Look beyond the title: the Conversion Therapy Bill is more dangerous than you realise

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”

It’s a well-trodden political path to manipulate language to achieve your goals. From Bill Clinton’s attempt to redefine ‘sexual relations’ to the recent bid to legislate on ‘assisted dying’ (code: ‘assisted for suicide’), the words politicians use are designed to leave their audience with a particular impression: radical legislation can sound gentle and unthreatening, weak decisions like a show of strength. The word we’ve particularly come to associate with this in recent decades is ‘spin’: presenting a biased, one-sided, or downright misleading depiction of events.

And when it comes to passing legislation, there are multiple audiences in play: you might frame a law in a particular way to convince an MP to vote for it (by playing down or amplifying dangers). But an MP will also consider what impact on their reputation voting for or against will have: How will activists spin things if I vote against a ban on ‘conversion therapy’? Just imagine the headlines in the press. Or how will it appear to my party members, or to the voters in the constituency, who I will depend on at the next election?

For years, successive governments have talked about trying to introduce some sort of ban on so-called ‘conversion practices’. In the most recent King’s Speech, a draft Bill was announced and then subsequently published by the Government. The joint committee considering the draft Bill is currently accepting evidence.

The words 'Conversion Therapy' carry particular connotations: lots of us might have read appalling stories about gay or lesbian people being forced to undergo electric shock therapy, or being pressured into forced marriages, or even corrective rape. These are truly barbaric practices, which any human - let alone any Christian - should utterly deplore. They are also, thankfully, already illegal today, through pre-existing legislation.

Others might think of attempts to supposedly “cure” homosexuality through counselling or therapy, with very little evidence to support their efficacy. Although some people do describe experiencing a fluidity during their lifetimes, this is not generally a result of human effort, and organisations that advertise conversion services tend to prey on false hopes and desperation. Perhaps the best known example, Exodus International, closed in 2012. Its leader, Alan Chambers, commented: “99.9% of them have not experienced a change in their orientation or have gotten to a place where they could say that they could never be tempted or are not tempted in some way or experience some level of same-sex attraction.”

Within religious contexts, others have spoken about having been the subject of exorcisms to try and ‘deliver’ them homosexuality. In her autobiography, Vicky Beeching told a story of when she asked for prayer ministry to remove her same-sex desires: one person “said loudly: ‘We command the demons inside her to go. We bind the demons of homosexuality.’ Another woman shouted, ‘Satan, get out of her. Let her go. Release your grip on her life.’...By the time it was finally over, I was hunched on the floor, shaking and wishing the ground would swallow me up”.

At CARE, we stand firmly against abusive practices and behaviour like this, and are deeply sorry when we encounter stories of them. Although we recognise that fellow Christians may mean well, any language of ‘demons’ or ‘possession’ in this context is not only utterly inappropriate, it is completely unBiblical: the stories where Jesus casts out demons are not related to any particular temptation, but involve figures who are completely under their power, to the point where the demons are controlling their very speech.

Examples like the above are thankfully much rarer than activists might suggest. When the Conversion Practices Helpline was run by Galop on behalf of the Government from 2022 to 2025, it was predicted that it would receive up to 15,000 calls every year. In reality, it received just 371 calls over three years, and only 29 of them raised potential conversion practices at all. But the scope of the Bill being put forward is rather wider...

If you’ve been following the evidence which has been given this week to the Joint Committee, or if you’ve read the text of the draft Conversion Practices Bill, you’ll know that it seeks to encompass far more than these extreme examples. On Monday, the long-time campaigner Jayne Ozanne, who founded the Ban Conversion Therapy coalition, and who will be familiar to many of us through her time on the General Synod of the Church of England, was giving oral evidence. She is not the only person to have given evidence, but as someone who is particularly familiar with evangelical contexts (and addressing them), her words are particularly worth considering.

It became clear as she spoke that she had a far broader target in mind than particularly extreme practices, as she spoke about those who try to ‘pray the gay away’: “Prayer goes to the heart of it. I speak as a Christian and someone with a deep love of prayer, but not all prayer is healthy or good. In my case it caused me, sadly, after 20 years of seeking out prayer, to end up in hospital fighting for my life because my body could not take the strain of the constant messaging that who I was was unacceptable and that I would never seek to have the intimacy that I craved.”

It is important to recognise the genuine pain, hurt and sense of shame which many LGBT people have felt as they try to understand their sexuality or gender. Although Christians might be tempted to see campaigners for a Bill like this one as bogeymen or bogeywomen, many will have stories like this. I can disagree with what Jayne Ozanne proposes, while still honouring her as someone who is created in the image of God, and who is loved and cherished by Him. And I can think that her suggestions would be dangerous, whilst still having compassion for anyone who has ever felt that ‘who she was was unacceptable’.

The broad point which she makes here - “not all prayer is healthy or good” - is actually, in the abstract, something which most Christians would agree with. We all know that we can pray for things which would not be good for us. C.S. Lewis once wrote: “If God had granted all the silly prayers I've made in my life, where should I be now?”

