Written by Caroline ffiske. Published 12 January 2022.

The Conservative Government continues to be hoodwinked by the LGBTQIA+ lobby. The latest example is its commitment to ban ‘conversion therapy’. This has always been understood to cover attempts to change the sexual preferences of gay men and lesbians.  Homophobic conversion therapy is now widely regarded as abhorrent; is abhorrent. If any strengthening of the law is needed there is unlikely to be a whisper of disagreement. 

So why is there controversy and concern about the Government’s current proposals? The LGBTQIA+ lobby wants a conversion therapy ban to cover ‘gender identity’. Staggeringly, the Conservative Government goes along. Let’s say that a vulnerable young person becomes convinced via social media or peer-group pressure that they were ‘born in the wrong body’ and would be better off becoming medicalised for life, potentially rendered sterile, with their sex organs surgically removed. Via the ‘conversion therapy’ ban, the Tories propose that it would become a criminal offense to try to persuade such a young person that they are making a mistake. 

The Government’s proposals risk criminalising expert adults who work with a growing number of young people in just these circumstances. They would criminalise talking therapies that explore this socially-contagious currently-fashionable tragedy. If this seems hard to believe, here is the actual wording from the conversion therapy consultation: 

“Question 2. The government considers that delivering talking conversion therapy with the intention of changing a person’s sexual orientation or changing them from being transgender or to being transgender either to someone who is under 18, or to someone who is 18 or over and who has not consented or lacks the capacity to do so should be considered a criminal offence. The consultation document describes proposals to introduce new criminal law that will capture this. How far do you agree or disagree with this?”

How will the Government define 'transgender' for these purposes? Simple self-identification, with no-one then allowed to question this? Is the goal more sterilised young people requiring lifelong medication, with additional serious health consequences (such as weak bones)? Does the Government regard this as remotely acceptable, particularly given that a considerable number of these young people are gay or lesbian? (The Bayswater Support Group, which includes over 400 families with a transgender-identifying child or adolescent, reports that over half of such children had come out as lesbian or gay before they were exposed to transgender ideology.) 

The successful strategy of the LGBTQIA+ lobby in influencing the Conservative Government to arrive at this position is straight out of the ‘Denton’s Handbook’. This document was brought to widespread attention by James Kirkup writing in the Spectator back in 2019.  The purpose of the document is to help trans activist groups bring about changes in the law to allow children to ‘legally change their gender, without adult approval and without needing the approval of any authorities’. Says the foreword: 'We hope this report will be a powerful tool for activists and NGOs working to advance the rights of trans youth across Europe and beyond'.

Here is the tip from the Denton’s Handbook that the LGBTQIA+ lobby is now using on the Conservative Government: 'Tie your campaign to more popular reform.' Doing so provides ‘a veil of protection’. It’s so blindingly obvious a strategy that you wouldn’t think anyone would get trapped. But the Government has. It has nodded along to the idea that gay conversion therapy should be banned, because who would now disagree?  Then, with extraordinary gullibility, it has expanded the meaning of the term to cover ‘trans’ identities. 

The solution to the problem is obvious: proceed with the proposals, but take any reference to ‘gender identity’ and ‘trans identities’ out. Stop being played by lobby groups. Particularly those which seem to take a cavalier approach to safeguarding and to the risk of confused young people being irreversibly damaged because they got caught up in a fad. Protect the right of same-sex attracted young people to become self-accepting lesbian or gay adults, of autistic children to be protected from harmful ideologies, and of gender non-conforming children not to feel pressured to conform to outdated sexual stereotypes.

If anyone has any residual doubts about the merits of the arguments being made by the LGBTQIA+ lobby, these should be blown away by reading the material it has pulled together to support this campaign.  This can be found on the website BanConversionTherapy (BCT), powered by, amongst others, Stonewall of course - and Mermaids.

Detailed guidance on how supporters should respond to the Government’s consultation to support the proposals can be found here. Concerns about safeguarding young people don’t appear to get a look in. “The UK Government must hear that there is widespread support not only for banning conversion therapy, but for doing so comprehensively, in a way that protects all LGBTQIA+ people, no matter what their age, no matter how they identify, and no matter what form that conversion therapy takes.” 

BCT says ‘2.4% of LGBT people have been subjected to conversion therapy, and a further 5% have been offered conversion therapy. These figures are higher for trans and asexual people’.  This bizarre claim about ‘asexual conversion therapy’ should lead MPs to robustly query the accuracy of BCT’s wider claims. 

BCT is worried that the proposed ban does not cover bisexual people or intersex people. Groups representing people who have DSDs, commonly but erroneously known as ‘intersex’, have frequently asked not to have their conditions weaponised in this way. 

BCT is concerned that the proposed ban ‘could leave worrying gaps for parts of the LGBTQIA+ community’. Who? ‘People on the asexual or aromantic spectrum.’ 

To be clear, this lobby group, taken so seriously by the Tories, wants to ban conversion therapy for aromantics. Someone is being taken for a ride; sadly it is our Government.

To suggest that the Government needs to criminalise adults for challenging someone’s aromantic status shows a lobby that has lost the plot. It’s an insult to the legacy of serious harm historically experienced by lesbian and gay people. It’s also an insult to the many families where a young person is now currently caught up in the gender identity fad and is at risk of serious harm.

BCT concludes ‘the government … should clarify in its proposals that these also cover non-binary, intersex and asexual and aromantic people for the avoidance of doubt’.

A significant proportion of young people now attending gender clinics are same-sex attracted. With their new cross-sex identity, they’ll emerge as straight! Is this not the true conversion therapy? BCT are keen to ensure this continues: “The government should make clear … that … gender affirmative therapy which accepts a person’s autonomous understanding of themselves without a predetermined or preferred outcome [is not] conversion therapy and therefore would not be an offence under its proposals.”

Imagine a future where a responsible and concerned therapist tries to help a same-sex attracted young woman understand that she might not be born in the wrong body, but that she might be a lesbian. That she might not want to start cross-sex hormones, but rather wait a while. That she should not yet plan for a double mastectomy, but rather wait a bit. The Government’s proposals would criminalise this therapist. How have we got to here?

If the Government proceeds with its proposals it will result in thousands of us being prepared to end up in Court. We must not be silent as we see young people harming themselves.  We must not be silent as more and more detransitioners express their profound regrets and talk about their pain and their ongoing medical problems resulting from 'gender-affirming' interventions. We must fight back against this damaging ideology now so widespread wherever young people gather, and especially on social media.

It would be easy for the Government to dig itself back out of the mess it has created. Ban conversion therapy as it applies to same-sex attracted individuals. That is all.

My final words go to Keira Bell, a young woman who has ‘de-transitioned’ from a male gender identity:

‘By the time I got to the Tavistock, I was adamant that I needed to transition. It was the kind of brash assertion that’s typical of teenagers. What was really going on was that I was a girl insecure in my body who had experienced parental abandonment, felt alienated from my peers, suffered from anxiety and depression, and struggled with my sexual orientation. After a series of superficial conversations with social workers, I was put on puberty blockers at age 16. A year later, I was receiving testosterone shots. When 20, I had a double mastectomy.

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. When I was seen at the Tavistock clinic, I had so many issues that it was comforting to think I really had only one that needed solving: I was a male in a female body. But it was the job of the professionals to consider all my co-morbidities, not just to affirm my naïve hope that everything could be solved with hormones and surgery.’

Is this the future the Conservative Government wants, for more young people?