King’s Speech

Earl of Leicester Excerpts

Friday 19th July 2024 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Leicester (Con)]

My Lords, I welcome the noble Baroness, Lady Smith of Malvern, to this House and congratulate her on her excellent maiden speech—likewise, my noble friend Lady Monckton of Dallington Forest. Both clearly bring great and valuable experience to this debate and to your Lordships’ House.

I take this opportunity to express deep concern at the proposal in His Majesty’s gracious Speech for a Bill to ban conversion therapy. I should make it clear that, of course, no one should be subject to abuse or coercion. But if independent lawyers have concluded that there really are gaps in the law against abuse and coercion, we should be shown their advice and those gaps should be filled. But that seems doubtful. Research commissioned by the previous Government showed that the evidence base for a new law is weak.

My main fear is that a criminal law against conversion therapy would have unintended consequences for children and young people expressing distress over what gets called gender identity but which in reality is gender dysphoria. The Cass review made it very clear that children should be able to access help to explore in a genuinely open way their experiences of gender dysphoria, and that this is not conversion practice. But banning conversion practices risks scaring into silence precisely those professionals who have young people’s best interests at heart.

Dr Cass has spoken about how clinicians who work in child gender services have told her that they are already afraid of being accused of “conversion therapy” if they follow a questioning or—in the proper professional sense of the world—critical approach. She is also clear that such an approach is absolutely the right one to take for anyone who looks after children. Actually, she says in her report that a mere

“‘informed consent’ model of care”

is incompatible with good safeguarding of children and young people. Professionals have to do much better than simply giving young people the medical interventions they think they want, especially if they think they want them only because they have spent too much time watching YouTube videos telling them that transitioning is some kind of magic solution to all their problems.

As I have said in this Chamber before, there are increasing numbers of detransitioners such as Keira Bell, who I have met and spoken to, who heavily regret their decision to transition, and for whom the only advice they received from so-called health professionals when they were young was one of affirmation of their early and ill-informed wish to change their gender.

Clinicians and others are right not just to take a young person’s word for it when they say that they are another gender; there can be serious safeguarding issues that need to be investigated. A doctor might believe that a young person’s desire to be another gender stems from trauma. They might believe that they do not comprehend the risks and consequences well enough to make an informed decision.

If a doctor recommends a watchful waiting approach to a child, but that young person disagrees and insists that they need medical intervention, is that doctor guilty of conversion therapy? Would they be guilty, in the language of conversion therapy laws that we have seen, of “supressing” or “inhibiting” that young person’s gender identity? Even if they are ultimately found not guilty, finding themselves on the wrong end of a police investigation for conversion therapy as a result of the child making a complaint would exert a massive chilling effect on good medical practice.

The pledge in the Labour manifesto was to protect an individual’s ability to

“explore their sexual orientation and gender identity”,

but that is not good enough. Any law on conversion therapy must comprehensively protect the professional integrity of doctors, teachers and others who work with children—people who put those children’s best interests first—even if that means not giving them what they think they want. They must not be chilled into silence.

Those who truly and deeply care about the well-being of the children and young people in their care should not be at risk of criminalisation. The Government must take heed of Dr Cass’s exhortation to “take inordinate care”—that is the phrase she used- with this. We need to slow down and engage in serious consultation with a full range of stakeholders, not just those who want the Bill.