The ‘conversion therapy’ ban is a Trojan horse for trans extremism

Conversion therapy is already prohibited in the UK. Every recognised professional body governing psychologists, psychotherapists and counsellors already bans coercive, unethical or abusive attempts to change a person’s sexual orientation or identity. Accredited therapists can already lose their registration for unethical practice. Assault, false imprisonment, rape, harassment and coercive control are already crimes.

If the Labour government genuinely wanted to improve therapeutic practices, it would start by introducing statutory regulation of the profession. In Britain, almost anyone can call themselves a psychotherapist or counsellor without belonging to an accredited professional body. Yet instead of addressing this glaring problem, ministers have chosen to introduce activist-pandering, rainbow-waving LGBTQIA2S+ legislation in the form of the Conversion Practices Bill.

Politicians have no expertise in psychotherapy. Therapy has always existed to help people change – to reduce anxiety, recover from trauma, overcome addiction, challenge distorted thinking, repair relationships and sometimes reconsider deeply held beliefs about themselves. Change is very often the purpose of therapy. The idea that politicians can legislate which psychological changes are permissible reveals a profound misunderstanding of psychotherapy, the unconscious and the extraordinary ways people use defence mechanisms to protect themselves from emotional pain.

Jonni Skinner, a 23-year-old gay man, was just 13 years old when he entered gender services. In a clear example of chemical conversion therapy driven by homophobia, Jonni was persuaded that he would have a better life as a ‘trans girl’ than as a gay boy. He was prescribed oestrogen and lived as a ‘trans girl’ throughout his teenage years. He has since detransitioned and now speaks publicly about the physical harm done to his body. As a psychotherapist, I have often worked with young people struggling with internalised homophobia. Some years ago, I worked with a teenage girl who insisted she was a boy. As our work progressed, she came to realise that she wasn’t actually a boy. She was a lesbian who didn’t want to be a lesbian. To this young girl, becoming a ‘normal guy’ felt cool, while becoming a lesbian felt like joining a cringy club of middle-aged women with short haircuts. Today, she is a cheerful lesbian who is out and proud.

But, if the Conversion Practices Bill succeeds, would therapists like me be arrested for this kind of therapeutic work? In the down-is-up world we now live in, chemical conversion therapy is encouraged while psychological exploration is due to become illegal. Gay and lesbian people can medically transition, permanently altering healthy bodies in an attempt to escape their sexual orientation, yet therapists risk legal consequences for helping patients explore the psychological origins of that same distress.

The real question is remarkably simple. Should we seek to change our minds or our bodies? As a psychotherapist, I naturally begin with the mind. I believe it is better to help people accept themselves than to change healthy bodies to accommodate psychological distress. Others are more identity-based and they seek to change the body to align with an internal sense of identity. These are fundamentally different approaches and they should be debated openly. Instead, this bill places one approach beyond question and the other under legal suspicion.

The chilling effect is already real. Therapists love their work, yet they deliberately avoid taking on patients who are struggling with their gender identity or sexual orientation because this area is becoming a legal minefield. Why risk complaints, investigations and criminal liability when there are countless other problems to help people with? Never before has the government sought to interfere with ethical, conventional psychotherapy. Yet politicians now believe they are qualified to determine which therapeutic conversations are acceptable.

This bill has consequences far beyond psychotherapy. It reaches deep into families, classrooms, youth work and places of worship. It gives the state unprecedented influence over ordinary conversations about sex and gender between parents and children, teachers and pupils, youth workers and young people, and religious leaders and those in their care. It is a Trojan horse for state regulation of conversations about gender identity.

Parents and children disagree every day. Parents question their children’s beliefs, challenge their decisions, set boundaries, refuse requests and sometimes tell them they are mistaken. The continued diminishment of parental rights and authority, coupled with the expectation that parents be more intensively involved in their children’s lives, is not going well. We all know that parenting teenagers can become very fraught. If parents aren’t free to guide their children according to their own values and beliefs, then what is the point of it all? Am I raising my children to be part of my family or to be good citizens of the state?

This bill creates an extraordinary moral inconsistency reminiscent of the Soviet Union, where it didn’t matter whether you were correct, only whether you were politically correct. Last week in the House of Lords, Hilary Cass described parents who socially transitioned their two-year-old son, affirming him as a girl and setting him on a pathway that has left him, aged 11, with ‘weak bones’ as a result of being largely confined to his bedroom. According to the logic of this bill, those parents should be applauded. Yet parents who question a child’s transgender identity, encourage psychological exploration, or simply ask their son or daughter to wait before embarking on irreversible medical treatment may find themselves jailed for being politically incorrect.

The evidence for this extraordinary expansion of state power is remarkably weak. Ministers repeatedly cite a report from Galop, an anti-abuse charity, as justification for banning what it calls conversion practices. Yet after reviewing around 13,500 client records over three years, researchers found just 371 potential cases, only 195 of which contained enough information to analyse. The report’s most serious examples involve assault, rape, forced marriage, deprivation of liberty and coercive control – all already criminal offences that should be prosecuted vigorously. On such flimsy evidence, the government proposes to redraw the boundaries between the state and the family.

This bill encourages therapists to practise defensively, teachers to avoid difficult safeguarding conversations, and parents to fear that their recalcitrant teenager may set the law against them in a fit of pique.

Stella O’Malley is the director and founder of Genspect.