SNP's proposed conversion therapy ban could criminalise parents who try to persuade their children they don't need to change gender

Screenshot from the BBC News website

This article was first published in the Scotsman on Saturday 13 January (behind the paywall).

No government makes policy based on evidence alone. Every administration, left or right, interventionist or laissez faire, roots its policies in its core values as well as facts. Take UK Labour’s decision to offer children lessons in how to brush their teeth. The facts are clear – in England, tooth decay is the number one cause of hospital admissions for children aged six to ten. Keir Starmer has decided on a policy of supervised tooth-brushing in schools. Critics deride the policy as the “nanny state”. The evidence is indisputable, Labour’s response is a matter of political judgement.  

It is when a government decides to make policy without any evidence to justify change that it risks getting into trouble, and that is exactly what the Scottish Government is attempting to do with its conversion therapy bill.  

Only weeks after the courts ruled that Westminster’s veto of the Gender Recognition Reform Bill was lawful, equalities minister Emma Roddick has published a consultation on an equally controversial piece of legislation. The proposed conversion therapy bill will ban “conversion practices which seek to change or suppress a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity”. As there are already laws in place that criminalise physical conversion therapy, such as food deprivation, the ban is for “talking therapy”. That puts parents at risk of criminal sanction for trying to persuade their child not to change their sex, as one parent described to me: “Our daughter’s former school reported us to social services over concerns that we were ‘supressing’ our daughter’s ‘wish to transition’ and it is chilling to see the Scottish Government propose to criminalise parents like us.  

“Our social worker dismissed the referral, saying the school should follow our lead instead of creating division. However, under this bill, they would have no choice but to insist we agree to the school supporting her gender identity. We would not have even been able to prevent her from wearing a binder which comes with serious risks of permanent damage to breast and rib cage.”  

Emma Roddick insists that parents would only risk criminal sanction if their actions caused harm to their child who was coming out as gay or transgender, but only days after she published her plans, it is clear that they have caused much distress and confusion. Not least among the LGB community, the very people Roddick insists she wants to protect.  

Joanna Cherry KC MP, who was earlier this week elected chair of Westminster’s Human Rights joint select committee, congratulated equalities charity LGB Alliance after its Scottish trustee Rhona Hotchkiss said the conversion therapy bill risked “transing away the gay.” Hotchkiss, a retired prison governor, told the BBC, "The affirmation-at-all-costs approach hurts confused young people, most of whom would grow up to be happily LGB if left alone by the gender industry.” Cherry’s response: “Bravo.”  

Women’s rights activists, senior lawyers, parents’ groups and faith leaders are among the groups gearing up for a campaign to stop the SNP’s latest gender identity plans from becoming law. So given the SNP’s recent bruising experience over the gender recognition reform bill, one would imagine its latest plans are based on a mass of irrefutable evidence. They are not.  

The only evidence that there is “widespread harmful conversion practices in Scotland” is drawn from a handful of witnesses to the Expert Advisory Group on Ending Conversion Practices and the Equalities, Human Rights and Civil Justice Committee, as well as a 2017 UK-wide survey on LGBT issues. The respondents to this questionnaire were self-selecting, which renders it statistically unreliable.  

And an FOI response, dated 11 May 2021, is unequivocal. It states that the Scottish Government does not hold any information "in relation to the number of individuals believed to have been subject to conversion therapy practices over the last decade, or the number of institutions or groups in Scotland believed to practise conversion therapy." 

As Alba MP Neale Hanvey pointed out in a letter to the First Minister this week, “legislation is supposed to fix a problem, not create a new one. There is little-to-no evidence that conversion practices are occurring in Scotland beyond the emerging scandal of the medical and surgical conversion of vulnerable young LGB people because of governmental enthusiasm for policies driven by gender ideology.” 

So there we have it. Clear evidence that the SNP’s plans for a conversion therapy bill are largely based, not on a proven need, but on a contested belief that there is such a thing as “gender identity”. Even the minister in charge of steering this tricky piece of legislation through parliament cannot offer a definition of its central proposition. When asked on social media to define “gender identity”, Emma Roddick replied, “…I'm aware of many I've come across, but everyone has some kind of gender identity, even if it is ‘none’…” The definition used in the government’s consultation document is as obtuse. It states gender identity is “an individual’s personal sense of being or belonging to a particular gender or genders, or of not having a gender.” 

I have no argument with Emma Roddick’s personal values, or those of the SNP government, on matters of sexual orientation. From an early age – when homosexuality was still largely a guilty secret – I have believed that we should be able to love who we want and express our personality as we wish, provided we do not harm others. I suggest the overwhelming majority of Scots feel the same.  

And most parents would try and stop their 14-year-old girl from binding her breasts after the Pride group in her school had encouraged her to believe her burgeoning sexual attraction to girls means that she is a boy trapped in a female body, not a lesbian. To attempt to criminalise this loving response, without any evidence to back up your argument, borders on authoritarianism.