The Labour government slipped out a press release this week announcing that the ‘Equality Hub’, which previously sat within the Cabinet Office, is being “replaced” by the ‘Office for Equality and Opportunity’, which will be under the control of the Women and Equalities ministerial team.
Mere semantics, you might think. And yet, according to the press release, one of the Office for Equality and Opportunity’s immediate priorities will be to make good on a Labour Party manifesto pledge to deliver “a full, trans-inclusive ban on conversion practices”.
Oh dear.
The FSU has written previously about the likely impact legislation of this kind will have on free speech (here).
Of course, there are some forms of “conversion therapy” that few people would object to being banned, such as attempts to stop someone from being gay or transgender via exorcism, physical violence or food deprivation. No-one is disputing that “treatments” of this kind have no place in a free society. But a bill isn’t required to ban them. Such practices are already illegal in the UK.
Where things start to get more complicated is at the softer end of the spectrum if “conversion therapy” is defined too broadly — specifically, practices that centre on children and adolescents. In the past few years, a “gender affirmative model” has taken hold in clinical settings like the NHS’s controversial, and now closed gender identity development service (Gids) for children at the Tavistock Clinic.
Faced with cases of gender distress, this model encourages clinicians — as well as parents and teachers — to affirm rather than question a child’s chosen gender identity, before then putting them on a medical pathway that can have lifelong, irreversible consequences.
As per the findings of NHS England’s interim Cass Review in 2022, clinicians at the Tavistock said they felt under pressure to adopt an unquestioning affirmative approach in a manner that was at odds with the standard process of clinical assessment and diagnosis that they had been trained to undertake in all other clinical encounters.
This culture of silencing any evidence-based challenge to gender identity ideology is already deeply concerning given that we now know that puberty blockers — intended to delay the onset of puberty so children suffering from gender dysphoria can have more time before deciding whether to have surgery — can cause lifelong harms, such as bone disease and infertility, and that the majority of children wrestling with their identity and sexuality ultimately grow out of their gender dysphoria as they reach adolescence.
But how much more pressure will cautious doctors, clinicians and therapists feel under to take an affirmative approach if trans activists have recourse to a new law while attempting to inveigle employers, professional associations and regulators into agreeing with them that “intellectual doubts”, “research evidence”, “unique patient characteristics”, “longitudinal studies”, “inferences drawn from systematic reviews”, “clinical data”, “past casework” and so on represent little more than transphobia-in-action?
The risk, then, is that a poorly worded bill will end up criminalising doctors, therapists, parents and teachers who try to discourage gender-confused adolescents from embarking on irreversible medical pathways on the grounds that such conversations are an attempt to ‘convert’ them from being transgender to cisgender.
In fact, even a carefully drafted trans-inclusive ban that didn’t catch this type of conduct would be in danger of being amended by members of the LGBT+ lobby as it made its way through Parliament.
This might all seem far-fetched, 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 having to take 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.
Trans activists and trans lobby groups like Stonewall tend to pooh-pooh this as transphobic scare-mongering — but anyone familiar with the fraught wrangling now taking place over the meaning of the word ‘sex’ in the 2010 Equality Act can attest to the unintended but profound consequences that an undefined word or phrase can have on the right to freedom of expression when it comes to society’s most controversial issues.
Indeed, when the Christian Institute obtained legal opinion on the question of whether a previous legislative attempt to ban ‘conversion therapy practices’ in the UK would interfere with a person’s Article 9 (freedom of thought) and Article 10 (freedom of expression) rights under the European Convention on Human Rights, it had this to say about the draft law’s use of the word “practice”:
“It is possible that it would be interpreted (as with the Equality Act 2010 definition) to imply an element of potentially continuing or habitual conduct. However, it is also possible that it would be interpreted simply as meaning ‘conduct’. Even if it were interpreted in line with the first meaning essayed above, that meaning remains relatively wide. As noted by the Court of Appeal, a one-off decision might be a ‘practice’ if it was considered to be something that might be done in future (including in a hypothetical future situation). On either interpretation, therefore, a wide range of conduct will be caught.”
In other words, a poorly worded bill risks catching a “wide range of conduct”, effectively criminalising those who deviate from an “affirmative” approach to gender dysphoria in children and adolescents — even if the deviation is only undertaken as part of a one-off, perfectly legitimate conversation with a child, and irrespective of whether that child is their own child, or a child in their care.
This is why the FSU has been lobbying against a conversion therapy ban and urging Parliamentarians to consider the unintended consequences for freedom of speech if a bill of this nature is brought forward.
We strongly urge you to voice your opposition to the new Office for Equality and Opportunity’s plan to push forward with its “full, trans inclusive ban on conversion practices” by writing to your local MP.
Please take a few minutes to fill out this template email. It’s a simple, fast process that can have a significant impact. Feel free to personalise it with your concerns.
