by Helen Joyce on Substack (Photo: Unsplash)
The draft Conversion Practices Bill could reverse everything we have won to date
Recent weeks have been completely consumed with work to fight the government’s plan to introduce a conversion-practices ban. This has been under discussion for some years now, with a pledge from the previous Conservative government to introduce a law which was abandoned when it realised that it couldn’t be done without trampling on other people’s human rights, and a couple of private member’s bills that went nowhere.
But the current government entered power in 2024 with banning conversion practices in its manifesto. For the past two years it has been working on a draft law, which was published in June, and now it is being put through pre-legislative scrutiny by a parliamentary committee made up of peers and MPs.
We on TERF Island have made extraordinary gains in the past decade: defeating self-ID, gaining protections for so-called “gender critical” beliefs in the workplace, the Cass Review’s rejection of gender-affirming care, the For Women Scotland Supreme Court judgment and new safeguarding guidance for schools that stops full social transition. These gains were very hard-won, and are still fragile and patchily implemented. Now all of them are at risk.
At the heart of the bill is an extraordinarily broad definition of a “conversion practice” as “any conduct” that causes an individual to have or not to have, or to believe that they have or do not have, a sexual orientation or a particular sexual orientation, or a transgender identity or a particular transgender identity. Whether a practice is “abusive” is a question of fact to be determined “by reference to all the circumstances”. Factors to be considered include, but aren’t limited to, whether there were controlling or coercive words or behaviour, or economic, psychological or emotional pressure. And finally, it has to meet a threshold of “harm” which can be as low as causing “serious alarm or distress which has a substantial adverse effect on usual day-to-day activities”. If all these conditions are met you can face prosecution, with a sentence of up to five years in jail.