British-Nigerian Minister, Kemi Badenoch has told UK MPs that there is ‘strong evidence’ young people who are gay are being convinced they are transgender..
Badenoch, the Equalities Minister, stated that children may act in a “gender non-conforming” way at an early age, long before they discover they are attracted to people of the same sex.
However, this can be “misinterpreted” as a sign that they want to identify as the opposite sex and lead to them getting irreversible medical treatment.
In a letter written to the Women and Equalities Committee, the Minister cited a string of studies supporting the claim she made in 2023 that gender treatment is “a new form of conversion therapy”, and there is “almost an epidemic’” of young gay people “being told they are trans”.
While talking to MPs, she said: “I committed to providing further details on the evidence that children likely to grow up to be gay might be subjected to conversion practices on the basis of gender identity rather than their sexual orientation.
“’Both prospective and retrospective studies have found a link between gender non-conformity in childhood and someone later coming out as gay.”
Badenoch disclosed that the “strong link” has been seen for “many years”, including in a Dutch study from 1999 which stated: “Not all children with Gender Identity Disorder (GID) turn out to be transsexuals after puberty… prospective studies of GID boys show that this phenomenon is more strongly related to later homosexuality than to later transsexualism.”
She said a “clear pattern” was discovered in a 2012 report revealing that in follow-up studies a “much larger proportion” of gender dysphoric children were discovered to “have a homosexual sexual orientation”.
Also, German clinicians noted in 2008 that “early hormone therapy may interfere with the patient’s development as a homosexual.”
They warned: ”’This may not be in the interest of patients who, as a result of hormone therapy, can no longer have the decisive experiences that enable them to establish a homosexual identity.”
Also, Badenoch quoted data from the NHS’s controversial Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS), showing older patients were ‘overwhelmingly not heterosexual’.
218 people referred to the gender clinic in one year were analyzed and it was found that 67.7 percent of female patients were “recorded as being attracted to other females only’” while 21.1 percent were bisexual and 8.5 percent heterosexual.
She quoted interviews by former GIDS staff who said they felt the clinic was performing “conversion therapy for gay kids” and “making them straight”.
Also, she highlighted overall figures for GIDS showing its referrals increased from 50 a year in 2009 to 5,000 in 2021-22.
She said: “As I said in my evidence session, this trend represents an explosion in the numbers of referrals.”
