Update from Helen
From left: Sue Evans, Matilda Gosling and Fiona McAnena in 2025
This week we’ve been gearing up to engage with the draft Conversion Practices Bill. When Parliament returns after recess on 12th October, a joint committee of peers and MPs will start to carry out pre-legislative scrutiny. It’s vital that this committee hears the arguments against the proposals and probes the claims of their supporters.
To kick off, on Thursday we published Criminalising conversations, a report by social-science researcher Matilda Gosling based on in-depth interviews with mental-health professionals who have concerns about the bill. (Matilda is pictured above with Sue Evans, a former mental-health nurse who started raising the alarm about poor practice at the Tavistock gender clinic in 2005, and my colleague Fiona, at the launch of Fiona’s book, Terf Island.)
Plans for a ban on conversion practices have been mooted for several years, and a growing number of other jurisdictions already have similar laws. But explaining why they are so pernicious isn’t easy, because they sound like something nobody opposes.
As one of Matilda’s interviewees, a clinical psychologist, said: “What comes into everyone’s heads when they talk about conversion therapy is conservative Christian groups in the United States using aversive practices with men such as gay porn with electric shocks. These are barbaric and non-therapeutic practices. What they are actually banning is being able to ask really basic questions like, ‘I wonder why you feel that way?’”
Unlike similar laws elsewhere, the draft bill contains an exemption for health professionals who are working to expected standards. But as several interviewees pointed out, thresholds for prosecution are likely to be set by licensing and membership bodies, almost all of which already insist transgender identities should always be unquestioningly affirmed. Almost half the interviewees based in the UK said they would stop, or consider stopping, working in this area if the bill passed for fear of unfounded complaints and prosecutions. Several had already stopped taking referrals for gender issues.
Before I settled down to read Matilda’s report, I thought I knew a great deal about the harms caused by banning so-called “conversion practices” – in reality, criminalising ordinary, ethical, evidence-based therapy. I knew there would be a serious impact on what mental-health professionals could discuss with their patients, and that it would drive many away from engaging with gender-distressed patients altogether.
But it hadn’t occurred to me that whatever threadbare protection the healthcare exemption offers doesn’t cover other vital activities carried out by mental-health professionals, such as training, supervision and research.
And the knock-on impacts outside therapy are so much worse than I had realised. There are no exemptions for anyone else: not parents, friends, teachers, social workers or researchers. I knew that it would make responsible parenting harder by potentially criminalising straightforward statements of disbelief in the possibility that girls can become boys or vice versa, or simple facts about the two sexes. It hadn’t occurred to me that it would potentially throw a new, incendiary element into family breakdowns and perhaps even increase family estrangement, as warring couples throw accusations of “conversion practices” against each other and gender-distressed children are told online that parents who don’t “affirm” them must hate them and want them dead.
We have commissioned Matilda before: her 2024 report for us, Women’s services: a sector silenced, was cited by the Supreme Court in the For Women Scotland judgment. We hope her latest work will help change the weather in the same way.
Find out more
Draft Conversion Practices Bill threatens parents with jail time
Conversion therapy: still not legal – or still not happening?
Media coverage
Labour’s ban on trans conversion therapy ‘will undermine parents’
“Our report is the first of its kind, documenting the serious problems foreseen by experienced therapists who work with gender-distressed young people.” - Helen Joyce
Daniel Martin • The Telegraph
Criminalising conversations
Matilda Gosling on the Conversion Practices Bill
In this week’s episode, Helen Joyce is joined by Matilda Gosling to talk about her research, which documents the serious problems with the planned new law foreseen by experienced therapists who work with gender-distressed young people.
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