Conversion therapy – a widely condemned pseudoscientific practice that aims to ‘cure’ gay people – is finally set to be banned in England and Wales. Banning this awful practice may seem like the obvious choice, but the journey to this point has not been a smooth one.
Many organisations and individuals have frequently campaigned for the ban for many years but these campaigns have yielded little results despite their immense effort. A document was leaked yesterday that suggested plans to ban practices were being ditched despite years of repeated promises. Boris Johnson quickly backtracked on this and mere hours later confirmed that conversion therapy for gay and bisexual people in the UK would be banned.
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Conversion therapy (also sometimes known as cure therapy or reparative therapy) aims to convert gay or bisexual people into straight people through a series of pseudoscientific treatments. Beginning in the 19th century, these treatments have included prayer, exorcisms, physical violence, food deprivation, and disturbing uses of aversion therapy. Aversion therapy is a type of behavioural therapy that involves repeatedly pairing an unwanted behaviour with discomfort:
‘Under medical supervision, people were given chemicals that made them vomit when they, for example, looked at photos of their lovers. Others were given electrical shocks.’
Uses of this treatment were reported in the UK up until the early 1970s, with one case in 1980. Following the decriminalisation of certain homosexual acts in 1967, conversion therapy has grown slowly more uncommon here in the UK.
Many people had felt they needed to seek ‘treatment’ for their sexuality because of hostile family and social attitudes, but as acceptance improves around the country fewer people feel the need to seek conversion therapy for themselves. However, some families may still pressure gay members of their families to change. Though there is no representative data on the current state of conversion therapy in the UK, the practice is still, unfortunately, alive and well
Conversion is almost never successful – and the cases that are ‘successful’ are largely just cases of immense guilt and suppression. A study involving people who had been through conversion found that ‘no participant suggested that treatment had had any direct benefits and, for many, it had reinforced the emotional isolation and shame that had been a feature of their childhood and adolescence.’
The government initially suggested that conversion therapy should not be banned entirely as they wanted to keep it available to consenting adults ‘who seek counselling to help them live a life that they feel is more in line with their personal beliefs.’ However, ensuring all participants were truly consenting and not being coerced would have been an impossible task. Internalised homophobia is also very real and can lead to gay people denying their sexual orientation and attempting to alter it in order to fit the ideals they have been raised to believe in. Separating these internalised beliefs from the true sense of self is an immense task, and understanding whether someone truly wanted to go through conversion – as opposed to feeling that they should – would be impossible.
While this ban will put an end to legal gay conversion therapy in the UK, there is no protection offered for transgender people.
This has been met with major backlash from campaigners and the planned Safe To Be Me LGBT summit has been cancelled in response to the refusal to include transgender people in the conversion ban. More than 100 groups, including Stonewall, have pulled out of the event in protest. The event was supposed ‘to protect and promote the rights of LGBT people around the world’, but many of the groups involved felt this recent move by the government was in direct contradiction with this goal.
Transgender people are at a higher risk of being subjected to conversion therapy than LGB people, and excluding them from the protections offered to the LGB community has been described as ‘abhorrent’.
‘A national LGBT survey done by the government in 2017 suggested 5% of LGBT people have been offered conversion, and 2% have undergone the therapy. These figures were higher among trans people, with 8% saying they had been offered the therapy, and 4% reporting having undergone it.’
Sajid Javid today commented that it is ‘absolutely right’ that conversion therapy is banned ‘for LGB people’, but that ‘we need to be more careful‘ when it comes to transgender conversion therapy. Boris Johnson has also voiced concerns that banning conversion therapy for transgender people may prevent staff at gender identity clinics from thoroughly assessing and interrogating the feelings of their patients.
Javid claimed transgender conversion therapy required a ‘more sensitive approach’ because of the potentially varied reasons that transgender people feel the way they do about their gender; he posited that they may not be experiencing genuine gender identity dysphoria and their feelings could stem from child sex abuse or bullying. However, transgender people attend gender identity clinics to discuss the origins of their feelings in order to gain their diagnosis of gender identity dysphoria. It is unclear what relevance Javid’s comment bears to conversion therapy which does not seek to help people uncover their true self, but to eradicate it.
Transgender people are already struggling for their rights in many areas and their omission from the conversion therapy ban is a sad indication of the lack of understanding the community receives from government health bodies. While it is exciting to see a ban on conversion therapy finally being put in place, it is hard to be celebratory when such a large and underserved part of the LGBTQ+ community is being left behind.
