Dan James Smith is a communications and branding expert, and a Fellow of the Chartered Management Institute (CMI) and the Institute of Internal Communication (IoIC). He is also trustee of LGB Alliance, the UK’s only charity dedicated solely to the rights of lesbians, gay men and bisexuals.
As Sir Keir Starmer says farewell to the front bench and turns his attention to his legacy, the government publishes the Conversion Practices Bill as a ‘be kind’ quick-win and salute to the LGBTQ+ lobby to coincide with Pride month. Yet, does this Bill set out to tackle the big problems facing Brits today, or is it merely a performative gesture to satisfy the appetite of activists who desperately need a victory?
Conversion therapy is, thankfully, practically non-existent today. Homosexuality began to be decriminalised in the UK from 1967; six years later it was de-listed as a mental illness by the influential American Psychiatric Association. Behaviour therapists quickly conceded defeat, and attempts to ‘cure’ gay people with electrodes and nausea-inducing drugs had disappeared from clinical practice in the UK by 1980.
Those pushing for this Bill have struggled to unearth any evidence that conversion therapy — as most of us understand it — is currently practised. The most comprehensive analysis to date was conducted by Coventry University in 2021 at the behest of the Government Equalities Office (GEO). The Coventry report was able to find just 30 cases across the previous two decades. This includes six trans or ‘non-binary’ people who said they had been offered conversion therapy.
The National LGBT Survey ran a survey in 2017 which found 2 per cent of 108,000 respondents claim they had undergone conversion therapy, and another 5 per cent had been offered it. We shouldn’t dismiss this figure out of hand – but we should at the very least question it.
That combined 7 per cent figure will be repeated ad nauseam in the months to come, but a quick dig into the data shows that they don’t stand up to the most cursory scrutiny. In their desperation to prove the necessity of a new law, LGBTQ+ organisations take an extraordinarily expansive definition of ‘conversion therapy’. This encompasses everything from talking therapies for young people struggling with their ‘gender identity’, to pressure from family members (including parents offering to set their children up with opposite-sex dates).
Stonewall even claimed that one in ten LGBTQ+ people had been subjected to exorcism to change their sexuality or gender identity. This finding came from 2025 research commissioned from Opinium, and was repeated by CEO Simon Blake in an interview with The Guardian. Unsurprisingly given the widespread mockery, this figure seems to have disappeared from Stonewall’s website (you can still find it on the Opinium website though). Thankfully, and to channel Kemi, Stonewall doesn’t make the law – although its fingerprints can be found all over this bad bill.
All this would be comical if it weren’t so serious. This seems to be a law in search of a problem, with all the cited abuses being either prohibited by existing legislation (such as horrid threats of ‘corrective rape’), or beyond the scope of Parliament (prayer, refusal by parents to fund puberty blockers for their children).
The Bill has a more nefarious aim, however. If passed, it would mark the first time that the subjective and highly contentious concept of ‘gender identity’ will be written into the statute books. It’s been barely 12 months since the Supreme Court put an end to 10 years of misinformation about the definition of sex in the Equality Act. Yet we now face the prospect of an even more insidious law that would criminalise anyone from parents to therapists who fail to affirm someone’s notions of gender. That’s the real purpose of this law: it’s an attempt to reverse the string of legal defeats suffered by gender identity ideology, which is the idea that sex isn’t binary and you can choose to be a man, woman, or identify as neither.
As Rebecca Paul, the Conservative MP for Reigate tweeted, this Bill should chill everyone to the bone. But if we’re to send it to the legislative scrapheap where it belongs, we Tories have to acknowledge our role in how we got here.
It was Theresa May who, as Prime Minister, championed the idea of a conversion therapy ban in a well-intentioned attempt to be nice to the gays. May’s premiership was a time when the Conservatives had drifted into the yellow wilderness, some affiliate groups were swept up in a sea of preferred pronouns and the civil service was ideologically captured by the idea you can choose your sex.
May’s successors started, to varying degrees, to loosen the grip of trans activist organisations like Stonewall on the party – but Labour then swept to power.
Most common-sense Conservatives today know this is a daft draft law, and many see it as the Trojan Horse it is for trans activism.
At best, this is moral cowardice; at worst it’s collusion. As Baroness Cash noted in the House of Lords recently, the draft Bill is being justified with dodgy data sourced from a charity helpline that’s received government funding of £360,000 over the last three years. “This is a government contractor’s report,” she said, “created to justify further funding for that same contractor, and presented as independent evidence.”
The question is, do the Conservatives have the gumption to take on Stonewall and the rest of the TQ+ lobby? Or will they once again meekly surrender to the dishonest demands of the Rainbow Warriors? Under Kemi, I believe common sense will prevail, and an opportunity for Conservatives to get back to grown-up, evidence based policy-making.
