by Dr. Frederick Attenborough, Daily Sceptic:
During last week’s King’s Speech, Sir Keir Starmer set out his legislative programme in this Parliamentary session and made clear Labour intends to bring forward a “full, trans-inclusive ban on conversion practices”.
From a free speech perspective, the problem with this proposal isn’t just that no-one yet knows what he or his Government mean by that enigmatic phrase “full, trans-inclusive ban on conversion practices”. It’s worse than that. If the difficulties encountered by every other Parliamentarian that has attempted to define the phrase “conversion practices” in a way that doesn’t interfere with a person’s Article 9 (freedom of thought) and Article 10 (freedom of expression) rights under the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) are anything to go by, it’s likely Sir Keir and the two Government Ministers with joint responsibility for women and equalities, Bridget Phillipson and Anneliese Dodds, don’t know what the phrase means either.
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Of course, there are some forms of “conversion practices” that no sensible person would object to being banned, such as attempts to stop someone from being gay or transgender via exorcism, electro-shock therapy, physical violence or food deprivation. No-one is disputing that ‘treatments’ of this kind are appalling and have no place in a free society. But a bill isn’t required to ban them. Such practices are already illegal in the U.K.
Indeed, when the Government commissioned researchers from Coventry University to study the evidence on conversion therapy, they managed to find just 30 people from the past two decades who claimed to have experienced such treatment, and the only examples of “horrific and life-altering practices” they were able to unearth – during the process of, among other things, trawling through “entries for conversion therapy in Wikipedia” – were drawn from the United States.
As the then Tory MP for Workington, Mark Jenkinson, put it: “From all the published evidence, it is clear that current laws are sufficient to cover the vanishingly rare number of cases of conversion therapy.”
But if that’s the case, then what is it, exactly, that Labour wants to ban?
At the Free Speech Union (FSU), of which I’m the Senior Communications Officer, we fear that if a poorly worded ban is railroaded through Parliament by a Labour Party with a 174-seat majority, it will curtail the speech rights of parents, teachers, religious leaders and health professionals wanting to advise gender-confused children to pause and reflect before embarking on a pathway that leads to irreversible, life-changing surgery.
That might seem like an outlandish fear, but in the Australian state of Victoria, where “suppression practices” have been banned since 2021, a parent who refuses to support his or her child’s request for puberty blockers is at risk of prosecution and could end up spending 10 years in jail.
A similar piece of legislation in Canada, Bill C-4, recently made it an offence to “cause another person to undergo conversion therapy”, with the result that Canadian parents who want to explore the many, varied reasons why their children are showing signs of gender confusion, or who might want their child to see a psychotherapist before agreeing to irreversible medical procedures, now risk prosecution and up to five years in jail.
Closer to the U.K., in Switzerland, where conversion therapy is banned in some cantons, it recently emerged that a Swiss couple are taking legal action to regain custody of their 16 year-old daughter, who has been a ward of the state for over a year, i.e., since she was 15, following a disputed diagnosis of gender dysphoria that led to their withholding consent for her to take puberty blockers.
Having been separated from their daughter since April last year thanks to their refusal to show fealty to gender identity ideology, the couple are now being supported by the Christian legal advocacy group Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) as they attempt to bring their daughter home.
In a case they hope will set a precedent, the parents are appealing a court order forcing them to hand over documents that would enable their daughter to apply for a change of “legal sex” in the civil register.
The demand for the documents came following the parents’ failed appeal to recover legal authority over the appointment of their daughter’s medical professionals, which the court had granted to the Swiss child welfare agency.
Lead lawyer on the case Dr. Felix Boellmann said these parents, who are remaining anonymous for safety reasons and to protect their child, “are living every parent’s worst nightmare. Their child has been taken away from them simply for trying to protect her from harm.”
