the second, now she’ll be the first, soon she’ll probably be the third."
Matthew Williams on X - "She's a DEI exec, this is literally her job on a civilizational level."

Scott Robertson on X - "Carney: Canada is a mosaic, not a melting pot. And this is the distinction that matters. Because a mosaic doesn't dissolve or blend its pieces. Each is stitched to each and all the pieces hold all. And the beauty is in the arrangement, not in the blending."
Simen on X - "I hope people realize that this particular conception of multiculturalism, which has become predominant in the West as of late, is completely utopian. In fact, it is the latest great Utopian project to come out of the West (joining a long line of past failed schemes).  First off, the analogy is flawed. A mosaic is the product of top-down work, not bottom-up spontaneous order from cultural anarchy. (This is important).  Secondly, it is in the nature of things for people to blend together, and so the only way to preserve some “mosaic” fantasy is by reifying and propping up tribal delineations. Of course ethnic identity politics does some of this (as we’ve seen in the last decades). But to sustain it longer you need to reproduce something à la the Ottoman millet system (only woke).   There are of course signs of such things going on, not just with extra-official religious courts, but by officially sanctioned and enshrined discrimination. Remember that the heart of Kendian Anti-Racism, which we saw guided British police into the Nowak case, is that to be “blind” to ethnic identities and treat people the same is bad. Hence you need to treat groups differently to have “equity”. But how is this working out? Does Britain look very stable? Meanwhile, the populist right — the reaction to this project — is surging like a tide across Europe. John Gray is good on this.   Now, the entire idea is clearly a misunderstanding of the American project. America assimilates better than any nation on earth. Any particularism is as shallow as a puddle. There’s a reason America is the only great multicultural democracy to succeed, and that is because it assimilates intensely. Its “cultures” (except African American culture) are merely accessories. Irish Americans or Italian Americans are just American, which is obvious when they visit Ireland or Italy.  The idea of turning dusty old nation-states, that have undergone centuries of nationalistic development, into a fantasy picture of New York City is clearly extremely… ambitious. It is also probably a liberal fantasy picture of imperial cosmopolitanism, but as indicated with the Ottoman example, this doesn’t work with liberalism.   It’s amazing that a mere 30 years after Yugoslavia imploded into sectarian violence, the idea has suddenly become to build Yugoslavia from scratch, on steroids, only somehow make it work this time. “If only they were liberal and progressive like us, everyone would surely live in harmony!”. And bear in mind Yugoslavia at least had the idea of a unifying pan-nationalism. Mosaic multiculturalism has nothing, except the empty phrase “our values”.   So to conclude, this project is intensely utopian, and I suspect it will turn out like all utopian projects, very badly. Then the Western elite and intellectuals will learn nothing, and it’s on to a new utopian project. This is what happens when you don’t know your own history of ideas."
Simen on X - "Partially I also think it’s because these imbeciles confuse multi-racial with multi-cultural. You can easily have a multiracial country through liberal nationalism, without it being “multicultural” in this utopian sense. Also, I am convinced most of these people envision multiculturalism as “more food”. I remember a classic NYT report from a terror attack where it said “the street was famous for its rich restaurant diversity” or whatever."

Tolerance of Islamism in Canada threatens LGBT rights

Adam Zivo: Tolerance of Islamism in Canada threatens LGBT rights  | National Post
The hostility many immigrants feel towards LGBT people is neither an abstract nor trivial problem

The greatest threat to LGBT rights in the West is not the “far right,” as some claim, but rather Islamism and insufficient emphasis on shared values. Yet, many progressives, including “queer” activists, refuse to acknowledge this reality and are inadvertently throwing gender and sexual minorities under the bus.

It should be intuitively obvious that when large numbers of immigrants arrive from largely homophobic countries, without being pressured to adopt Canadian values, they will often retain their homeland’s backwards prejudices. This is especially true if they live within ethnic ghettos that allow them to maintain parallel societies and resist integration.

There is ample data substantiating this hypothesis throughout the West, with Canadian research going as far back as the mid 2000s. However, studies into immigrant and Muslim homophobia largely dried up after 2020, when it became increasingly taboo to raise these kinds of social critiques.

One pioneering 2006 study, published by Citizenship and Immigration Canada, found that recent Canadian immigrants were 2.5 times more likely than native-born citizens to object to having homosexuals as neighbours (33.9 versus 13.3 per cent, respectively). Another 2019 poll conducted by Research Co. similarly found that, while 71 per cent of European-Canadians supported same sex marriage, approval was much lower among East Asians and South Asians (44 and 42 per cent, respectively).

