For legal/safety reasons, it wasn’t possible to release this recorded interview before last week’s EU announcement about banning ‘conversion therapy’ in the EU.

It’s an interview with an anon paediatric psychiatrist who practices/practiced in Belgium, a country that has already enacted a ban on conversion therapy — despite having found almost no evidence it is happening.

Conversion therapy bans make it legally risky to try to talk a kid out of their wrong-body distress. At the very least, it makes doctors scared to try it. But some therapists, like ‘Sarah’, are braving it anyway. Unfortunately they are few and far between.

While activists — across Europe — failed to find much evidence of pray-away-the-gay type torture (which is the image your brain is intended to conjure up when it hears the term ‘conversion therapy’) there is plenty of trans skepticism about, and criminalising this skepticism is the intended effect of conversion therapy bans. Such legislation essentially performs the same function as hate speech laws that make it very legally dangerous to refute transgender core beliefs. However, this one has a particularly chilling influence on the psycho-medical profession.

Conversion therapy bans are about coercion, because transgender wrongbodyism does not have popular support. Making non-compliance illegal is how its advocates get around the unpopularity problem.

The soft-power machinery non-ban ban

I had been hoping to get this doctor’s experience out there before the decision was made by the EU as to whether or not to make a law against conversion therapy enforceable in all EU countries, but she is under (stalled) criminal investigation for conversion therapy herself (she refuses to affirm the gender delusions of her young patients) and as we spoke, she was literally trying to keep a low cover as she escaped the country.

Ultimately, last week, the European Commission decided not to issue a legally binding directive telling EU countries to ban conversion therapy.

But the outcome was hard to decipher based on the mixed reactions to the announcement. Messaging from activists was schizophrenically lopsided. At first, both sides — the activists making demands of the legislature, and the legislature itself — seemed to be celebrating their joint victory. But then a lot of people on the activist side decided that, in fact, there was nothing to celebrate, and that they had lost the fight. That’s because the EU’s self-trumpeted proposal, in the end, was non-binding. It was just vibes. Or soft power machinery, as Athena Forum called it.

Things got weird online: on the one hand, members of the NGO that had organised the campaign — which amassed 1 million citizen signatures — were filmed smiling and laughing in photos with EU officials. At the same time, their allies were posting Instagram reels about how disappointed they were.

So what happened?

The EU concluded that it can’t legislate in this area. But the fact that the petition even happened in the first place is evidence that they were chancing their arm, as we say back home.

Getting caught mid mission-creep

It’s not an ‘EU competence’ to get involved in criminalising talk therapy for genderfeelz. However, what is considered an EU competence has been subject to extreme mission creep in recent years*, and issues that you would imagine should remain national have become Brussels’ business.

The whole conversion therapy thing was born out of a petition launched in 2024 that was actually an EU-branded, EU-supported ‘citizens initiative’. This bit is important: this petition would not have been possible — it would not have been allowed to go ahead — if what it was asking for was not considered part of the EU’s mandate.

So why did it go ahead? How did it get this far?

A few years ago when I noticed the petition campaign getting off the ground, I wanted to know how the organisers — a couple of skinny young gay chaps from France — were paying for the legal advice that they would need to determine whether or not what they were asking for was even something the EU can legislate on. So I contacted the official EU petition people to ask about their funding declarations, but there were none. So how did they pay for the legal advice? Surely they got legal advice?

These details are boring and finnicky but they’re kind of important: it turns out that the legal experts in the EU Commission itself have to decide whether or not the subject of your demand is something the EU can make binding legislation on, before anything else can happen. (No doubt the vast EU network of NGOs are ready to help out with free legal consults, but it’s the Commission that decides on the legal basis for your request, if there is one).

Let me spell it out: the EU told the activists they could make a binding law banning conversion therapy. They said: go ahead and get your signatures, we can legislate on this. But they have since decided that they cannot make such a law. What changed between 2024 and now? (Awaiting a response from the press contact, will update).

I suspect that the EU bureaucracy was creeping the mission, and got caught mid-creep.

Time was, anything gender-y was waved through the EU bodies — because who cares amiright — but those days are over. The reality is that everyone’s on high alert for social issues in a way they might not have been before. Turns out people do care about what constitutes reality and about keeping their kids out of the hands of state-mandated ideologues. Shocking.

A legally-binding ban on sex-swap talk therapy would never “get past the Council” which is eurospeak for “it would fail to be approved by the more conservative countries’ leaders”, who are growing wiser and wiser to the social engineering schtick by the day. This is none of your business, the heads of state would have told the Commission, and they would have been right.

I’m not a specialist so I’m just spitballing here, but I think that something that has been until now a bit of a grey area has just been shoved firmly into the black.

So the Commission came out and told the gathering of disappointed youngsters last week that nope sorry, no law, we can’t actually do that, but here’s a non-binding vibes-setting document instead (I don’t think the lads should worry, it still looks great on their CVs. I’m proud of them in a twisted maternal way).

The NGOcracy and their buds in-state just got too brazen, got some backlash full-force in the face, and knew such a law would never get anywhere. Officials were forced to (sort of) concede: nobody wants this, so it’s shelved.

One of the ILGA-Europe enbies was clear-eyed about it. She said the decision “accounts for the limitations of the EU legislative process’“. She also described the setup as a “tyranny of the majority”, which is apparently not the same thing as a democracy? I also think ILGA-Europe, who astro-turfed the whole petition thing in the first place, lost interest, and have shifted their energy and focus towards rule-of-law stuff. Enforcing case law is where it’s at, because nobody can do much about stopping that.

There’s always the possibility that Commissioner Hadja Lahbib (with whom the conversion therapy buck stopped) and her friends realised that they will one day be the hook for the inevitable fallout of the trans scandal. I guess we’ll find out eventually, whether it be via tell-alls or tribunals. Looking forward to it.

*(I am trying hard to ignore the fact that the EU now wants to govern that extremely intimate part of a sexual encounter where you and someone else decide whether or not you want to shag each other. The EU parliament wants you to make a contractual agreement before you f**k, and if the deal’s not inked in the way the EU wants it inked by the f*****s, one of the two fuckees could go to jail. Yeah I know that rape is a problem. Yeah I know consent is important. That doesn’t mean either will be fixed by making sexual foreplay sessions subject to EU legislation. I mean what the everloving christ? The Heavy Petting Regulation? The Sustainable Dry Humping Act? The Third Base Protection Directive? I oppose this solution to the problem. I do not deny there is a problem — just to make it clear for the anti-gender movement academitards out there compiling lists of my crimes against the Borg.)

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