Within this particular context, Ozanne is talking about praying to change sexuality or gender identity, and is looking to label it as abusive. Now on one level, we will probably all have prayed for desires or temptations we didn’t want to be removed (in a range of contexts). But we will probably also all have seen that God does not always say yes. This is something which we know Paul himself experienced, when he prayed about his ‘thorn in the flesh’ (2 Corinthians 12). The pastor of St Ebbe’s, Oxford, Vaughan Roberts, who experiences same-sex attraction, said in an interview in 2012: “God has the power to change their orientation, but he hasn’t promised to and that has not been my experience.”

It is, of course, not a sin to experience temptation, or to simply be attracted to the same sex, and there are many Christians for whom this is a reality. Praying for sexuality to change can lead to people who are gay feeling uniquely broken or ashamed, as if their temptations are worse than other people’s (which the Bible certainly does not say). And it can leave us with a mistaken impression: that our primary goal is heterosexuality. Become straight, and you’ve solved it…as if people who are straight don’t struggle with sexual desires and sexual sins just as much as others do!

The theologian David Bennett, who moved from being a gay atheist to becoming a celibate Christian (without his sexuality changing), writes in his book, ‘A war of loves’: “The opposite of homosexuality is not heterosexuality, it is holiness.” Christians are all called to holiness regardless of the situation they find themselves in: whether they are married, single of their own volition, or single against their will. Ed Shaw writes about this in much more detail for Living Out here.

Speaking personally, my prayer for someone who is LGBT would be that they would know and love Jesus, and know that they are fully known and loved by Him, and for God’s help as they seek to live as a disciple, honouring him and growing in holiness with every part of themselves, including their sexuality. Other Christians might pray differently, particularly in private.

But pray the wrong kind of prayer, and some campaigners want the Conversion Practices Bill to be used to criminalise you. When Jayne Ozanne was pressed upon this point, she tried to draw a distinction between criminalisation and prosecution, saying this behaviour should be criminalised, but she would suggest just having a word with someone after ‘one little prayer’: this, of course, is not within the gift of Parliament to be determined, but is a matter for the CPS and the courts.

Concerned? You’ve seen nothing yet…

One of the most illuminating sections in the evidence from Monday was when Ozanne spoke about what she called “suppression” of sexuality: “I get that some people are called to be single and celibate for the rest of their lives—that is wonderful, but not if it is forced on you and, perhaps most importantly, not if that is what you are taught when you are growing up. That is happening to many teenagers who, perhaps, confide in their youth pastors that they are suffering from same-sex attraction and are told, ‘Well, you just have to bear that for the rest of your life. You will never be allowed to have a relationship.’”

Historic Christian teaching - although these views are not exclusive to just Christians - is that marriage is created by God and designed by him to be the lifelong covenant of one man and one woman; it is the context for sexual union and bearing children. We know that marriage will not happen for everyone, for a variety of reasons (Jesus talks in Matthew 19 about eunuchs “who were born that way”, others who “have been made eunuchs”, and others “who choose to live like eunuchs”). As a now 32-year-old, many of my peers are married, but some are not, even though they long to be, and we are walking alongside them as they struggle with that. Of course, I have some wonderful older friends too, for whom this has never happened, for whatever reason: I admire and love them deeply.

As an aside, this does not quite mean, as Jayne Ozanne claims, ‘you will never be allowed to have a relationship’ if you are gay. Following Jesus does mean that we are not free to pursue a romantic or married relationship with someone of the same sex, and that can indeed be very painful. But life is made up of many kinds of relationship. Andrew Bunt, who works for Living Out, speaks in this video about the difference his church family and his faith made, who loved him and made sacrifices for him: “being single, for me, doesn’t mean loneliness or isolation, actually it’s meant a life full of deep relationships and ultimately with wonderful Jesus.” There is a challenge here for the Church. Psalm 68:6 declares that God “sets the lonely in families”: let us make it so.

But Jayne Ozanne’s comments suggest that “suppression” of sexuality is a form of conversion therapy: she directly speaks about youth leaders who speak about celibacy, although it could just as easily be pastors who preach about God’s design for marriage, or even family or friends who are walking alongside someone experiencing same-sex attraction. Later in the session, she spoke specifically about the Evangelical Alliance: “The Evangelical Alliance, which is a network of evangelical churches—not all evangelical churches believe this, but thousands of them do—talks about the need for transformation, which is code for, ‘You must change yourself. You must deny yourself.’

It’s important to define ‘transformation’ right here: although it will have been unclear to many of her listeners, EA do not use the language of transformation to refer to going from gay-to-straight. The sense the Bible usually uses it in is being transformed into the likeness of Jesus: turning away from our sins (whatever they are) and living life in the power of the Holy Spirit. And ‘self-denial’ has always been a part of Christian living, not just in the area of sexuality or gender. Jesus calls us to a narrow path; it is certainly not an easy path (which is why so many of his disciples left him during his ministry), but he has the words of eternal life.

“Suppression” of sexuality does not, of course, just encompass people who are LGBT; the teaching that sex is exclusively for within marriage is, by its very definition, restrictive and suppressive. Such proposals would criminalise normative Christian teaching, create obstacles for parents trying to raise inquisitive teenagers, and probably contravene various Human Rights laws. They are not only unpalatable; they are unworkable.