Meanwhile, a 2013 study published in Comparative Migration Studies, which analyzed polling data gathered two years earlier, found that, compared to the overall population, Muslim Canadians were three times less likely to support same-sex marriage (21 vs 63 per cent), and roughly four times more likely to oppose any recognition of same-sex relationships (47 vs 12 per cent).

Another 2016 poll conducted by the Environics Institute for Survey Research found that only 36 per cent of Canadian Muslims believed that homosexuality should be accepted by society, while 43 per cent did not. For context: a 2013 poll conducted by the same institute found that 80 per cent of all Canadians believed society should accept homosexuality, with only 14 per cent opposed.

More recently, Canada’s 2025 Survey of Safety in Public and Private Spaces found that support for gender nonconformity was noticeably lower among citizens who were foreign born, Arab, Black or Chinese.

European and American researchers have discovered similar trends in their own regions.

A 2016 poll by ICM Research infamously found that, within Britain, 52 per cent of Muslims believed that homosexuality should be illegal in the country — a shocking number, especially considering that only five per cent of the general population felt the same way.

Another 2022 study, published in the International Journal of Intercultural Relations, examined data gathered from 18,058 students in four European countries (Germany, England, Sweden and the Netherlands) between 2010 and 2013. They concluded that ethnic minorities were more homophobic than general society, especially if they were Muslim.

A 2021 study published by Migration Studies, another peer-reviewed academic journal, analyzed survey data from thousands of Norway’s secondary students in 2016, and found that homophobia was markedly higher among those with Middle Eastern or African parents, followed by those with Balkan parents. Almost a third of students with Pakistani parents believed that homosexuality is “never acceptable,” for example, while only 2.8 per cent of students with Norwegian parents felt similarly.

In the United States, the 2025 American Values survey found that only 37 per cent of Muslim respondents supported same-sex marriage, as opposed to 65 per cent of the general population, suggesting that the chasm between attitudes has not closed in recent years.

While some of these aforementioned studies found that immigrants and Muslims become more accepting of homosexuality over time, this was consistently described as a slow process that generally does not lead to an alignment with majoritarian values.

The hostility many immigrants and Muslims feel towards LGBT people is neither an abstract nor trivial problem, because it occasionally leads to violence.

The 2016 Orlando Pulse Nightclub shooting, wherein an American Islamist killed 49 people at a gay club, is considered a seminal example, even if some later disputed whether the assailant was driven by homophobia. Unfortunately, it appeared to mark the beginning of a trend.

In 2022, an Iranian-born Norwegian man, described by police as a radical Islamist, committed a mass shooting at an Oslo gay bar, killing two and injuring 25 others. The next year, Austrian police arrested three Islamists who, having pledged loyalty to the Islamic State (IS), were plotting a jihadist attack against Vienna Pride. And then, in 2024, American officials warned that terrorists, instigated by IS, were possibly planning attacks on Pride events worldwide.

Earlier this year, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation reported that networks of young Muslim men — including many Islamic State sympathizers — have been fuelling a wave of anti-LGBT violence throughout the country. In at least 36 prosecuted cases, these individuals used dating apps to lure gay men into secluded areas, then brutally assaulted and humiliated them on camera.

In 2024, Berlin’s police chief made international headlines when she cautioned gay people (and Jews) to “be vigilant” when traversing certain Arab-majority neighbourhoods, due to high levels of support for Islamist terror groups. In a recent Swiss news story, a gay couple explained that they were leaving Berlin, their home of several decades, due to growing Islamist hostility, and said that a local Muslim had told them: “It’s good that you’re leaving, Islam will soon rule here.”

It’s clear that, when it comes to LGBT rights, integration efforts throughout the west need to be strengthened. This doesn’t mean that anyone should be coerced into accepting particularly contentious ideas (e.g. gender ideology), but it is reasonable to demand support for basic human rights — no misguided attachment to “multiculturalism” can negate this social responsibility or excuse barbarism.

Further, there needs to be more research on immigrant- and Muslim-driven homophobia, especially given the lack of recent data in Canada. It cannot be taboo to discuss or investigate this problem, which cannot be addressed until it is properly understood.

Unfortunately, many LGBT activists have chosen to remain wilfully blind, and have dismissed these concerns as “homonationalism.” The aforementioned surge in Australian assaults, for example, has been conspicuously ignored by major gay media outlets that otherwise cover hate crimes with great enthusiasm (especially those associated with Western conservative politics).

