Alex

This is the worst of all bills. When people hear the words “conversion therapy” they think of the electric shocks and nausea-inducing drugs used on gay people in the 1950s and 1960s and the “corrective rape” of lesbians. Such practices and others are already illegal under existing law including the Offences Against the Person Act 1861, the Sexual Offences Act 2003, the Serious Crime Act 2015 (coercive or controlling behaviour), and the Domestic Abuse Act 2021, which protect both adults and teenagers from violence, sexual abuse and coercive control. To date, neither the government or prosecuting agencies have been able to describe any conduct that is not already illegal, nor are there any reports of such conduct to the police. The proposed Bill is therefore completely unnecessary: there is no “gap” in the law. The proposed Bill is, however, extremely dangerous, in that it attacks significant areas of human rights and will bring about huge challenges to the already overstretched public services that will have to deal with them. The main problems with the Bill, in our opinion, are: 1. It intrudes unacceptably into family life (ECHR Article 8). There is no protection for parents who, in good faith, tell their children they do not agree with gender transition. It creates “protection orders” which could be used to compel parents to agree under threat of imprisonment. Children could be driven into the care system, with all the problems that brings, for the child, their family, and the state. 2. Protection orders are open-ended. Courts may impose any “prohibitions, restrictions or requirements” they consider appropriate, without notice and on application by anyone with the court’s leave. Parents who refuse to use a child’s chosen name or support their transition face imprisonment. They represent an Orwellian intrusion into private and family life. 3. If enacted, the Bill would drive away therapists who can help vulnerable young people. The “healthcare exemption” would not work in practice as it cannot stop people from complaining, with therapists facing months or years of investigation. The process may be weaponised by adolescents and activists who have convinced them they were “born in the wrong body” which is impossible. Experience in countries which have such a bill is that therapists who encourage children to think about why they feel negatively about their natal sex will self-exclude, leaving the way clear for the “affirmation practices” that have been criticised by Dr Hilary Cass. 4. The Bill would harm young lesbians and gay men. Cass found that many gender-distressed children attending the Tavistock Gender Clinic were same-sex attracted. Yet they were redirected towards puberty-blockers and cross-sex hormones and led to believe they could “change sex”. Medical transition is irreversible and leads to a lifetime of medication, infertility and poor health. A recent Swedish study shows that transition did not resolve the issues that young people had presented with: they endured because the trauma was not addressed. 5. It conflicts with schools’ legal safeguarding duties and the Equality Act. A school following statutory safeguarding guidance could be accused of a conversion practice, with governors held personally liable. The Bill introduces a concept of “gender identity” which is not a protected characteristic under the Equality Act and as a concept has no stable meaning. 6. Its key terms are vague or open-ended. “Abuse” would be left to the courts to decide case by case. This inevitably will lead to subjective judgements in the absence of an objective definition (and breaches ECHR Articles 6 and 7). 7. It is open to misuse. Anyone could bring a private prosecution without the consent of the Attorney General or the Director of Public Prosecutions. Violence, sexual abuse, threats and coercive control are already crimes. The government’s own notes say the new ground is mostly “verbal or non-violent” conduct, which is very widely drawn indeed, and is almost impossible to evidence (ECHR Article 3). 8. It is an attack on free speech. A bill which enables protection orders requiring affirmation of a belief — that a person is “transgender”, or is a woman in a male body, or any other variation of transgender belief — is incompatible with protecting freedom of belief and freedom of expression. Protection against belief discrimination in the Equality Act 2010 includes “gender-critical belief”, that is, saying that no one can change sex, and that it is important to be able to say so and such views are worthy of respect in a democratic society (ECHR Article 10). We believe the true intention of those advocating for the Bill is to introduce the concept of “gender identity” into law; to effectively criminalise and silence those who do not agree with gender self-identity. Most of the British public believe people who identify as “transgender” should be free to express themselves but they do not believe that an identity overrules the reality of biological sex. If “trans identities” are protected in the same way as sexual orientation, the sex-based protections and single-sex spaces that same-sex attracted people rely on are undermined. The Bill’s victims will be parents and professionals who are serving children’s interests and children, whose protections from the activists seeking to harm them, will be eroded. The Bill has been conceived in response to the Supreme Court ruling on biological sex, to create a conflict that the authorities will be forced to deal with through endless and costly court cases, or by a further change in the law, giving “gender identity” precedence over biological sex. Bear in mind the testimony of detransitioners as UK detransitioner Keira Bell, who was given puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones as a teenager via the Tavistock clinic and later underwent a double mastectomy, has written: “The consequences of what happened to me have been profound: possible infertility, loss of my breasts and inability to breastfeed, atrophied genitals, a permanently changed voice, facial hair.” This draft bill is bad law. It needs to be stopped.