Labour’s ‘conversion therapy’ ban will do untold harm to children

What does a governing political party do after a humiliating electoral defeat? Apparently, if you’re Labour, you try to placate your activist flank by reviving one of the most radioactive issues in the UK: a proposed ban on ‘conversion-therapy practices’.

In the King’s Speech last Wednesday, the UK government reaffirmed its commitment to pushing through the Conversion Practices Bill, hastily tacking a mention of it at the end of a sentence about protecting ‘people in homes with unsafe cladding’. While banning so-called conversion therapy was a promise made in Labour’s 2024 manifesto, there is now mounting pressure on the government from campaigners urging it to move faster.

‘Conversion therapy’ is a deceptive term. Many unfamiliar with this topic will hear it and think of gay people being subjected to outrageous practices like electric shocks or medicalisation. But the proposed bill has nothing to do with abuse like this, which has long been a criminal offence anyway. In fact, Labour’s proposal to ban conversion practices is not motivated by concern for gays or lesbians at all.

This is, at its core, about reducing the ability to question children who claim to be the opposite sex. Using language such as ‘bodily autonomy’, those pushing the bill frame any intervention – any failure to accept a child’s chosen ‘gender identity’ – as a violation of rights. Such phrases hark back to slogans that were popular in the 1970s and 1980s, when activists maintained that children’s rights included the right to sexual agency. We hardly need reminding that the people best served by those slogans were paedophiles.

We at LGB Alliance take the view not only that no new legislation is necessary, but also that the proposed ban would do untold harm to ‘gender-non-conforming’ children and young people – most of whom would simply grow up to be gay, lesbian or bisexual if not sterilised in a futile attempt to change sex. Or, as we call it, ‘transing away the gay’.

If the bill passes, we could see all types of behaviour criminalised. If you were to, say, discover that your 14-year-old daughter (who claims to be a boy) has obtained a binder to compress her breasts, and confiscate it due to concerns about her health, you would find yourself in violation of the law. The same goes if you are a teacher who refuses to refer to a female student by their ‘preferred’ pronouns, or as a therapist who dares to ask a boy precisely how he arrived at the conclusion that he is a girl.

Though the ban’s advocates will say that such measures are to protect ‘genuine exploration’, it should be noted the children concerned do not want to explore anything. They insist they are the opposite sex. The bill will serve to prevent the adults in the room from telling them otherwise.

Psychiatrist Az Hakeem, a patron of LGB Alliance, was accused of ‘conversion therapy’ in 2024. When assessing a young female client who identified as male, he had asked her why she wanted to be a boy. Years later and after several follow-up sessions, the patient complained to the GMC that the question had been a form of ‘conversion therapy’. Thankfully, the GMC dismissed the complaint as unworthy of investigation – but if such accusations become linked to potential for a custodial sentence, the fear factor will be more than enough to shut therapists up.

As such, the aim of the ‘conversion practices’ ban is to serve as a deterrent. Similar bans in Canada and Australia have shown us how effective this is. Therapists must either affirm a child’s gender identity without probing the underlying reasons for it, or else simply refuse to take on children presenting with gender issues, as it is simply not worth the risk.

The bill serves nobody except those who wish to replace biological sex in law with the nebulous, subjective concept of gender identity. Having lost the battle for gender self-ID in the UK, this is their dangerous, last-ditch attempt to get the concept enshrined in law. If this bill materialises, we should all strongly oppose it. 

Bev Jackson is a co-founder and trustee of LGB Alliance. Follow her on Twitter: @BevJacksonAuth.