by Andrea Williams, Christian Today
The Labour government’s draft bill to ban so-called ‘conversion therapy’ is rightly being denounced by commentators.
The definition is put in such arcane and vague language that it could apply to all sorts of things.
Pray for someone to be faithful to their wife? Conversion therapy.
Tell someone to stop watching porn? Conversion therapy.
Say to your 14-year-old daughter that she isn’t really a non-binary transmasc genderqueer demiboy? Believe it or not, conversion therapy.
Meanwhile, under the proposed law, NHS professionals can continue handing out body-altering, irreversible puberty blockers to children who are confused about their identity. ‘That’s just healthcare.’
When critics like me point out the real effects of this ban, people might think we’re over-egging it. But the definition is so vague and broad it invites this kind of speculation.
It covers anything someone does towards another person, with either the intention of their orientation or identity changing, or the intention that they believe a change has happened.
That explicitly means that if you deny someone else’s gender identity and try to persuade them that it isn’t true, you’re conversion-practising them. Even if they’re unsure about their identity, if you do anything to prompt them in one direction or another, you’re conversion-practising them.
The same goes for behaviour. So, if you think that a married man who’s watching gay porn might do a better job of being faithful to his wife if he stops watching gay porn, and tell him to stop and to save his marriage, you are conversion-practising.
The draft bill then applies a second test to determine whether that conversion practice is abusive or not. This is itself an admission that plenty of ‘conversion practices’ are not abusive. It is completely at odds with the Stonewall-inspired rhetoric used by politicians like Theresa May and Boris Johnson during Peak Trans.