No, what happened was the religious right in the US, after losing on Obergefell v. Hodges, immediately changed tactics. They held huge conferences outlining their plans to roll back LGBT rights as whole by targeting trans people. They didn't skip a beat. We aren't to blame for our own oppression.

When the government insists that legitimate healthcare providers wouldn’t carry out conversion therapy, remember that the NHS didn’t stop funding homeopathy until 2018.

I feel their pain. They spent half a decade campaigning for a ban and the government triangulated and came up with regulation instead.

Meanwhile in Hansard… the ministerial statement on conversion practices.

I've spent years working towards a ban on conversion practices, hoping to see a bill published. Today, I just feel so profoundly sad. As many others have noted, the draft has a carve out for "healthcare" so broad it makes a mockery of the idea this is a 'ban'. 1/2 www.gov.uk/government/p...

important to note the draft bill produced by the scottish government only exempted regulated healthcare professionals (this is a *very* small number of people) and only when acting in line with their regulatory boards the westminster version basically allows any quack 'counsellor' to carry on

This bill, in its current form, simply is not fit for practice. It is, as far as we can see, so short because it has been rushed out for political reasons and leaves an enormous loophole any conversion practices provider could use. We hope to see a Scottish bill in the upcoming ScotGov PfG.

The carve out for "healthcare" fails our "no exemptions or exceptions" criteria because it leaves an enormous loophole for any conversion practices provider to claim they are practicing healthcare. This would make the ban potentially completely useless. bsky.app/profile/joly...

🆕🚨 UK government has published a draft Conversion Practices bill containing significant 'healthcare' loophole - which won't ban practices in these spaces. Here's what we know 🧵 Get a detailed explainer with analysis in our Saturday newsletter. Join 10K readers 📨 wearequeeraf.com/subscribe

The Draft Conversion Practices Bill has been released. A few quick thoughts from someone adept at reading statute without any specific expertise in the area of regulating (?) conversion therapy follow. 1/

In other words, this does not protect the people who need the protection from conversion therapy the most in 2026 - it appears to me to instead license the state to carry on with its version of conversion therapy, because that version isn't seen as abusive. In formal legal terms: gross. /fin

The carve out for healthcare also makes a nonsense of the clause 3 ban on encouraging conversion practices outside the England and Wales. This report by the UN’s independent expert in 2020 found that medical and mental health providers were found to be the main perpetrators in 45.8% of cases…

Indeed, in so far as the government includes a massive carve out for conversion practices carried out in medical settings, could be argued that they haven’t banned conversion “therapy” at all: the government accepts that some practices are therapeutic.

A reminder that around fifth of those who received conversion therapy said it was conducted by health care professionals. www.gov.uk/government/p...

Plus explanatory notes.

Draft conversion therapy bill is out.

Beautiful stuff

Ok am going to do this but mostly just focus on trans rights. Phillipson reassures that the conversion bill will be published ASAP and will be 'trans inclusive'. Hm.

I do wonder if we could do something radical, because half the time these ideas amount to “anyone who works outside London isn’t important enough to need to see the minister at 15 mins notice”

The scum pond is delaminating well ahead of schedule. This is a good hypothesis for why. They're dumping peroxide in at the edges, where the polyurea attachment will be patchy thanks to shrinkage during curing. O2 will be produced at the concrete surface, mechanically lifting the membrane.

HAHAHAhaha! they're making the world's biggest synthetic scum pond!!! The coating is a polyurea used inside pipes. It gels in about 3 seconds, making it non self-leveling. The texture is like an orange peel, the perfect substrate for biofilms. www.nytimes.com/2026/05/19/u...

It keeps happening!

Excited to learn from my weather app that it’ll be 24 tomorrow until someone pointed out that was the date…

A major scandal has broken out in Norway at NBTK, the national gender clinic that has notoriously limited access to care. Researchers, including SEGM affiliate Anne Wæhre, engaged in substantial misconduct and ethical violations in their research on trans people. www.aftenposten.no/norge/i/43RE...

In honor of Norwegian anti-trans pediatrician Anne Wæhre & two others being found guilty of research misconduct today, here's my profile of Wæhre, who spoke at a 2023 conference organized by anti-trans hate group Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine: www.transgendermap.com/issues/medic...

While I personally think we should make Wes Streeting governor of some desolate island inhabited by penguins, I would begrudgingly allow him to be Home Secretary…

This is an exclusive. The statement from the Northern Ireland civil service on why they are withdrawing from Pride

A doctor I know said that it's no coincidence that the Resident Doctors reached an agreement, weeks after Wes Streeting stopped being the Health Secretary. Apparently he was the main blocker. Another reason to add to the list.

