Conversion Therapy Prohibition (Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity) Bill [HL]

Lord Robathan Excerpts

Friday 9th February 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Robathan (Con)]

My Lords, we have all been contacted by many people about this Bill, so I have been looking at it to understand it. Physical abuse, detaining somebody against their will and assault are already illegal, so what is the Bill about? What is it for?

To explore this further, I read a Times article on 1 February—last week. It should have clarified the situation. Others will raise more points in detail but I will concentrate on the article, which purported to clarify the situation. The headline reads: “Conversion therapy? It must be banned. I should know”. The journalist, Emily Sargent, who is gay,

“went undercover to try it and was shocked by the damage it did”.

In brief, she was paid to write this article and, in pursuit of remuneration, she lied and said to a therapist that she was unhappy about being attracted to women. All the sessions were on Zoom. I quote the article:

“When I logged on to our first Zoom call the woman—whom I will call Carol—appeared to be a harmless-looking, middle-aged lady in a cosy, middle-class home”.


It quickly changed. She says:

“The process … quickly became destabilising. I dreaded the sessions, which were making me feel wrung out and depressed”.


She could have stopped.

Emily was also horrified to be asked about her sexual relationships—these were six counselling sessions about sexual relations—and about her relationship with her parents. That is pretty standard for psychologists, of which more later. She then says that she felt “exploited”. One might ask who was exploiting whom: Carol, whom Emily called “empathetic and gentle” and who had been asked to give counselling, or the journalist who deceived her, was paid for the article and could have switched off Zoom at any time?

Emily Sargent concludes:

“There is no doubt that a ban on these practices is wildly overdue”,


but she does so without any evidence in her article that I can see. Personally, I am against banning things just because someone does not like them—as, indeed, I am against pointless legislation.

We are also told that the therapy does not work. The Library briefing says that, in a government survey of 108,000 LGBT people, fewer than 3,000 had undergone this therapy—presumably all voluntarily. So what is the problem that the Bill wishes to solve? I note the BMA’s briefing, which I will read from now. The BMA says that it “strongly supports” the Bill and that:

“Talking therapy is recognised as a legitimate clinical pathway to those questioning their gender identity or sexual orientation. Such therapy is typically explorative and patient led, and thus cannot be seen as seeking to supress or deny an individual’s understanding of their gender identity or sexual orientation”.


It concludes, rather illogically, that it wishes

“to ban conversion practices in their entirety”.

I ask again: what is the purpose of the Bill? Is it to ban talking therapy, which the BMA calls “a legitimate clinical pathway”, or is it to ban physical assault, which is already banned and illegal? It seems to me, I am afraid, to be purely virtue signalling to placate a very small, outraged minority who think that their choice of lifestyle must never be questioned or discussed, however gently, by parents or anyone else.

I would like to conclude on a lighter note; I find it amusing, although others may not. Some 43 years ago, when I was young, I did SAS selection. At the beginning, Derek, who was running the course, said to me, “Andrew, somebody in the MoD has been persuaded that we can identify potential SAS officers using psychologists. You have been chosen”. So I filled in a long questionnaire, then met a man who asked me lots of questions. I had just trained a dog and had put that down as an interest, so we talked a lot about it. After some 20 minutes, he suddenly said, “You haven’t mentioned your mother”, to which I replied, “But you haven’t asked me about her”. At the conclusion of the selection, Derek told me that the psychologist had said I was totally unsuitable and could not possibly pass selection. The lesson I drew from that was: what do psychologists—or indeed therapists—know?