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

Lord Strathcarron Excerpts

Friday 9th February 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Strathcarron (Con)]

My Lords, there are many areas of concern with the Bill, as we have heard, but I would like to focus on what it means to parents and children, and to freedom of speech and religion.

As the Bill is drafted, and before the army of amendments surely coming its way, it would become a criminal offence for parents to discuss gender issues with their children. Given that parents will have only their child’s best interests at heart, there is clearly no harmful intent, yet, as drafted, the Bill assumes there is only harmful intent. Surely it cannot be right, as a matter of principle, that free speech becomes criminalised when there is no harm intended, let alone caused.

How are these private family conversations discovered anyway? It is possibly because a child tells a classmate or teacher. What then of the teacher? Is he or she committing a crime by not reporting the parents to the police? If she or he does report the parents to the police and the police arrest the parents—who now have a criminal record—what does that do to future family relationships?

But it gets worse. The Bill proposes to ban not only spoken free speech but silent free speech in the form of prayers. Thus, we have a new crime: prayer crime. Ban Conversion Therapy’s founders say that a ban must cover “gentle, non-coercive prayer”, before going on to confirm that prayer has a “pernicious power”, and then linking prayer and corrective rape. Humanists UK says that the ban must cover repentances, wilfully ignoring that repentance is a core belief of the Christian faith. As it is drafted, will our own right reverend Prelates also face prosecution, if, for example, at Sunday school they were to read from any of St Paul’s Epistles to the Romans, Galatians or Corinthians or from the Hebrews or the Epistle of James? Would imams, rabbis and gurus also not be liable for reading from their scriptures? If they were not reading in English, which seems highly likely, how convoluted will that prosecution be? What effect will that have on community and cultural relations? None of this has been thought through at all.

As with parents and prayers, so with clinicians. As the interim Cass review concluded, clinicians should delve deeply into a child’s emotional state, but the Bill would make such exploratory conversations illegal and leave the clinician open to prosecution. As with parents, the clinician would have no statutory defence—an extraordinary state of affairs in itself—which will almost certainly lead to miscarriages of justices.

Talking of justice, noble Lords far more learned than me are certain that, as drafted, the Bill would fall foul of ECHR Articles 8, 9, 10 and 11. I agree with the previous suggestion in this House by the noble Baroness, Lady Burt, that Parliament should not pass Bills that are unlikely to survive a human rights challenge.

The Bill places parents in an impossible situation. To discuss with their child their gender identity and explore the future options will now be illegal. What remains legal—the Tavistock/Mermaids solution of brain-damaging cross-sex hormones, pubescent breast binders, teenage double mastectomies, physical and chemical castrations, testosterone injections that so ravage the young female body, puberty blockers that lower IQ, breast enhancers and pumping up with steroids and artificial hormones—is all too awful for any loving parent to consider. Faced with the choice between illegal, non-violent, open discussion with their children, and legal but violent and irreversible so-called treatments, I suspect that most parents will now be forced to choose the illegal option.

The irony is that conversion therapy used to mean the type of physical violence that has now been criminalised by other legislation. Yet the proponents of the Bill have no hesitation in inflicting a different type of physical violence on the children of those who oppose them. The Bill fails on many levels, and I fear that no number of amendments will make it workable, but of course we must try.