A new law published this week by the Labour government risks turning into the most anti-gay piece of legislation since the 1885 Labouchere Amendment, according to critics who argue that the Conversion Practices Draft Bill conflates sexual orientation with gender identity in a way that could punish anyone who fails to affirm a person’s belief they are “born in the wrong body”.
The bill, described as an ostensible ban on attempts to force someone to change their sexual orientation or gender identity, instead smuggles in what one commentator called “state-sanctioned gay conversion therapy” by treating the two concepts as interchangeable. Under the proposed law, anyone who does not automatically affirm a person’s transgender identity or who questions the notion of “transgender identity” could be accused of “conversion practice” and face up to five years in jail.
“Labour's new conversion therapy ban could criminalise those who question transgender identity, critics say.”
The risk to gay people is underlined by data from the Tavistock Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS), the NHS paediatric clinic shut down in March 2024 after the Cass Review determined its treatment was unsafe and unevidenced. In 2012, around 90% of female adolescents and more than 80% of male adolescents referred to GIDS were gay or bisexual. By 2015, those proportions had declined but remained a majority: 70% of females and 60% of males.
Critics point to a growing body of evidence that gender-affirming care has, in practice, been used to “fix” gay and bisexual people who do not conform to heterosexual stereotypes. Journalist Hannah Barnes, in her book Time to Think, documented how same-sex orientation has routinely been misinterpreted as a mismatch between soul and body, raising the alarm that the new law will only entrench this approach.
The bill goes further even than the Conservatives’ Section 28 of 1988, which banned the “promotion of homosexuality” in schools. Section 28 was widely condemned as homophobic and was repealed in 2003. The new law, by contrast, could criminalise private conversations and therapeutic interventions that do not affirm a person’s self-declared gender identity.
With the Conversion Practices Draft Bill now published, the question facing parliament is whether it will protect vulnerable people or, as its detractors argue, become a legal weapon against those who hold that biological sex is immutable.