“No, you can’t wear a breast binder.” “No, I won’t call you by a new name.” These are reasonable things for a responsible parent to say to a gender-distressed 13-year-old. Under the government’s draft Conversion Practices Bill, they could become the basis of a criminal complaint, which could be brought by anyone.
These sorts of scenarios are described in Criminalising conversations, new research for Sex Matters by social scientist Matilda Gosling. Gosling interviewed 30 psychotherapists, clinical psychologists and counsellors about the bill, which is about to start a 12-week process of pre-legislative scrutiny by a joint committee of MPs and peers. In the latest Sex Matters podcast, she talks to Helen Joyce about what they told her.
Six points stand out.
There is nothing left to ban but conversation. The abuses people picture when they hear “conversion therapy”, such as electric shocks and aversion therapy, are already unlawful. They are also almost entirely a thing of the past: interviewees saw little or no evidence of anything like them happening today. What the bill adds is an offence defined by its intention (to change someone’s transgender identity) and its effect, including “serious alarm or distress”. As Gosling puts it: “If you were to say something to me that hurt my feelings, I could say, actually, I feel severe distress…. And then that could fall under the definition of harm.” The maximum sentence is five years.
An exemption for healthcare providers offers no real protection. Therapists are supposedly exempt from prosecution unless they fall “far below the standards reasonably expected of a person in their position”. But there is no clarity on what those standards are. Interviewees expected them to be set by the professional bodies that signed the Memorandum of understanding 2, which they said has already made exploratory therapy risky. “It seems very likely that the organisations that will set the standards are the organisations that have already signed up very, very firmly to an affirmative model,” says Gosling – in other words, which say that when a client or patient expresses a transgender identity, mental-health professionals should simply take it at face value, rather than exploring what might lie behind it. Parents, teachers, social workers and clinical supervisors do not have even that threadbare protection.
Chilling effect
Laws like this work without prosecutions. Gosling also interviewed mental-health professionals in California, Illinois, Philadelphia, Canada and South Australia, all of which have similar laws. In none could she find evidence of anyone being convicted or disciplined. Yet in each, therapists described self-censorship, silence among colleagues and withdrawal from this work. As she says: “It is entirely the threat of that happening that has caused all of these negative consequences.”
Supporters of the bill may point to the absence of prosecutions as proof that such laws are narrow and harmless. That misses their hidden harms: a complaint can take years to resolve, and nobody wants to be the test case. “Someone will be the first,” a Canadian psychotherapist told Gosling. “We don’t know who it’s going to be.”
Experienced professionals would walk away. Almost half the UK interviewees said they would stop working with trans-identifying clients, or consider doing so, if the bill passed. Several have already stopped. Those who stay, Gosling says, would be “less present in the room… because they’re always thinking, okay, what can I say?” What makes this particularly disastrous is that this group is particularly complex and vulnerable. Interviewees described young people arriving with trauma, autism, anxiety and difficult family backgrounds, including teenage girls who want to identify out of their sex after sexual abuse. Detransitioners, already poorly served, would find even fewer therapists willing to work with them, perhaps for fear that someone who has already changed their mind about their identity might do so again, and then reinterpret what was said in good faith in the therapy room.
A ban on gender-identity conversion could be gay conversion in disguise. As Gosling points out, many young people referred to gender clinics are same-sex attracted, or grow up to be. The result is a paradox at the heart of the bill: on its face, it protects people on the basis of sexual orientation, but would make it more likely that people who would otherwise have grown up gay grow up to be “straight”, based on their self-identified gender identity rather than their sex. “It is encouraging gay people to go down a lifetime of medication,” one interviewee told Gosling. Another recalled the “dark jokes” at the former Tavistock gender clinic that soon there would be “no gay kids left”.
Families in crisis
Families would pay the greatest price. Parents get no exemption, yet parenting means saying No. “Parents have authority for good reason. They are responsible for their children,” Gosling says. She describes two ways in which the bill would destroy their authority. The first is quiet: parents “are worried about being reported… so they’re checking themselves and they’re checking their language”. The other is overt: a child who says, in effect, affirm me or I’ll report you. Both these situations harm children because children need boundaries to feel safe.
The worst potential outcome would be family breakdown. Some interviewees said they had already seen parents’ denied contact with their children because they would not affirm a child’s gender identity. “I do not understand how, in law, the desires, interests, motivations and viewpoints of a child at 13 become more legally defensible than those of the parent,” said a clinical psychologist.
The bill could hand a way for a man who transitions later in life to exert coercive control over his wife. “A man who takes on an identity as a woman can say to his partner, unless you affirm me as a woman, then I can report you for conversion practices,” says Gosling. “It potentially stops her from leaving the relationship.” Interviewees also expect some unrelated family conflicts, such as an affair or a divorce, to be fought on the territory of accusations about conversion practices, with the criminal law to hand.
The joint committee now has to decide whether this bill solves a real problem or creates new ones for the very people it claims to protect. Gosling’s interviewees are in little doubt.
Related content
Read our report Criminalising conversations