For many progressives and gay activists, homophobia isn’t worth discussing if the perpetrator does not fit their preferred profile.

The homophobic folly of banning ‘conversion therapy’

A former recipient and opponent of conversion therapy explains how trans mania is the true conversion therapy and homophobic, gives another example of how trans mania took over the gay rights movement (with lies about the author, to boot) and documents another instance of the slippery slope between gay rights and trans mania: 

The homophobic folly of banning ‘conversion therapy’ - spiked

"If the goal of legal bans on so-called conversion therapy – or in Britain’s case, a ban on ‘conversion practices’ – is to help end harmful treatments of same-sex attracted people, then these bans are not only failing, they are doing something far worse. They are codifying into law a new form of conversion therapy that medicalises away the same-sex attraction of minors before they have even matured into adult gay people.

I say this with the greatest remorse, because I advocated for these bans for years. I survived six years of psychiatric conversion therapy in the early 1990s. Since the late 1990s I used my story to fight for legal protections for gays and lesbians – and later, I thought, for trans people, too. I helped initiate Canada’s first municipal conversion-therapy ban in Vancouver in 2018 and testified before parliament in support of a national ban (Bill C-4) that became law in 2022. I believed these laws were necessary and just. But now I want to finally set the record straight...

There were early signposts that the movement to end ‘treatments’ of gay people was already heading in a direction I could never have imagined. One of the first occurred in 2006, while I was drafting ‘query letters’ for my memoir. These letters are pitches to publishers, in which writers routinely identify the likely readership for their book. I knew that gay, lesbian, and bisexual readers, among others, would be interested, so I was prepared to use the familiar acronym ‘LGB’. But then I noticed the letter ‘T’ beginning to appear in media and activist acronyms, turning ‘LGB’ into ‘LGBT’. I still understood ‘T’ to primarily mean ‘transexuals’, or those with profound, lifelong dysphoria with their sexed bodies – the sense of having been ‘born in the wrong body’. I knew this had nothing to do with sexual orientation, but with a sense of one’s ‘gender’. Like them, I had lived through a degree of body dysphoria as a child, something common among many who later grow up gay. The broader culture seemed to be conflating the two without much discussion or distinction. My unease with the conflation was personal. I could still recall how my psychiatrist had mistakenly believed that by changing my gender behaviour – what would later be called ‘gender expression’ – by decreasing my femininity and strengthening my masculinity, he could somehow awaken my dormant heterosexuality.

Ultimately, because my focus in 2006 was on ending all conversion treatments, I decided to include the full ‘LGBT’ acronym when naming the potential readership in my pitches. I pushed aside the twinge of discomfort I felt and marched forward with my goal: to use my story to help prevent others from enduring similar abuse.

A decade later, the conflation of sexual orientation and gender accelerated dramatically. In 2015, following the suicide of a 17-year-old ‘transgender youth’ (born male) who had been sent to Christian-based conversion therapy, US president Barack Obama called for an end to conversion therapy for both gay and transgender youth. Backed by the likes of LGBT advocacy group Human Rights Campaign, Obama’s intervention helped cement the two issues together in the public mind.

In late 2016, I sold my book to a press in California, with publication scheduled for the following summer. In anticipation, I began reaching out more broadly...

At that time, I still viewed ‘transgender youth’ primarily as kids who did not conform to traditional expectations for their birth sex – what would later be called gender-nonconforming. They were struggling with societal restrictions on expression, the same kind my psychiatrist had tried to ‘correct’. Many of them, I believed, would likely have grown up gay or lesbian if simply left alone.

My book was published on 17 May 2017. A few months later, the Vancouver LGBTQ2+ Advisory Committee invited me to present my case at Vancouver City Hall. When the chair asked everyone to introduce themselves with their ‘preferred pronouns’, I was caught off guard. In 1980s dance clubs, nearly everyone bent gender norms, yet no one questioned their birth sex...

Another indication that the movement against conversion therapy was potentially heading down a dangerous path arrived in May 2018. At a library event to promote my book, I had arranged for trans activist Morgane Oger to interview me. During the Q&A, an audience member asked Oger about ‘trans surgeries on minors’. This was the first time I had heard the issue raised publicly. Oger responded that she was ‘not aware’ such surgeries were performed on minors. When the man pressed further, calling it ‘torture’, Oger grew defensive and evasive. The exchange left me confused and chilled. I had never heard of these kinds of treatments on minors. I told myself to stay focussed on my own story as a gay man – and on ending all treatments of anyone, regardless of age...

