Draft conversion-practices bill threatens parents with jail time

The government has published a draft bill to ban “conversion practices”.

While there are improvements on previous drafts of this law, it remains an attempt to shift “Stonewall Law” – now slowly being driven out of workplaces and services – into homes and classrooms.

It puts parents, therapists, teachers and partners at risk of being subjected to investigation if they do not affirm that someone is “male” or “female “ (or both, or neither) based on their personal declaration rather than their biology.

Although it offers an exception for medical professionals as long as they do not “act in a way that falls far below the standards reasonably expected of a person in their position”, others are at risk of being subjected to investigation if they do not support a person’s transition.

It also hands the power of private prosecution to organisations like the Good Law Project and Nancy Kelley’s Trans Solidarity Alliance.

What does the bill do?

The bill defines “conversion practice” as any conduct with the intention of causing the individual to have or not have (or to believe that they have or do not have) a particular sexual orientation or transgender identity. The question of whether conduct amounts to an abuse is a question of fact “to be determined by reference to all the circumstances of the case”.

The government’s argument is that “abuse should never be legal”, but in practice this bill hands off the detail for determining what is or isn’t abuse to the courts.

We fear that this open-ended and subjective definition will lead to parents, teachers, therapists, youth workers, pastoral leaders and others being investigated by the police and possibly submitted to the Crown Prosecution Service for assessment and prosecution, and also being vulnerable to private prosecution.

The offence of carrying out an abusive conversion practice on an individual is defined in terms of causing “serious harm” to the individual’s physical or mental health, or “serious alarm or distress to the individual which has a substantial adverse effect on their usual day-to-day activities”. This could potentially mean a wife telling her husband to stop wearing her clothes, parents telling a child they will not pay for puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones, or a school insisting on referring to all children accurately as girls or boys, in line with its safeguarding responsibilities.

Making Equality Act compliance a criminal offence?

The crime may be tried as a summary offence at a magistrates’ court, which can hand down a 12-month prison sentence, or by the Crown Court, leading to imprisonment of up to five years. Corporate bodies such as companies can also be tried for “failing to take all reasonable steps to prevent the commission of the offence”.

This is likely to have a significant chilling effect on individuals expressing gender-critical beliefs and applying sex-based rules at work.

A brief history: from historic abuses to strategic campaigning

Historically, what the public understands as conversion therapy refers to abhorrent, systemic attempts in the 1950s and 1960s to “cure” homosexual individuals using barbaric aversion techniques such as electric shocks or nausea-inducing drugs. These historic practices have long since died out – and are completely illegal under existing UK criminal laws.

When we reviewed 10 years of annual reports from major LGBT organisations up to 2019 we found that “conversion therapy” was barely mentioned as an active concern: it was widely seen as a historical relic. The sudden pivot occurred around 2020 following the loss of the debate over gender self-identification via the Gender Recognition Act. Lobby groups strategically co-opted the universal moral outrage against historic gay conversion methods and lifted the terminology wholesale to apply it to an entirely different phenomenon: “gender identity”.

The evidence vacuum: pulling apart the numbers

Proponents of the ban routinely lean on three heavily compromised data sources to assert that there is an ongoing “epidemic” requiring a new criminal law. When subjected to scrutiny, the evidence is not there:

• 2017 National LGBT survey: this self-selected online survey is frequently cited because 2% of respondents claimed to have undergone conversion therapy. However, the survey bundled spiritual counselling and ordinary conversations into the same definition as serious criminal abuses like corrective rape. Crucially, the survey showed that reporting was higher among older age groups, confirming that traditional conversion efforts are a historic, rather than contemporary, UK issue.

• 2023 Galop report: This was based on a survey claiming that 43% of trans-identifying people had faced conversion practices. Yet the qualitative data in fact shows that 56% of those accounts described ordinary interpersonal family friction or peer disagreements (such as a friend telling a teenager they are transitioning “for attention”). While emotionally distressing, family arguments should not be the business of the criminal justice system.

• 2025 Stonewall/Opinium poll: This push poll claimed that 30% of trans-identifying people in the UK had been subjected to an exorcism in the past five years. It also featured a bizarre generational skew whereby the youngest respondents reported drastically higher rates of physical violence than the older generations who actually lived through the persecution of the 20th century. It represents a narrative capture that broadens the definition of “harm” so widely that it pathologises everyday parental guidance and clinical scepticism.

Today’s announcement came with another report from Galop which analysed the case notes of 195 detailed cases of GALOP clients. Most of these relate to family relationships which they identify as “emotional and psychological abuse” such as:

“Dad makes frequent comments that ‘[Client] is not trans’ and that he is a woman. […] [Client] disclosed his parents want to take him to counselling to ‘convince him he is a female’.“

Like the previous Galop study, it includes a small number of crimes such as sexual assault alongside a much larger number of family disagreements. There is nothing in the study about what proportion of these cases were judged to be crimes by Galop, and what the outcomes were if they were reported to the police.

What happens next?

Ministers have opted for the slow track: the draft bill will be sent for pre-legislative scrutiny by a joint committee. This gives parliamentarians, clinicians, parents and teachers a vital window to influence what happens next.

Briefing on the draft bill

More on conversion therapy