Conversion Practices

Debate between Neale Hanvey and Christian Wakeford

Wednesday 6th December 2023 Westminster Hall

[Neale Hanvey (Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath) (Alba)]

I will struggle to get what I want to say into five minutes, but I will certainly have a stab at it. I will focus principally on the assertion that there is a need for a ban on conversion therapy, including for the conversion of trans people, and I want to look at it through a slightly different lens.

I will start with a quote from Kierkegaard:

“There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn’t true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true.”

That is, in essence, the point I want to make. Legislation is supposed to fix a problem, not create a new one, and where evidence of conversion practices exist, they will not be mitigated but exacerbated by such proposals. The true scandal that needs to be addressed is the medical and surgical conversion of young lesbians and gay males by affirming and transing away the gay.

This proposal rests on a bed of dangerous lies, and it is but one part of an assault on the sex-based rights of women, lesbians, gay men and bisexual people. It is perpetrated by and done under the cover of once-important LGBT organisations such as Stonewall, which are erasing gay identities and are complicit in using the T to erase the LGB.

There are three legislative conceits that form part of this movement: gender self-ID, amendments to hate crime and public order legislation, and so-called conversion therapy bans. Each is the antithesis of what it purports to be. Self-ID is not about equality but about promoting supremacy, hate crime legislation is about silencing the raising of valid safeguarding concerns, and preventing conversion therapy is promoting the very thing it aims to stop. The planned Bill is today’s modern conversion therapy scandal, and it is affecting vulnerable children and young people who may be gender non-conforming or struggling with normal yet distressing pubertal body dysmorphia. It would embed the lie that those young people have been born in the wrong body, that the normal development of puberty should be arrested with chemicals—something that can never be restarted or repaired—and that emotional distress can be fixed with hormones and irreversible radical surgical intervention.

That is being facilitated in Scotland and elsewhere by Government non-statutory guidance, promoted by activist teachers and enabled by others who are bamboozled, threatened and afraid to speak out because of the attacks carried out by radicalised gender activists. Social transitioning is being arranged and encouraged in schools, with parents and carers being completely excluded from their own child’s care. The NSPCC recognises that as a form of grooming, stating:

“Groomers may introduce ‘secrets’ as a way to control or frighten the child.”

Teachers prepared to keep secrets with children, to the exclusion of their parents or child protection teams, is not only dangerous to the child but legally precarious for that teacher, and they should be open to prosecution. None of those teachers are employed as experts in psychological therapy, dysphoria or complex gender assessment. What they are doing is top-to-tail dangerous and wrong. In their zeal, and in secret from parents, they are effectively denying vulnerable children access to the very therapeutic support that they so desperately and obviously need, from real experts, not gender ideology radicals. That is chilling.

[Christian Wakeford]

This is not a debate about trans rights; it is about conversion therapy. I think we have all acknowledged that conversion therapy is abhorrent and evil. If it abhorrent and evil for gay and lesbian people, it is abhorrent and evil for trans people. How this conversation keeps descending to an anti-trans position is wrong. Will the hon. Gentleman think on that point: that conversion therapy is evil and just needs banning?

[Neale Hanvey]

I cannot really respond to the hon. Gentleman constructively because he is obviously not listening to the points I am making.

When I was a young lad—this might stretch Members’ imagination—I was a very pretty boy. In the 1970s, I had long hair and flared trousers, and I was often confused for a girl. The question I am struggling with is this. Is it possible that I would have been open to this form of conversion therapy, and would not have become the successful, happy, gay man that I am today? I can only conclude that, yes, that could easily have happened to me.

We had plenty of struggles growing up, such as section 28. My friend the hon. and learned Member for Edinburgh South West (Joanna Cherry) and I attended the first ever Pride event in Edinburgh, Lark in the Park. We have faced these struggles and now we face them once again. I am absolutely exhausted from listening to people using my history and my struggle against me, when I am when I am attempting to stand up for the rights of young LGB people and protect their futures.

I appreciate that I need to draw to a close, so I will conclude with this. It is not a ban on conversion therapy that the Bill proposes; rather, it is rocket fuel for radicalised ideologues, to trans away the gay, depriving a generation of young LGB people from becoming the fabulous, vibrant and unique, gender non-conforming people they have every right to be.