I travelled to Calgary for a panel discussion on their recently proposed municipal ban on conversion therapy. One of the other panelists was Kristopher Wells, then an associate professor at MacEwan University. Before the event, Wells took a call from community members concerned that the ban might lead to more minors undergoing ‘gender transitions’. On speakerphone in the boardroom, he responded firmly and repeatedly: ‘Minors do not go through gender transitions.’ I believed him. 

Bill S-202 did not advance past first reading. However, on 9 March 2020 (the same week Canada began shutting down schools and non-essential businesses due to Covid-19), the federal government introduced Bill C-8, An Act to Amend the Criminal Code (Conversion Therapy). The bill would have made it illegal to force someone into conversion therapy, to subject a minor to it, or to advertise or profit from it. But for adults, the only prohibition was ‘forced’ conversion therapy, implying that a competent adult could consent.

It was around this time that media and online coverage of gender identity exploded. Almost overnight, the conversation around gender seemed to shift dramatically. Definitions of sex and gender became increasingly confusing. What I had long understood as ‘trans’ – a condition involving persistent gender dysphoria in adults that might, after careful evaluation, lead to medical transition – was now being reframed as simple self-identification at any age, including for minors. 

I had heard the term ‘affirmative care’ before and assumed it simply meant affirming the existence of gay and trans people. Now I understood it meant fast-tracking minors toward ‘gender-affirmative care’ – puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and possible surgeries – with little or no gatekeeping. None of this made any sense to me, especially when self-identification could lead to permanent medical alteration of healthy bodies.

New terms and ideas that contradicted long-accepted scientific facts flooded the discourse. I kept encountering the slogan ‘trans women are real women’ repeated like a mantra, claims that biological sex was a spectrum or ‘assigned’ at birth, and that gender identity superseded biological reality. The more I watched and listened, my disorientation intensified. I wondered if I was missing something or if my own thinking was just faulty...

By late March, writing keynotes for my upcoming ‘LGBTQ’ events had become difficult. I no longer knew how to speak at gatherings that prominently featured the ‘T’. I wanted to remain true to what I had believed, stated and written for decades, but I could not support ‘gender-affirmative care’ for minors or self-identification leading to irreversible medical interventions. I was relieved when, in April 2020, all my speaking engagements were cancelled due to Covid travel restrictions.

The world outside felt like it was coming undone. The lockdowns brought isolation and fear. I worried daily about my 96-year-old mother. On 25 May, George Floyd was killed by police in Minneapolis, sparking riots and worldwide Black Lives Matter protests. The only unifying theme amid it all – the rise of gender ideology and the chaos in the streets – was a sense of everything coming apart.

My reading intensified that summer. Prominent voices in major outlets were openly questioning the very existence of a binary biological sex. Among the most cited were Anne Fausto-Sterling’s ‘Why Sex is Not Binary’ in the New York Times, Claire Ainsworth’s ‘Sex Redefined’ in Scientific American, Kim Elsesser’s ‘The Myth of Biological Sex’ in Forbes, and Allison Whitten’s ‘Untangling Gender and Sex in Humans’ in Discover. These pieces argued that thinking of sex as only male and female was overly ‘simplistic’, citing examples like intersex conditions, brain-sex differences, chromosomal variations, gene mutations and hormone irregularities. Claims that sex was a spectrum or merely ‘assigned’ at birth were everywhere. Encountering these arguments from so-called experts left me increasingly disoriented and unsettled...

As 2021 began, I turned to longer reading to understand the rapidly evolving claims around gender and ‘trans’ identities. I had bought Abigail Shrier’s Irreversible Damage when it came out in 2020, but left it on my shelf for months, too nervous to open it. When I finally did early that year, it validated what I had already suspected. Shrier documented the dramatic rise in young people – especially natal females – self-identifying as transgender, sometimes as young as pre-pubescent children. In the UK alone, referrals for gender treatments among girls had risen by over 4,000 per cent between 2009 and 2018. Once labelled trans, minors were entitled to immediate ‘gender-affirmative care’ based solely on self-identification, with no gatekeeping or exploration of underlying issues. Suicide threats were routinely used as leverage against concerned parents. Any kind of questioning or exploratory therapy was now labelled ‘conversion therapy’. 

