‘Labour’s draft Conversion Practices Bill is unnecessary, illiberal and politically motivated’

All reasonable people oppose the barbaric conversion practices once inflicted on gay men and lesbians. Electric shocks, aversion therapy and chemical castration are thankfully in the past. Those abuses are already illegal under existing criminal law covering assault, coercion and controlling behaviour. No one serious is arguing for their revival.

Yet the government has just published a draft Conversion Practices Bill that introduces new criminal offences, carrying up to five years in prison, for “abusive” acts intended to change or suppress someone’s sexual orientation or transgender identity. It claims a high threshold and exemptions for legitimate healthcare. But in reality, the drafting is dangerously vague, the evidence base threadbare, and the timing politically revealing.

The bill is not a response to a proven, ongoing epidemic of conversion practices. Government-commissioned work and independent reviews have repeatedly found little concrete evidence of the kind of systematic, organised abuse that would justify fresh criminal sanctions. In Ireland, where similar legislation has long been promised, a government-commissioned 2023 study found no robust evidence of conversion practices occurring. In contrast, self-selected surveys from activist organisations inflate figures by folding in ordinary family disagreements, parental caution or exploratory conversations. Historical abuses against gay people are real; contemporary “conversion therapy” at scale for either sexual orientation or gender identity is not.

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What the bill does threaten is a chilling effect on parents, therapists, teachers and youth workers. Telling a distressed child they are not “born in the wrong body,” refusing to fund experimental medical interventions, or seeking therapy that explores co-occurring autism, trauma, same-sex attraction or mental health issues could be framed as causing “serious alarm or distress.” Family lawyers have already warned that allegations under this law could trigger local authority investigations and care proceedings, even for siblings. An already overstretched family justice system would face new pressures while parents exercising ordinary caution risk becoming criminal suspects.

This is the opposite of progressive child safeguarding. Most gender clinic referrals historically involved same-sex attracted youth. The majority desisted naturally when given time and holistic support. The modern affirmation pipeline has too often functioned for some as a form of medicalised conversion, steering same-sex attracted adolescents towards hormones and surgery rather than helping them accept their bodies and orientation. LabourLGB exists precisely because lesbians, gay men and bisexuals refuse to see same-sex attraction erased or medicalised in this way.

The political drivers are equally clear. The trans activist lobby has suffered a series of reversals: the collapse of self-ID ambitions in Scotland, court rulings affirming that sex is biological and material in prisons, sports and single-sex spaces, and the restructuring of NHS gender services. In that context, a broad conversion practices bill looks like a low-cost political concession. Something that can be presented as “standing up for LGBT+ people” without tackling the harder questions about evidence, child protection or the material reality of sex. It is gesture politics dressed up as principle.

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It also arrives in a peculiar leadership vacuum. After Andy Burnham won the Makerfield by-election in emphatic fashion he spoke of the “Makerfield test: the need for Labour to reconnect with the actual concerns of voters in places like Makerfield rather than the priorities of metropolitan activist networks. This bill fails that test. Target Labour voters are worried about the NHS, wages, housing and schools. They are not demanding new criminal laws that risk turning family disagreements into police matters or that hand fresh culture-war ammunition to Reform and the right.

Public opinion has shifted too. Most Britons remain tolerant of adults living their lives as they see fit. But they reject the claim that children can be “born in the wrong body” and are increasingly sceptical of medical pathways with lifelong consequences for minors. A party that ignores this shift, or worse, legislates in the opposite direction, risks looking captured rather than compassionate.

True progressive politics has always combined compassion with evidence and a healthy scepticism of state overreach into private life and thought. Criminalising exploratory therapy or parental caution is not progressive; it is authoritarian. 

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LabourLGB believes MPs should use the pre-legislative scrutiny period to listen properly: to the clinicians, to parents’ groups such as Bayswater Support seeking evidence-based help for their children, to detransitioners, and to the many same-sex attracted people who worry that gender ideology is the new conversion practice. Whilst we welcome the commitment to tackle this issue, any law must be narrowly drawn around genuine coercive abuse that existing statutes and regulations do not already cover. Expanding the criminal law into contested beliefs about identity, with prison sentences attached, is neither liberal nor left-wing. It is a mistake that will divide our movement, harm the very young people it claims to protect, and hand our opponents an easy win.

Labour has a chance, post-Makerfield, to choose evidence over ideology and solidarity over symbolism. This bill points in the wrong direction. We should change course before it is too late.

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