Dan James Smith is a communications and branding expert, and a Fellow of the Chartered Management Institute (CMI) and the Institute of Internal Communication (IoIC). He is also trustee of LGB Alliance, the UK’s only charity dedicated solely to the rights of lesbians, gay men and bisexuals.
As Sir Keir Starmer says farewell to the front bench and turns his attention to his legacy, the government publishes the Conversion Practices Bill as a ‘be kind’ quick-win and salute to the LGBTQ+ lobby to coincide with Pride month. Yet, does this Bill set out to tackle the big problems facing Brits today, or is it merely a performative gesture to satisfy the appetite of activists who desperately need a victory?
Conversion therapy is, thankfully, practically non-existent today. Homosexuality began to be decriminalised in the UK from 1967; six years later it was de-listed as a mental illness by the influential American Psychiatric Association. Behaviour therapists quickly conceded defeat, and attempts to ‘cure’ gay people with electrodes and nausea-inducing drugs had disappeared from clinical practice in the UK by 1980.
Those pushing for this Bill have struggled to unearth any evidence that conversion therapy — as most of us understand it — is currently practised. The most comprehensive analysis to date was conducted by Coventry University in 2021 at the behest of the Government Equalities Office (GEO). The Coventry report was able to find just 30 cases across the previous two decades. This includes six trans or ‘non-binary’ people who said they had been offered conversion therapy.
The National LGBT Survey ran a survey in 2017 which found 2 per cent of 108,000 respondents claim they had undergone conversion therapy, and another 5 per cent had been offered it. We shouldn’t dismiss this figure out of hand – but we should at the very least question it.
That combined 7 per cent figure will be repeated ad nauseam in the months to come, but a quick dig into the data shows that they don’t stand up to the most cursory scrutiny. In their desperation to prove the necessity of a new law, LGBTQ+ organisations take an extraordinarily expansive definition of ‘conversion therapy’. This encompasses everything from talking therapies for young people struggling with their ‘gender identity’, to pressure from family members (including parents offering to set their children up with opposite-sex dates).
Stonewall even claimed that one in ten LGBTQ+ people had been subjected to exorcism to change their sexuality or gender identity. This finding came from 2025 research commissioned from Opinium, and was repeated by CEO Simon Blake in an interview with The Guardian. Unsurprisingly given the widespread mockery, this figure seems to have disappeared from Stonewall’s website (you can still find it on the Opinium website though). Thankfully, and to channel Kemi, Stonewall doesn’t make the law – although its fingerprints can be found all over this bad bill.
All this would be comical if it weren’t so serious. This seems to be a law in search of a problem, with all the cited abuses being either prohibited by existing legislation (such as horrid threats of ‘corrective rape’), or beyond the scope of Parliament (prayer, refusal by parents to fund puberty blockers for their children).
The Bill has a more nefarious aim, however. If passed, it would mark the first time that the subjective and highly contentious concept of ‘gender identity’ will be written into the statute books. It’s been barely 12 months since the Supreme Court put an end to 10 years of misinformation about the definition of sex in the Equality Act. Yet we now face the prospect of an even more insidious law that would criminalise anyone from parents to therapists who fail to affirm someone’s notions of gender. That’s the real purpose of this law: it’s an attempt to reverse the string of legal defeats suffered by gender identity ideology, which is the idea that sex isn’t binary and you can choose to be a man, woman, or identify as neither.
As Rebecca Paul, the Conservative MP for Reigate tweeted, this Bill should chill everyone to the bone. But if we’re to send it to the legislative scrapheap where it belongs, we Tories have to acknowledge our role in how we got here.
It was Theresa May who, as Prime Minister, championed the idea of a conversion therapy ban in a well-intentioned attempt to be nice to the gays. May’s premiership was a time when the Conservatives had drifted into the yellow wilderness, some affiliate groups were swept up in a sea of preferred pronouns and the civil service was ideologically captured by the idea you can choose your sex.
May’s successors started, to varying degrees, to loosen the grip of trans activist organisations like Stonewall on the party – but Labour then swept to power.
Most common-sense Conservatives today know this is a daft draft law, and many see it as the Trojan Horse it is for trans activism.
At best, this is moral cowardice; at worst it’s collusion. As Baroness Cash noted in the House of Lords recently, the draft Bill is being justified with dodgy data sourced from a charity helpline that’s received government funding of £360,000 over the last three years. “This is a government contractor’s report,” she said, “created to justify further funding for that same contractor, and presented as independent evidence.”
The question is, do the Conservatives have the gumption to take on Stonewall and the rest of the TQ+ lobby? Or will they once again meekly surrender to the dishonest demands of the Rainbow Warriors? Under Kemi, I believe common sense will prevail, and an opportunity for Conservatives to get back to grown-up, evidence based policy-making.