Shrier laid bare the medical reality behind the euphemism: ‘puberty blockers’ chemically castrated minors, with risks including osteoporosis, loss of sexual function and near-certain infertility. Nearly all who started blockers proceeded to cross-sex hormones, which carried lifelong consequences including cardiovascular disease and cancer risks. Surgical interventions – mastectomies on healthy adolescent girls, phalloplasties, vaginoplasties – often resulted in severe complications, chronic pain and multiple revision surgeries. The more I read, the clearer it became that in no other field of medicine were patients, especially minors, allowed to self-diagnose and prescribe their own treatments.

Reading about the scale and speed of medical interventions on young females left me stunned. I wondered whether the sudden surge in girls identifying as trans and seeking to alter their bodies was a new manifestation of a much older pattern of female self-harm. I had engaged in self-harm myself during my youth as a symptom of earlier trauma and deep self-loathing toward my body during puberty. Questions like these led me to Marilee Strong’s 1998 book, A Bright Red Scream, which explored self-mutilation as a language of unbearable inner pain. The young females Shrier described – suddenly identifying as trans and pursuing hormones and various forms of surgical ‘cutting’ (mastectomies on healthy breasts, and in some cases phalloplasties) – seemed to belong on the same continuum as Strong’s ‘needle girls’ (young women in the 1880s who injured themselves by puncturing their flesh with needles) and ‘wrist-slashers’ (sudden waves of young women in the 1960s in Philadelphia and later in Massachusetts who cut their wrists). It seemed to me that behaviour once understood as pathological was now being rebranded as progressive ‘gender-affirmative care’, with surgeons and doctors doing the cutting on behalf of young women.

The same pattern was devastating young males as well. Many gender-nonconforming boys who would likely have grown up gay were being steered toward medical transition, often presenting afterward as ‘heterosexual’ in their declared gender identity. Stories from male detransitioners – including that of Yarden Silveira, who transitioned at 15, underwent vaginoplasty at 19, suffered severe complications, expressed profound regret, and died by suicide at 23 in May 2021 – showed the medicalisation was not limited to natal females.

Reading evolutionary biologists such as Heather Heying, Bret Weinstein, and Colin Wright in 2021 finally helped me articulate, even to myself, the simple, binary nature of sex – definable by gametes (small or sperm for males, large or eggs for females). Secondary characteristics and sex-determination systems (such as chromosomes) were consequences of sex, not its definition. Exceptions did not erase the binary. These and other sources confirmed what should have been basic: there are only two sexes; biological sex did not exist on a spectrum. Gender (behaviour, roles, norms) was far more variable, but gender was not the same as sex. 

Kathleen Stock’s 2021 book, Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism, helped clarify how the word ‘gender’ itself had shifted over time into four incompatible meanings – from a simple synonym for biological sex to a purely psychological sense of self-identification. The same word was now being used for entirely different concepts, creating widespread confusion. The word ‘trans’ had changed meaning just as dramatically. What I had understood in 2017 or earlier was no longer how it was understood in 2020 and beyond. Even my own earlier public statements supporting ‘trans youth’ could now be misinterpreted.

I began reflecting on my own past in a different light. The similarities between many of today’s ‘trans’-identified youth and the child I had been struck me forcefully. So-called trans healthcare was not just medicalisation, but medicalisation rooted in stereotypes: a feminine boy was now told he was probably a girl; a masculine girl was told she was probably a boy. The endless natural variations of male and female behaviour – including the well-documented link between childhood gender nonconformity and later same-sex attraction – were being pathologised and ‘fixed’ with hormones and surgery. Children with histories of trauma, like my own sexual abuse and body hatred during puberty, were being told their distress was gender dysphoria rather than receiving help for the underlying pain. If I had come of age more recently, I could easily have been labelled trans and set on a path of puberty blockers, hormones and surgeries.

Noah called before summer and asked me to join a small group of advocates working on new provincial legislation to ban conversion therapy in British Columbia. An academic called Florence Ashley, who I had participated with on a panel discussion a few years prior, would be drafting the bill, Noah said. When he sent me the draft, I saw Ashley had redefined sexual orientation as attraction to the ‘same gender’ or ‘opposite gender’, removing biological sex entirely. In meetings I argued that this made no sense for a law intended to protect gay people, whose orientation is based on same-sex attraction.

Between meetings, I called another group member, a gay man in his thirties. He repeated that he didn’t have an issue with the change. I asked if he had any issue dating someone who identified as a ‘trans man’. Without hesitation, he said he had no issue with it. I was stunned. I had always known that ‘trans men’ were still just biological females (and if attracted to men, were then also heterosexual), the same way that I never thought trans women were real women. They were biological males. How could someone be gay while being open to dating and sleeping with a biological female?

