Last night much of my Twitter feed was full of people (mostly gay men) discussing Channel 4’s expose of reparative therapy treatments (otherwise known as “gay cures”). A few people had horror stories to tell about aversion therapy, a form of “cure” that basically involves torturing people until they agree to say they are not gay any more. Thankfully most people in the UK these days accept that being homosexual is not a mental illness and cannot be cured.

Meanwhile another substantial part of my feed was taken up with a furious argument between trans people and white, cis feminists (all of them proudly left wing). The feminists were insisting that any trans person who was unwilling to “debate” the ideas that being trans is indeed a mental illness, and that gender reassignment should be banned in favor of reparative therapy, was guilty of “censorship” and was “violently anti-free-speech”. I note that I put debate in scare quotes because it is rather difficult to have a debate about something when the other side’s position is that you are insane and that nothing you say about yourself can be believed.

White feminists, eh? Thank goodness for women of color. People like Melissa Harris-Perry and bell hooks are very happy to share sistership with trans women. I can’t think of a single high profile cis white feminist in the UK who isn’t a former sex worker of whom I could say the same.