Gender bending laws threaten long imprisonment for challenging self-identity

By Charles Gardner, UK correspondent

We would do well to heed a warning from Down Under of the potential for further restrictions on our religious and other liberties.

The transgender debate – and in particular the “conversion therapy” issue – has already seen bizarre new laws introduced in Australia that could soon be followed in the UK.

According to Professor Holly Lawford-Smith¹, in order to legally change your sex in the state of Victoria, “you simply need to make a statutory declaration of what you ‘believe’ your sex to be.”²

Tasmania even allows for no gender to be recorded on a child’s birth certificate.

Similar laws are being considered in other parts of Australia which would make refusal to affirm a person’s self-identity an offence punishable by up to 10 years in prison or a fine of as much as $200 000 (approx. R2.3-million). Excuse me! Are we living in the real world?

In a article I wrote last week on climate change dogma, I quoted Paul Watson, one of the Greenpeace founders, as saying: “It doesn’t matter what is true; it only matters what people believe is true…”³

So if you say it often enough, people will believe you – it’s called brainwashing – and now the same policy has produced a society falling hook, line and sinker for the gender identity scam.

If, say 20 years ago, someone told you there would come a day when you could be arrested for not affirming a man claiming to be a woman as a woman, you would no doubt have thought it a sick joke. Well, at least, The One enthroned in heaven laughs. — Psalm 2:4

Yet that is the implication of the Conversion Practices Bill in Australia where “trans widows” – women whose husbands abandon their marriage to live as females – could be guilty of an offence if they don’t affirm their spouses in their new identities.

In Britain, over a quarter-of-a-million people signed a petition last year calling on the government to ban conversion therapy. A study is currently being carried out and, unless Christians and others do something about it, such a draconian step may well be taken.

Already, a Christian charity counselling those wishing to escape unwanted sexual attraction has come under fire, with Barclays Bank even closing their account.

Much is made of people’s rights to various lifestyles, but when they wish to revert to a normal heterosexual existence, it suddenly seems that they have no rights. A curious contradiction.

Australia may have closed its borders to potential Covid carriers. But this diabolical identity culture is even more likely to spread to the motherland before too long. And the harm it will inflict on our society doesn’t bear thinking about.

Trouble is, we all want to be like the other nations. That was often the problem with ancient Israel and God saw it for what it was – a rejection of Him!

For in doing so, we find ourselves following all the fashionable fads like sheep going over a blind precipice, no longer “penned in” by God’s commandments.

Banning conversion therapy would be as bad as the policies of radical Muslim nations like Saudi Arabia where conversion from Islam is forbidden, taking us back to the tyrannical Dark Ages that gave rise to the Spanish Inquisition and much besides.

Who would have thought that, in the wake of nuclear efforts to defend ourselves from the evils of Communism during the Cold War, we would soon be fervently promoting Cultural Marxism which has us all singing and dancing from the same hymn-sheet, or at risk of being cast aside as dastardly infidels?

We were created male and female to walk in fellowship with God and each other. He wants to build a relationship with us – not shout from on high in a sort of heavenly Zoom asking how we are doing every now and again. He wants to walk with us and talk with us, and lead us along paths of righteousness to fulfil His perfect plans.

We are also given boundaries for our own safety, and warned to avoid forbidden fruit! But no, we decide to cast off restraint and follow our own – often sinful – inclinations.

And where has it got us? Lost in a sea of despair as plague and pestilence threaten to overwhelm us. But have we sought wisdom from above? God says: …if you call out for insight and cry aloud for understanding, and if you look for it as for silver and search for it as for hidden treasure, then you will understand the fear of the Lord and find the knowledge of God. — Proverbs 2:3-5. You will also then understand what is right and just and fair – every good path. — v9

A ray of hope in all this is that Britain’s High Court has ruled that children can’t give informed consent to receive puberty blockers. But how long before we succumb to mob rule?

Asking why all this matters, Prof Lawford-Smith says it makes it incredibly difficult to talk to people who claim to be trans about the right course of action for them. “There is a strong body of evidence that autistic people, gay people, and people with mental health problems can sometimes identify as trans,” she writes.

I suggest that, in being effectively prevented from talking to them, their cry of help is being ignored by a politically-correct world determined on gaining total approval for errant lifestyles. A totalitarian state that brooks no dissent on morality, in other words.

As with the global warming debate, it is about using “science” to stifle public debate and alter people’s behaviour. Will the UK government’s current mantra to “follow the science” on matters around Covid and vaccines be used to dupe the public into wholesale acceptance of a multi-gender “new normal”?

If wisdom from above is abandoned, we are heading for the abyss. Pray for our government – and for Australia.

¹An associate professor in political philosophy at the University of Melbourne
²The Spectator, February 13, 2021
³The World Turned Upside Down, Melanie Phillips, Encounter Books