Ten years on from the Brexit vote and it has contributed to a devastating decline in human rights. Not just on migration, but also trans, disabled rights etc, Brexit has become a lodestone of anti-rights attitudes and policies. My piece for @bylinetimes.bsky.social bylinetimes.com/2026/06/23/t...

Maybe the reason people struggle to name Starmer’s achievements but can readily recall this, his comments on cutting off Gaza, him kicking people out of his own party en masse, blocking Burnham from G&D etc. is because he made a loud performance of being a thoroughly nasty piece of work.

Ah, so Hilary Cass wants us to believe that she’s so dopey and credulous that she didn’t realise she was hand-picked by the Tories to provide a pretext to ban healthcare for trans kids?

“These are not small side-issues. They directly affect the lives of millions. Brits who, say, are married to someone on a visa route, or have trans family, will also be impacted. Taken together, the country is a much, much more illiberal place than it was two years ago.”

Seems really quite weird that such a guy could become leader of the Labour Party and then Prime Minister, apparently without anyone noticing how disastrously unsuited he was for these roles until he had been PM for about two years

This is the thing. I try not to bring up politics with people but I am known as A Politics Guy, and people sometimes ask me my opinion. If I’m asked “why is this Labour government so abysmal”, I’m going to tell people exactly why, and I can be a persuasive person.

the write ups of the pm's fall never mention his biggest reforms—those that made the uk far, far worse for minorities my latest for @liberalcurrents.com www.liberalcurrents.com/starmer-out/

I mean as someone who is American but pays attention to UK news and commentators: it was extremely clear this was going to happen. Basically everyone who ever supported him had reasons to hate him. Labor is a coalition party, and he pissed off every different interest. Not a mystery at all.

Man I'd even go so far as to say: if there was a prime minister who did Starmer's exact choices on matters of economy and social policy, but made radically different choices on immigration, Gaza, and trans rights, I would be that prime minister's strongest soldier.

The folks who say they don’t understand why Starmer is hated are making it very clear that they regard people like me and the other victims of Starmerism as fundamentally illegitimate.

All the people "puzzled by why Starmer is so disliked" are then doing a follow-up where they go "but people are giving a hundred different reasons rather than one!" Yes. That is why he is so disliked.

Starmer lied his way to the top, took every freebie he could get, targeted the sick and disabled, demonised & scapegoated refugees, gave a top govt job to a billionaire paedophiles best pal, enabled & armed a genocide. Beth Rigby tells us it was a very dignified speech.

Keir Starmer this morning accused his Labour predecessors of "moral bankruptcy" yet in truth it was his own moral failure to stand up against the forces of far-right hate targeting this country that ultimately led to his downfall bylinetimes.com/2026/06/22/k...

I’ve been listening to papers’ and magazines’ politics podcasts for years and I can confirm that the issue here is not “the public can’t explain to journalists why they don’t like Keir Starmer”. The hacks clearly don’t like the reasons they’re hearing, but there is no public reluctance to explain.

I think this is actually a fair point, but that in itself contains the answer: his actions collapsed any coalition of supporters he originally had, from every direction. He failed to please /anyone./

Does that mean he cannot count to 80?

Sadiq Khan, responding to Keir Starmer's resignation says "the local election results showed people are impatient for the change that was promised and a Labour govt that holds firm to the progressive values our party was established to promote. This should be the focus of the next Prime Minister"

This basically. Labour has relentlessly increased the salience of the issues Reform prioritises, whilst winning over basically no Reform voters, and simultaneously alienating their own base. It's just terrible politics.

As Starmer steps down and Burnham prepares to sweep into power, I imagine that Wes Streeting has basically morphed into the creepy art curator from Ghostbusters 2. Except instead of worshipping a painting of Vigo the Carpathian, it's a portrait of J.K. Rowling.

Having overseen a massive rollback of human rights, it does feel petty for Starmer to talk about Labour having been "morally bankrupt". especially after calling human rights' supporters "extremists" and a Home Sec who told refugee rights advocates to "fuck off". www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/poli...

I mean, look around you. Would you say that these clowns have made Britain less racist, less cruel, less stupid, less unpleasant? You would not, because they have fought for most of a decade to make much dumber, nastier, harsher and more cruel. They are not sorry they did, not a bit of it.

Not really. Starmer pursued a strategy that made essentially every political scientist suck their teeth and go 'that's not a good idea', his administration was not centrist (looking Tony Blair when I take my glasses off does not make you centrist)....I don't think polsci will be that troubled.