This is not, to paraphrase Faye Dunaway playing Joan Crawford, our first time at the rodeo. Six years ago, Theresa May promised to ban conversion therapy. It later appeared twice in the Queen’s Speech under Boris Johnson’s premiership, and then unravelled amid the scaremongering about trans rights, lost in a quagmire of opposing arguments that somehow prohibiting a form of psychological torture will have Unintended Consequences.
“You might end up criminalising a doctor, a teacher, or even a parent for suggesting a trans person is in fact not!” opponents of the ban cried.
This fear is misguided – you can easily write legislation which sets the bar of criminality at the right level with the right parameters (which I will come onto).
But how telling to see the majority (with power) care more about a theoretical threat to one of their own, than to the actual threat, the real abuse, happening to a minority (without power). This stalling tactic against social justice is even older than Joe Biden.
Today it’s Labour’s turn. They had already promised before the election to ban the practice, which seeks to “cure” LGBT people, to turn gay and bisexual people straight and trans people cisgender. But now “a draft bill will be brought forward to ban conversion practices” according to their first King’s Speech in government.
The explanatory notes provided to journalists as a background briefing also look fairly reassuring. First, the ban will include transgender people, who amid Boris Johnson’s chaotic leadership were for a while excluded and removed from the Tory’s proposed ban. Second, it seeks to strike the right balance between criminalising harmful practices while still allowing everyone involved in the support and medical care of LGBT people to explore their identity.
This is a crucial point, and one to watch as the fights over this bill ricochet around the airwaves in the coming months. This balance is both remarkably easy to understand but equally easy for anti-LGBT people to exploit and misdirect the public over.
I know from personal and professional experience far too much about conversion therapy. In 2009 I went undercover to expose it. First at a conference in central London devoted to teaching people – whether counsellors, therapists or clergy – how to become conversion therapists. This sounds like a joke, or a wild anachronism from 50s America. It was not. Instead, it was hours and hours of lectures about how broken gay people are, how they need saving, fixing, changing, curing. At one point I watched a young man being “cured” in front of a live audience.
That day changed me, scarred me, forever, and in so doing set off a chain of events that led to today’s King’s Speech. At the conference, I met a psychiatrist and, separately, a psychotherapist. They agreed to “treat” me for my homosexuality. Having heard the lies, the poison, and the scripture-based hatred bellowing around that conference hall, I knew I had to expose what really happens behind closed doors. At the time, there was no awareness of conversion therapy happening in Britain, no conversation in the media, not a word from politicians. Even Stonewall didn’t have a clue.
Over the next few months, I subjected myself to conversion therapy to turn a floodlight onto this darkness. There are two main approaches. They first embark on what I call a “wound hunt” where the therapist tries to find what went wrong in your childhood, what broke you, to make you homosexual (as they would say) – because they believe homosexuality is an illness.
If they don’t find it they will invent it. My therapist suggested I had been sexually abused in childhood, probably by a member of my family. I had not. Imagine the damage that would have done to a person, and their family, if they had not been an undercover journalist.
The second part comprises the techniques to make you straight. These included, ludicrously, telling me to join a rugby team, to pray, even to stand in front of the mirror naked and touching myself while affirming to myself my masculinity. This might sound almost comedic, but imagine a vulnerable person being told in myriad subtle and direct ways: you are broken, you are sick, never accept yourself, to be gay is to fail, try harder.
Once my investigation was published in the Independent in 2010, I set about trying to hold the psychiatrist and the psychotherapist to account. I submitted a complaint to the General Medical Council about the psychiatrist, which included sending them tapes of the sessions. The GMC hired another psychiatrist to assess my evidence and decide whether he believed it to be malpractice. Extraordinarily, he did not.
Then I complained to the psychotherapist’s professional body, the British Association of Counselling and Psychotherapy, the largest organisation of its kind in Britain. I had to find a barrister to represent me for free, sit through several days of hearings into her conduct, and use every ounce of my ability to explain and express how conversion therapy is harmful before the panel would agree.
It took two and a half years but eventually they revoked the therapist’s membership. In 2012, she became the first therapist in Britain “struck off” after practising conversion therapy. She could still see clients, but would not be allowed to say she was a member of the BACP.
None of this should have happened. There must be a law to ensure this ends here. And that law is not difficult. It comes down to two principles by which to judge anyone accused of conversion therapy. First, what was the goal and the intention? Good therapy of any kind should not have as its core aim to push anyone into a sexual or gender identity. The point of decent, ethical therapy is to allow the individual space to find their own answers, to figure out who they are.
To differentiate from conversion therapy, many therapists have called this approach “affirmative therapy”. The problem is that this term is often misinterpreted by people who insufficiently understand. Affirmative therapy isn’t the opposite of conversion therapy because it tells people they are gay or bisexual or trans. It’s the opposite because it doesn’t tell them anything – neither who they are, nor imposing the agenda of the therapist, whose only goal is to improve their mental health.
The second principle is the therapist’s practices itself. What did they tell the patient? What techniques are they deploying? If they’re telling them to try fantasising about the opposite sex, to self-punish if they have same-sex feelings, or to wear the clothes associated with their birth sex, or any of the other hundreds of messages imparted by those who seek to make people heterosexual or cisgender, then there is your answer. It’s conversion therapy. Regardless of whether someone “consents”. People often do “consent”, because they enter into it already full of self-loathing, instilled in them from their own community or religious group.
People need space and support to explore who they are. Conversion practices squeeze any space out and instead insert an agenda: you should become straight or conform to the sex of your birth.
The consequences of conversion practises are dire. I thought I would be fine – I was a secure 30-something, who had come out aged 14. It proved catastrophic. The stress led to neurological episodes – spasms in my face and body. The extensive press coverage of my case against the therapist didn’t exactly help. Even columnists from the newspaper that published my investigation sharpened their knives, eager to condemn me. The BBC seemed to delight in putting me on programmes pitted against conversion therapists for “balance”.
But it put the issue on the map, never to be ignored again. The psychological scars remain, even though I was a reporter, not one of the thousands of real patients. I’ve seen their physical scars, their lacerations, and heard their stories of self-harm and suicide attempts. Everything I have done was to try to stop more people being lost.
I will scrutinise the details of this law as and when they become available. But in the meantime, I call on the Government to do something else – to regulate counselling and psychotherapy. Currently, neither “counsellor” nor “psychotherapist” are protected titles, which means anyone can call themselves one, without any training, experience or qualifications, or any need to be a member of a professional body.
But those professional bodies are all independent and private, far from the reaches of any oversight from the Government. Earlier I wrote inverted commas around the term “struck off”, because it’s a term we usually apply to doctors. When a doctor is struck off by the GMC, they can no longer practice as doctors. When a therapist tries to “cure” a gay person and is struck off from their professional body, they can simply carry on seeing patients, and even join another professional organisation.
In the King’s Speech, the Government promised to “ensure mental health is given the same attention and focus as physical health” so here’s a great opportunity to enact that. Doctors are regulated properly, so why not therapists? By doing this, it also allows for a wider two-pronged protection for victims of conversion practises. If their experiences don’t meet the threshold of the criminal law, or they are not believed, then they can also bring a complaint to the regulator.
In the 15 years since I went undercover, I have met and interviewed countless people who have experienced conversion practises, including exorcisms and electric shocks. But most will never speak publicly; too traumatised, too ashamed.
A government’s job is to protect the most vulnerable. The Government says it will listen to all relevant groups. I therefore ask Anneliese Dodds, the minister in charge, to meet with me. And I remain hopeful. For now, it’s all we have.