In 1596, Luis de Carvajal the Younger was burned at the stake at an auto da fé in Mexico City for practising the Jewish faith. His mother and sisters were executed on the same day. While this may sound horrific to modern ears, we should keep in mind the many safeguards the Inquisition had in place to ensure that a miscarriage of justice could not occur. Before commencing prosecutions in a new town, inquisitors declared an ‘Edict of Grace’ during which voluntary confessions would receive light penances. False witnesses were subject to severe penalties, and there were strict limits on the use of torture.
If the purpose of the bill was simply to prevent abusive or harmful behaviour it would not need to mention gender at all
The safeguards in the government’s new conversion practices bill are, if anything, more stringent. Parents can rest assured they will not be criminalised for talking to their children unless their behaviour is ‘abusive’ and causes ‘serious harm, alarm or distress’. The bar is lower elsewhere. If a parent attempts to convince their daughter she is not really a boy, they may be made the subject of a Conversion Practice Protection Order if a court believes their behaviour is abusive and may cause serious harm, alarm or distress in the future. If the parent persists after an order has been made, they may face up to two years in jail. The government is confident this law will not be misused.
But would Rachel Meade share the government’s confidence? The people who will make the frontline decisions on which practices are abusive are social workers. In 2020, Rachel Meade, a social worker with a 20-year career behind her, was reported by a colleague to Social Work England for making private Facebook posts they felt were offensive to the transgender community. This included such horrors as sharing a link to a petition to the international Olympic committee opposing male athletes competing in female sports. Meade was sanctioned by Social Work England and suspended from her job with Westminster City Council for potential gross misconduct. Eventually both the sanction and suspension were withdrawn and Meade was awarded £58,000 for harassment by an employment tribunal.
Another group who will be trusted to implement this law are the police. Their zest for pursuing gender-critical wrongthink was compared by Justice Julian Knowles to the Gestapo and the Stasi after they visited Harry Miller to ‘check his thinking’ for his tweets. To date such criticism does not seem to have dampened their zeal. Earlier this year, the Metropolitan Police paid £25,000 compensation to Graham Linehan after arresting him for three gender-critical posts on X and holding him in custody until a spike in his blood pressure led to him needing hospital treatment.
The government’s impact assessment for the conversion practices bill does not even consider the possibility that anyone will ever make unwarranted accusations of conversion practices. This seems, to say the least, naive. Divorce is one of the most stressful things that can happen in someone’s life, even if it is not precipitated by a husband declaring that they are now transgender. Divorcing couples do not always behave impeccably. Likewise, teenagers do not always act responsibly.
Genuinely abusive or harmful behaviour is already illegal. If the purpose of the bill was simply to prevent abusive or harmful behaviour it would not need to mention gender at all. If the safeguards were adequate we could safely extend the bill to any belief. But there is a very clear reason why the Bill does not also protect Christians, Muslims, Moonies and Scientologists from conversion practices: because doing so would be completely insane. It would criminalise sincere expressions of belief by members of proselytising religions, while abandoning the vulnerable to dangerous cults.
To justify the special treatment given to the cult of gender in this new blasphemy law, campaigners have been desperate to show that there is an epidemic of LGBT conversion practices in the UK. One survey conducted by Stonewall claimed that 30 per cent of trans people in the UK had experienced an exorcism, a figure that literally sets your head spinning.
Four years, ago the government set up a hotline for people who had experienced conversion practices. Based on their own survey data they estimated 2 per cent of LGBT people had experienced conversion therapy in their lifetime, from which they predicted it would receive 10,000 to 15,000 calls a year. This year the Cabinet Office put out a new tender to run the hotline which, based on actual call volumes, now anticipates it may receive as few as 300 calls per year. As a comparison, when the Ministry of Defence’s UFO hotline was shutdown in 2009 it had received 520 calls that year, yet they still concluded that an alien invasion was not imminent.
The government’s impact assessment for the conversion practices bill does not use the data from their helpline, or even the data from their own LGBT survey. Instead, it uses Stonewall’s exorcism survey. This gives an estimate of the prevalence of conversion practices which is about 13 times higher than even their survey. According to the Cabinet Office, the Stonewall survey is the best available data. The reality is instead that the Stonewall survey provides the best available data on how likely people are to fabricate claims of conversion practices if it suits their goals.
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