Sir Keir Starmer has appointed his cabinet following a landslide Labour victory last week, with the post of Secretary of State for Education going to Bridget Phillipson MP.
The MP for Houghton and Sunderland South has also been named as Minister for Women and Equalities, where she will have responsibility for equality policy involving not just women, but transgender people as well.
Confusingly, Anneliese Dodds MP has also been appointed as Minister for Women and Equalities. According to the Prime Minister’s spokesperson, this doubling up is necessary because although “for all intents and purposes” Dodds will be the lead minister, “for constitutional purposes you need someone who’s a full Cabinet member [i.e., Phillipson] having the brief as part of their role”.
To get a sense of what they’re likely to do with this shared portfolio, and in particular where they stand on the question of whether so-called ‘conversion therapy’ should be banned, it’s worth considering some of the opinions they’ve expressed previously.
The Labour manifesto promised to “finally deliver a full trans-inclusive ban on conversion practices, while protecting the freedom for people to explore their sexual orientation and gender identity”.
It’s not clear what that means – and Dodds and Phillipson may not know themselves. But we fear it will mean that parents and health professionals who advise gender-confused adolescents to pause and reflect before embarking on life-changing medical treatment will fall foul of the ban.
Dodds has in the past expressed her allegiance to gender identity ideology – i.e., the belief that a person’s gender can be different from their biological sex and that a biological male who identifies as a woman should be treated as legally indistinguishable from a biological woman, with the same access to single-sex spaces, including prisons.
Of course, there are some forms of ‘conversion therapy’ that no sensible person would object to being banned, such as attempts to stop someone from being gay or transgender via exorcism, electro-shock therapy, physical violence or food deprivation. No-one is disputing that “treatments” of this kind are appalling and have no place in a free society. But a bill isn’t required to ban them. Such practices are already illegal in the UK.
Indeed, when the Government commissioned researchers from Coventry University to study the evidence on conversion therapy, they managed to find just 30 people from the past two decades who claimed to have experienced such treatment, and the only examples of “horrific and life-altering practices” they were able to unearth – during the process of, among other things, trawling through “entries for conversion therapy in Wikipedia” – were drawn from the United States.
But if that’s the case, then what is it, exactly, that Dodds’s “full, no loopholes, trans-inclusive” law – which is how she described it at the Labour Party Conference last year – will end up banning? We fear it will be any attempt by parents and health professionals to talk troubled teenagers out of embarking on irreversible medical pathways.
Over the past few years, a “gender affirmative model” has taken hold in the NHS’s Gender Identity Services (Gids) for children and young people – and a “full trans-inclusive ban on conversion practices” could have the effect of criminalizing any alternative to this approach.
It’s true that the new Health Secretary, Wes Streeting, has just announced he intends to pass a law banning powerful puberty blockers being given to children by private or offshore clinics, in a move that will bring the private sector into line with the NHS.
But the gender affirmative model also involves ‘social transition’, which doesn’t require medical, physiologic or hormone interventions, and can instead be expressed by the use of hairstyles and clothes, a name change and the use of different pronouns.
That might sound harmless enough, but it’s currently unclear what the long-term psychological effects of social transition are for children – i.e., how it impacts on the development of their sense of self and their psychological functioning. Several recent studies (here, here and here) have also questioned whether it actually prolongs the persistence of gender confusion.
Still, in fairness to Dodds, she does at least appear to be listening to all sides on this issue.
For instance, earlier this year a Labour spokesperson was forced to defend Dodds after she was criticised by LGBT+ Labour – one of the party’s affiliated societies – for her “appalling” decision to meet with the LGB Alliance, a gender critical charity.
According to an X post by the charity, they had a “productive discussion” with Dodds regarding their work. If that is indeed the case, then Dodds must surely now have an inkling as to why the previous Conservative administration repeatedly backed away from legislating in this area.
The problem that various parliamentarians faced when bringing forward bills to ban ‘conversion therapy’ and ‘conversion practices’ was defining what these terms meant. In the bills brought forward to date, they were too vaguely defined to form the basis of a workable new law.
For instance, the Christian Institute recently obtained a legal opinion from a KC on the question of whether a Private Members’ Bill to ban conversion therapy sponsored earlier this year by Baroness Burt 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, and it had this to say about the Bill’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 “full trans-inclusive ban on conversion practices” risks catching a “wide range of conduct”, effectively criminalising doctors, parents and teachers 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 conversation with a child and irrespective of whether that child is, in fact, their own child.
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.
Religious leaders in the state are also held to be carrying out an illegal act if they tell people “that their gender identity is not real”, or if they say prayers that “ask for a person to not act on their attractions” or “talk about a person’s brokenness or need to repent”.
The Victorian Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission even suggests alternative ways that Christian residents of Victoria can “continue practicing your faith without causing harm”, including prayers that reassure people they’re perfect just the way they are, and other similarly suggestions that sound like lyrics from Ed Sheeran’s back catalogue.