When I met continued resistance in the group, I withdrew. I supported bans on conversion therapy, but I had no interest in debating why erasing sexual attraction from the definition of sexual orientation was a bad idea. If they couldn’t see it, I was not going to try to explain it. 

As 2021 wore on, my horror at what I was continuing to learn grew tenfold. Many nights I lay awake, ruminating on how children were being sexualised under the banner of ‘trans healthcare’, which to me looked like mutilation straight out of Frankenstein. If minors could consent to surgeries on their sex organs, what would stop arguments for minors consenting to sex with adults? This should have alarmed everyone, not just survivors of childhood sexual abuse. For gender-nonconforming minors who would likely have grown up gay, ‘gender-affirmative care’ was clearly a new form of conversion therapy – medicalising their bodies and appearance to match an internal feeling now called an ‘identity’. This approach felt completely antithetical to the earlier women’s and gay-rights movements, which had fought to free people from rigid sex stereotypes rather than reinforce them through medical intervention. 

What I still did not fully see was how even the term ‘conversion therapy’ itself had become part of the problem. When I first began speaking out in the 1990s, I never reduced my experiences to a catch-all phrase. I simply described what had been done to me – drugs, ketamine injections, primal-scream sessions, aversion techniques – and why: to change me from homosexual to heterosexual. Later, when the terms ‘reparative’ and then ‘conversion therapy’ gained widespread use, I adopted them too, although somewhat nervously. Once a single phrase was used to describe these treatments, its meaning expanded dramatically—and so did the bans meant to end them. Those bans shifted from ending treatments aimed at changing sexual orientation to protecting, affirming, and enabling any claimed gender identity. In effect, a term originally intended to stop one form of intervention was stretched and inverted to enable another – ‘gender-affirmative care’.

Following a snap Canadian federal election in September 2021, the government introduced Bill C-4, An Act to Amend the Criminal Code (Conversion Therapy). On 1 December 2021, Bill C-4 was fast-tracked and passed unanimously in the House of Commons, which was virtually unheard of. On 7 December, the Senate also passed it unanimously, and on 8 December, it received royal assent and became law. I watched much of the process live, alone in my apartment. 

In the days that followed I felt nothing – no excitement, no sense of victory. A few long-time advocates, including Noah, sent brief, polite congratulations. I didn’t reply. By then I sensed what the new law would unleash, but I could not yet fully sort it out in my head. The feeling of dread was palpable.

Beginning in January 2022, the full implications of the new law started to become painfully clear. By including ‘gender identity’ in the protected categories and providing an exemption for ‘gender-affirmative care’, the legislation effectively criminalised attempts to change sexual orientation while codifying and protecting medical transition for anyone claiming a gender identity. What I had understood for decades as conversion therapy had now been broadened to include any challenge to a person’s belief that they were ‘born in the wrong body’. The law I had fought for had, in practice, legalised what I saw as a new and more invasive form of conversion therapy.

Conversion therapy for sexual orientation historically meant attempts to change same-sex attraction – through lobotomies, drugs, aversion techniques or the kind of psychiatric regime I endured. The goal was to make someone heterosexual, or at least to silence their same-sex attractions. 

Conversion therapy for gender identity worked in the opposite direction. By banning challenges to a claimed gender identity, the law effectively removed barriers to ‘gender-affirmative care’ – social transition, puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and in some cases surgery. What was called a ban on conversion therapy for gender identity actually increased access to medical treatments that could sterilise, impair sexual function, weaken bones and create lifelong dependence. It facilitated conversion therapy on sexual orientation.

The irony was stark. Youth who might otherwise have grown up gay or lesbian were now being steered toward medical transition, often presenting afterward as ‘heterosexual’ in their declared gender identity. Because biological sex cannot be changed, it would be more accurate to say they had become mutilated homosexuals. Helen Joyce, in her 2021 book, Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality, described these treatments as ‘postmodern gay conversion therapy’. The ban – and others like it that bundled sexual orientation with gender identity – had not ended conversion therapy. It had simply given it a legal sanction under a new name.

This realisation hit harder when I remembered the 2018 Vancouver City Council debate. Across hours of presentations and discussion, the focus was almost entirely on changing homosexuality. There was almost no meaningful reference to ‘gender identity’, even though the final bylaw bundled both together. Most people – including the politicians who passed the law – likely did not foresee how that conflation would play out. I had strongly advocated for these bans to apply to all ages, believing even young adults needed protection. What I did not yet see was how that all-ages language, combined with the bundling and the exemption for ‘gender-affirmative care’, would ultimately put minors at the greatest risk.