Most of this article so far has concentrated on sexuality, which is what the evidence given to the Select Committee centred around. However, perhaps most concerning of all is the risks the Draft Conversion Practices Bill presents to vulnerable children and young people who are exploring their gender, and all those who love or seek to counsel them, such as parents, grandparents, teachers, youth leaders and even various health professionals.

The Bill - in its attempt to be fully inclusive - applies the same threshold to ‘conversion therapy’ on gender as it does on sexuality. This has been done despite the appalling scandals uncovered by the Cass Review, which revealed that young people were being prescribed untested cross-sex hormones, being socially transitioned within schools, and ushered down pathways which led many to make permanent, damaging changes to their bodies. Don’t want to simply affirm that your child has been ‘born in the wrong body’? That might make you a criminal too…

This is something which the Labour MP Naz Shah rightly pressed Jayne Ozanne upon on Monday, asking whether she would want to criminalise a parent who refused to buy a teenage girl a breast binder (which can cause serious respiratory issues and damage to the back and spine). In response, Ozanne tried to say that children (and parents) know they are transgender from picking up a toy (at which point alarm bells will surely have begun ringing about stereotypes!), and attempted to deflect the question by saying it was hard to discuss in the abstract. Naz Shah’s response was unimpressed: “I have heard that word “abstract” a lot, but we are talking about the criminal law, so we need to get this right”. Shah also raised the reality of ‘detransitioners’, who have initially identified as transgender, only to reverse that later, sometimes after making life-changing decisions.

Make no mistake: this is a completely ideological move from certain activists, who, after seeing supposed transgender ‘care’ for children and teenagers be summarily halted by the Government, and after a number of setbacks around single-sex spaces, are trying to smuggle in gender ideology via the back door. In their excellent report for Policy Exchange, ‘Not what it says on the tin’, Baronness Falkner and Akua Reindorf KC, describe the Bill as “ideological, authoritarian, unworkable and wholly unsuitable legislation for a democratic and pluralistic society”.

They explain the problems, particularly around gender, at length: “If enacted, the draft Bill will criminalise parents just when they are grappling with a uniquely challenging and high-stakes quandary. A child who declares a transgender identity may be embarking on a one-way path of experimental medicalisation and surgical body modification which will imperil their long-term physical and mental health, impair their sexual function and destroy their fertility. A parent considering whether to try to dissuade their child from this course of action, or to refuse to pay for it, should not have hanging over their head the possibility of criminal conviction and imprisonment at the behest of an angry and frustrated adolescent. Yet those are outcomes which are heralded by the draft Bill.”

Indeed, because the word 'abuse' is so ill-defined the Bill, there have even been warnings that companies (and bosses) might face fines if an employee of their is misgendered in the work place, for not putting in place policies in advance to stop it. The detransitioner Philippa Roberts warned that the Bill might be a way to criminalise any publicly gender critical person: “The bill is a wrecking ball for people who criticise gender identity. They could arrest us all in one go – what a genius way to wipe out the opposition [to gender ideology] like [campaigners] Helen Joyce and Kellie-Jay Keen, LGB Alliance, Sex Matters, Women’s Rights Network and For Women Scotland."

It is this, which above all, has united opponents of the Bill, including some who Christians might be surprised to find themselves allies alongside. In recent weeks, there have been excellent pieces written by:

• Dennis Kavanagh, director of the Gay Men’s Network: “You’ve got to be able to understand law. It’s got to be comprehensible. I, mum and dad, can’t sit and read this bill across their kitchen table, where the shadow of criminal law is about to fall, and know whether they’re criminals or not.”

• Sonia Sodha, former writer for the Guardian, now with the Times: “This bill undoubtedly represents one of the most dramatic, disproportionate and illiberal incursions into our fundamental democratic rights, including the right to free expression, to private and family life, and to live in a society governed by comprehensible and predictable criminal law.”

• Kathleen Stock, co-founder of the Lesbian Project: “We should not be encouraging teens to think of loving parents as monsters. Law-makers should be putting flames out, not fanning them.”

The Reform Party and the Conservative Party have also come out against the Bill, and the Telegraph are actively campaigning for it to be scrapped.

Conversion Therapy might sound like something which ought to be banned wherever it is found; the reality is, what you think of as conversion therapy probably already is. The draft wording of this Bill, which focuses on vague terms like ‘alarm’ or ‘distress’, provides no safeguards for parents, teachers or religious groups.

The joint committee considering the Draft Conversion Practices Bill is currently accepting evidence from the public: the window to submit evidence ends at 5pm on Monday, 16 November.

Please do consider submitting evidence if you possibly can. We have provided some advice on what to say and practical guidance on how to upload your submission, which you can find on our website here.

And please pray that politicians would not be taken in, and would think beyond the title of this Bill and examine its detail. It is easy for MPs to chase headlines, rather than good legislation (as, for so long, was happening with the Assisted Suicide debate).

This Bill risks being the most dangerous threat to parental rights and religious freedoms for generations. It cannot pass like this.