During last week’s King’s Speech, Sir Keir Starmer set out his legislative programme in this parliamentary session and made clear Labour intends to bring forward a “full, trans-inclusive ban on conversion practices”.
Given the implications of this Bill for free speech, we strongly urge you to voice your concerns by reaching out to your local MP. Please take a few minutes to fill out our template letter by clicking the button below. We’ve written in more detail about the free speech issues involved here.
It’s a simple, fast process that can have a significant impact. We’ve provided a template, but feel free to personalise it with your concerns. Your voice matters and this is an important opportunity to make it heard.
At the FSU we fear a “full, trans inclusive ban on conversion practices” will curtail the speech rights of parents, teachers, religious leaders and health professionals wishing to advise gender-confused children to pause and reflect before embarking on a pathway that leads to irreversible, life-changing surgery.
That might seem like an outlandish fear, but in the Australian state of Victoria, where “suppression practises” have been banned since 2021, a parent who refuses to support their child’s request for puberty blockers is at risk of prosecution and could end up spending 10 years in jail.
A similar piece of legislation in Canada, Bill C-4, recently made it an offence to “cause another person to undergo conversion therapy”, with the result that Canadian parents who want to explore the many, varied reasons why their children are showing signs of gender confusion, or who might want their child to see a psychotherapist before agreeing to irreversible medical procedures, now risk prosecution and up to five years in jail.
Closer to the UK, in Switzerland, where conversion therapy is banned in some cantons, it recently emerged that a Swiss couple are taking legal action to regain custody of their daughter, who has been a ward of the state for over a year following a disputed diagnosis of gender dysphoria that led to their withholding of consent for ‘gender transition’ treatment involving puberty blockers.
Having been separated from their daughter since April last year thanks to their refusal to show fealty to gender identity ideology, the couple is now being supported by the Christian legal advocacy group, Alliance Defending Freedom, as they attempt to bring their daughter home.
In a case that hopes to set a precedent against Europe’s increasingly influential transgender lobby, the parents are appealing a court order to produce documents that would allow their daughter to apply for a change of “legal sex” in the civil register.
The demand for the documentation came following the parents’ failed appeal to recover legal authority over the appointment of their daughter’s medical professionals, which had been granted to the Swiss child welfare agency by the court.
Supported by the Christian legal advocacy group Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), lead lawyer on the case Dr Felix Boellmann said that these parents, who are remaining anonymous for safety reasons and to protect their child, “are living every parent’s worst nightmare. Their child has been taken away from them simply for trying to protect her from harm”.
The ordeal began in 2021 when their then 13 year-old daughter, who had previously experienced various mental health issues, told them she believed her “gender identity” was male.
Against her parents’ wishes, she then requested to ‘socially transition’ at her private school. As the Interim Report of the Cass Review points out, social transition is “not a neutral act” but actually a major psychosocial intervention that may lead to children embarking on a medicalised pathway that leads to irreversible, life-changing surgery.
Her parents believe she came to the conclusion she was born in the wrong body during the Covid lockdowns, when she spent a significant amount of time alone in her room on the internet – as previous academic research suggests, sudden onset of gender dysphoria can be associated with increased internet/social media usage.
The parents took their daughter to a hospital for help, and after a brief consultation with doctors she was shown an LGBTQ-approved ‘gender unicorn’ diagram, which depicts a sliding scale of male, female and other identities, alongside spectrums of gender expression and sex assigned at birth.
It remains unclear whether the medical staff considered whether the child’s gender confusion might be secondary to her mental health conditions, or if they considered adopting a ‘watchful waiting’ approach, which rather than steering a child towards any pre-determined outcome, recognises developmental change as an intrinsic part of childhood and understands that the most likely outcome is that gender-confused children will turn out to be gay.
Following this consultation, the doctors concluded that their daughter may be experiencing “gender dysphoria”. As a result, the parents were advised that their daughter should take puberty blockers, a recommendation they rejected, seeking private mental health care instead.
During this time, the school began to ‘socially transition’ – accommodate a new name and pronouns in accordance with the teenager’s wishes – their daughter, a process her parents explicitly rejected.
After the couple’s objection to the school accommodating their daughter’s ‘transition’, the school psychologist claimed she feared “suicidal acts” if the child was not allowed to ‘transition,’ and alerted the Swiss state’s child protection agency, Service de Protection des Mineurs (SPMI). Tellingly, it also liaised with trans activism organisation, Le Refuge.
In April 2023, a meeting was arranged between the parents and child welfare agency Service de Protection des Mineurs (SPMI), in which they were accused of “abuse” for not going along with what the authorities suggested, and rushing their child down a pathway towards medical treatment that all too often has lifelong, irreversible consequences.
Following this meeting, their daughter was removed from the family home, hospitalised, and put into a government-funded youth shelter.
The family, in a statement, said Le Refuge had pushed for the teen’s gender transition, and blamed an “alliance between the school, the Swiss Child Protection Agency, and the Swiss hospital in Geneva” for influencing their daughter against their wishes.
“We were very clear with the school that we did not believe it was up to the school to socially transition our daughter,” the parents said. “We learned that the school psychologist was getting in and was feeding my daughter with materials, putting her in contact with Le Refuge.”
“I feel powerless,” the girl’s mother said, adding, “I love my child. She is only 16 years old. She cannot make such a decision. She needs a mother and her family.”
The fact that the Swiss state has separated a gender-confused child from discerning parents who wanted to explore other treatment options before agreeing to irreversible medical procedures may well seem like an egregious aberration, but it is in fact the logical endpoint of any attempt to ban ‘trans conversion therapy’ since what is effectively being forbidden is evidenced-based argumentation, scepticism and debate.
There would be a whiff of Soviet-era Lysenkoism about any state sanctioned attempt to protect a supposedly scientific framework from scrutiny, but given that ours is a culture in which tolerance of dissent from gender identity ideology is already in short supply, it’s easy to see how a UK “conversion therapy” ban could quickly be weaponised by trans activists to pursue much the same ends as in Switzerland.
We strongly urge you to voice your concerns about the direction of travel under a Labour government by using our campaigning tool to reach out to your local MP. It’s imperative that freedom of speech remains protected, particularly in sensitive and potentially life-altering circumstances. The link to the campaigning tool is below.
