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

Baroness Fox of Buckley Excerpts

Friday 9th February 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Young of Norwood Green. It is so refreshing to have a bit of straight talking and honesty, and an important reminder of the political context for the Bill being put forward—and, in fact, for Bills suddenly jumping up all over the place. There is a political argument going on, and we were reminded of it.

I remind noble Lords that most of us in this House are in the job of conversion, not just the Lords spiritual. If you are in a political party, you want to convert as many citizens as you can to vote for you. As campaigners, we use persuasion to effect change and to win hearts and minds. Despite the qualms of anti-nanny staters such as me, changing behaviour is all the rage in policy circles, not least among the Liberal Democrats. Legislators use sticks and stones and the nudge unit to make us smoke and drink less and walk and cycle more. I note this because we are keen on imposing preferences of how we live on a wide range of issues. I give that as a reminder, as it has been asserted on several occasions: “Who would ever dare impose a way of living on someone? They should live as they want.” If only.

You might say that such conversions are legitimate because they are harmless, but the Bill’s broad drafting does not even attempt to require that any harm is intended or caused. The noble Baroness, Lady Burt, reassures us that good faith, harmless advice and so on are not in target. I am grateful for that, but she also says that it is all about motivation. How will the police and prosecutors assess this motivation? They would have to read minds. More likely, they would read social media, or even public speeches such as these made here today, scouring through everything for evidence of motivation. In that way, the Bill will be used to police views and does threaten free speech across a range of social settings.

I will start with church. I am a secularist, an ardent supporter of lesbian and gay rights, and no fan whatever of religious sexual ethics. The noble Baroness and I agree on religious freedom as a democratic virtue, and I argue that the Bill threatens it. All the world’s great religions are based on predetermined truth claims to which their followers must adhere. Preferences of behaviour and belief are baked in, and, yes, they are often judgmental and require some restraint on personal preferences. Christian teaching on the sacrament of marriage requires suppression of acting on sexual desire before marriage. However loving the church might be to any individual who is gay, the practice of homosexuality is deemed sinful, and therefore anyone who is gay is asked to practice celibacy if they want to be part of the church. You and I might think that such ideas are prosperous, but then the option is to leave the church or the religion, rather than inviting the law in to try to shape religious doctrine.

Every day, in this Chamber, noble Lords recite the Lord’s prayer:

“Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.”


With this in mind, take the scenario of a young Christian who wants to be delivered from evil and to follow the Church’s teaching, and so asks the vicar to pray to help him avoid sexual temptation. Surely the Bill will turn that priest into a criminal, or could do; after all, the Bill makes no distinction between consensual and non-consensual behaviour. What is at stake here should concern atheists, agnostics and everyone, because the Bill jeopardises fundamental principles of secular democracy.

To move on, while it is clear what the Bill means by sexual orientation, how would the noble Baroness, Lady Burt, define gender identity, before she tries to embed it in UK law for the first time? It is, at best, a contested concept. I appreciate that a precise, fixed definition might be tricky, when this particular identity can cover over 100 to 300 genders—transgender, gender-fluid, genderqueer, gender-variant, genderless and non-binary. The noble Lord, Lord Young, is not the only person who gets confused. Are all those to be covered by Clause 1?

As has been explained so well by the noble Baroness, Lady Ludford, we now have evidence that sexual orientation is being sidelined in the medical and cultural enthusiasm to affirm and champion gender identity. Definitions are also muddled by the forced marriage of “LGB” with “TQI”. There is no connection between being same-sex attracted and a desire to change gender. In fact, many lesbians and gay men feel that homophobic pressure is being exerted on them to drop their exclusive—and, yes, predetermined—sexual preference for the bodies of those born to the same sex.

Can we at least recognise that this is a very complicated and very contentious issue? A Bill such as this does nobody any favours. I ask every political party to keep well away from this. It will poison even more the well of free speech, intergenerational relations and our relations with each other on a topic that is toxic enough.