In 2022, Florence Ashley’s Banning Transgender Conversion Practices: A Legal and Policy Analysis was published. It was promoted as the first major legal and policy analysis of ‘trans conversion practices’. The foreword, written by Victor Madrigal-Borloz, the UN Independent Expert on Protection from Violence and Discrimination based on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity, celebrated Canada’s Bill C-4 as a landmark victory, and spoke exclusively about harms to ‘trans and gender diverse persons’. There was no mention of homosexuality, sexual orientation or conversion therapy against gay people – even though the bill had originally been crafted to protect them. 

In the first chapter, Ashley defined ‘trans conversion practices’ as any sustained effort to promote gender identities aligned with one’s ‘sex assigned at birth’ or to discourage behaviours associated with a ‘gender other than the one assigned’. Any questioning of a self-declared trans identity, or hesitation around puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, or surgeries, was labelled a ‘corrective approach’. I was surprised to see my own name in the index. Ashley referenced me alongside a publicly known trans-identified person, suggesting I had experienced a ‘conversion practice’ as a young adult and had ‘ostensibly consented’. 

The claim was false on multiple levels. I am gay, not trans. I had always described my experience as gay conversion therapy (or conversion therapy of my sexual orientation). And in numerous interviews, essays and my book, I had explicitly stated that I never consented to my psychiatrist’s treatment. Ashley’s misrepresentation was especially striking given that we had previously appeared together on a panel and she had told me she was familiar with my work. 

Early in the book, Ashley discussed ‘gender-creative’ children (whom she also called ‘gender-variant’, ‘gender-expansive’, or ‘gender-diverse’), noting that they ‘may grow up to be transgender’. At no point did she mention that these same children had historically grown up to be gay or lesbian. She framed historical ideas around gender variance entirely through a modern gender-identity lens. Her omission stood in stark contrast to earlier (and some of the first known) advocates for homosexuals like Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, who in the 19th century argued for the rights of same-sex attracted people – not to medicalise their bodies. 

Ashley’s book was so deeply immersed in a worldview built on falsehoods – about biological sex, about notions of gender and gender identity, about who grows up to be trans vs gay – that even attempting to analyse it felt like speaking in a language that was not real. Ashley made painfully clear how thoroughly the language and logic of conversion therapy had been inverted. Where earlier advocates sought to protect same-sex attracted people from coercive change, today’s gender ideology often medicalised the very children the bans were meant to protect. What began as an effort to end harmful attempts to change sexual orientation had, in practice, enabled a new and more invasive form of conversion under the name of ‘gender-affirmative care’.

After stewing over the ban, Ashley’s book and the growing damage I saw gender ideology inflicting on minors, I finally posted my first public statement on the subject in April 2022. I wrote that I struggled with how conversion-therapy bans had conflated sexual orientation with gender identity, and that the two should never have been bundled together because their developmental trajectories are entirely different.

The response was immediate and hostile. Several users called me hateful. Advocates I had worked closely with on the federal ban called me out online. One long-time collaborator responded publicly within minutes, stating that bans on trans-conversion therapy were ‘every bit as important as bans on conversion therapy for sexual orientation’. His tweet felt like a public rebuke.

In another comment posted days later, I explained why I rejected the label ‘cis’, which was now commonly used as the opposite of ‘trans’. The term presupposed that a person had never struggled with gender dysphoria. As a gay man, I was often lumped into the ‘cis’ category, yet I had experienced significant dysphoria as a child. That discomfort later resolved as I matured and accepted my homosexuality. Like many other gay adults who likely experienced similar dysphoria when young, being called ‘cis’ felt factually incorrect and incoherent to me.

Responses from Florence Ashley and others were swift and critical. One former member of the Vancouver LGBTQ2+ Advisory Committee tweeted that I was ‘undoing all that good’ and looking for ‘10 minutes of fame’. Her words stung. The last thing I wanted was fame. What I wanted – what I had always wanted – was to prevent further harm and to end what I now saw as a new form of conversion therapy. 

In a Quillette essay published early June 2022, I publicly stated for the first time that combining sexual orientation and gender identity in these bans was a mistake. In a second Quillette essay later that year, I laid out my opposition to many of the core tenets of gender ideology. I rejected the idea that a person could be ‘born in the wrong body’, that biological sex was ‘assigned at birth’, or that a person’s sex could be changed through hormones or surgery. I did not believe gender identities could supplant biological sex, nor did I support ‘gender-affirmative care’, especially for minors. These beliefs were incoherent to me and ultimately erased my gay sexuality. I also rejected the label ‘cis’ as meaningless and the term ‘transphobia’ as so broad and elastic that it now equated simple disagreement or appeals to biological reality with hatred. The pieces drew strong reactions, including from some of the advocates I had worked with for so long. 

A short time later, I removed pronouns from my social media profiles. I had previously included ‘he / him’, believing it showed support for trans people (under an older understanding of what it meant to be trans). But I now saw that displaying pronouns implicitly endorsed the newer idea that a person could change their sex or that minors should be affirmed in any self-identified gender.

In the wake of my essays, Noah contacted me directly. What began as a conversation quickly became confrontational. He accused me of spreading hatred, warned that my words could fuel violence, dismissed detransitioners as ‘like ex-gays’, and demanded I change my mind. I ended the call.

Several things became clear. First, many of those I had worked with had assumed we were all on the same side simply because we had fought together to end conversion therapy. We were all supposedly ‘on the left’. This was not true. I was on no one’s side. If I had been perceived as being on the left, it was only because the political left had historically fought for gay rights and free speech. With the rise of gender-identity ideology, the meaning of key terms had shifted dramatically. We had all been using similar language to mean very different things. 

Second, the casual dismissal of detransitioners as being ‘like ex-gays’ was deeply misguided. Detransitioners had been labelled (or had identified) as trans, often gone through medical transition, and later realised it was a mistake – sometimes a catastrophic one. Their error was believing they could change their birth sex. In contrast, ‘ex-gays’ had started out same-sex attracted and tried to become heterosexual. Their error was believing they could change their sexual orientation. The lie for detransitioners was that they could change sex; the truth was accepting their natal sex. The lie for ex-gays was that they could change their orientation; the truth was accepting their homosexuality. Birth sex and sexual orientation cannot be changed. For those detransitioners who had transitioned partly to escape emerging homosexuality, their experience was, at root, another form of homophobia.

Over the past few years, I have watched with growing distress as detransitioners recount their traumas and women lose their hard-won, sex-based rights to ‘trans women’ (biological males), and are then penalised for even speaking up. Minors, who lack full agency and are easily influenced, have been the primary focus of this new gender ideology. Instead of conversion treatments imposed on adults who are gay or same-sex attracted, legal conversion-therapy bans now effectively force a different kind of change on minors by medicalising their bodies before they’ve had a chance to grow up and explore their sexuality naturally. 

I still find it difficult to reflect on how much happened over so many years – decades of relentless effort, hope, crushing disappointment, public testimony, private pain and endless rewriting. Not to mention the psychiatric treatment I experienced, the consequences of which I still live with every day. Then came the slow, grinding realisation that the very thing I had fought so hard for had unintended consequences I could not have foreseen. 

I am profoundly disturbed. I survived a brutal, coercive treatment to try to change my sexual orientation that nearly destroyed me. I poured my story into fighting to protect others from similar abuse – only to slowly realise that the very laws I helped champion were being used, in ways I could never have anticipated, to enable a new and medically sanctioned form of ‘conversion therapy’ on a much larger scale. None of this is simply intellectual regret. It is a deep, existential horror. I fought hard to stop one kind of harm. I never intended to enable another. 

This reckoning did not arrive suddenly. Since 2023, I have been quietly working through these questions in a much longer manuscript. It was important for me to see everything laid out in one coherent, chronological document before saying anything of substance publicly. My current position is not a change of heart; it is more a statement of recognition about issues that were shifting almost daily, making them difficult to fully understand at the time. Until now, I was also scared – scared of being called transphobic, bigoted, or hateful, scared of losing friends and support. But children’s lives are at stake. 

After two decades of fighting what I believed was the right battle, I am convinced that these laws need to be revisited. Legal bans on so-called conversion therapy, if they remain, should never conflate sexual orientation with gender. Any laws that do should be repealed or amended.

Thirty years ago, I began a fight to protect vulnerable young people like the one I once was. Today I am still fighting for them – only now I understand that the greatest threat is not always the one I once feared. Sometimes it wears a white coat and calls itself affirmation." 

 

Clearly, the author is ignorant and doesn't understand how preventing TRAs from sterilising minors will result in gay people being lynched.

Of course, we are still told that minors do not undergo medical transition, despite the boatloads of evidence that they do.

In any event, even if you want to ban the traditional conception of conversion therapy for adults, this still runs up against the left's usual fetish for patient autonomy and non-interference in decisions made between healthcare providers and informed, consenting adult patients.