TERF Island’s biggest battle yet

The draft Conversion Practices Bill could reverse everything we have won to date

Recent weeks have been completely consumed with work to fight the government’s plan to introduce a conversion-practices ban. This has been under discussion for some years now, with a pledge from the previous Conservative government to introduce a law which was abandoned when it realised that it couldn’t be done without trampling on other people’s human rights, and a couple of private member’s bills that went nowhere.

But the current government entered power in 2024 with banning conversion practices in its manifesto. For the past two years it has been working on a draft law, which was published in June, and now it is being put through pre-legislative scrutiny by a parliamentary committee made up of peers and MPs.

We on TERF Island have made extraordinary gains in the past decade: defeating self-ID, gaining protections for so-called “gender critical” beliefs in the workplace, the Cass Review’s rejection of gender-affirming care, the For Women Scotland Supreme Court judgment and new safeguarding guidance for schools that stops full social transition. These gains were very hard-won, and are still fragile and patchily implemented. Now all of them are at risk.

At the heart of the bill is an extraordinarily broad definition of a “conversion practice” as “any conduct” that causes an individual to have or not to have, or to believe that they have or do not have, a sexual orientation or a particular sexual orientation, or a transgender identity or a particular transgender identity. Whether a practice is “abusive” is a question of fact to be determined “by reference to all the circumstances”. Factors to be considered include, but aren’t limited to, whether there were controlling or coercive words or behaviour, or economic, psychological or emotional pressure. And finally, it has to meet a threshold of “harm” which can be as low as causing “serious alarm or distress which has a substantial adverse effect on usual day-to-day activities”. If all these conditions are met you can face prosecution, with a sentence of up to five years in jail.

If you’re not used to reading laws, I suggest you think of a scenario in which you want, or even need, to state biological facts about someone trans-identifying who really doesn’t want to hear them. Someone who believes that your words are “transphobic”, motivated by hate and a desire to see them dead. This is the rhetoric that is used about us all the time; many people believe it. Many children, especially. You’ll quickly realise that it’s laughably easy to reach the threshold for these words to be considered a crime.

Here’s one: an autistic 11-year-old girl who identifies as non-binary genuinely seems to think this means she won’t go through female puberty. It’s urgent that her mother dispels this misconception. So she sits her daughter down and says something like this: “You’re a girl and you always will be, and no matter what you say about your ‘identity’, it won’t change that fact. You’re going to start periods and develop breasts just like every other girl does, and you’ll grow up to be a woman and that’s that.”

Such a conversation might not go smoothly. There might be a family row. The girl might become withdrawn afterwards, perhaps saying she feels low and anxious and refusing to go to school. The situation might lead to further rows, to the parents saying the girl has been misled by friends or materials she has found online. They might take measures such as taking away her phone or turning off the internet router at night.

All of this is completely realistic. Despite being normal, indeed responsible, parenting, it fits the definition of an abusive conversion practice that reaches the criminal threshold (in fact, I could have dialled it down a fair bit and still got over the line). The mother’s initial words can be read as an intention to change the daughter’s non-binary gender identity. Cutting the girl off from what her mother regards as bad influences can be framed as psychological or emotional pressure. The girl’s school refusal demonstrates an impact that arguably reaches the threshold for harm.

If this came to the attention of police — perhaps if the school looked into the reason for her frequent absences and then reported it (which under the new law they would have to, to avoid potential liability themselves) — the police would have to investigate. They might well conclude it met the threshold for this new crime, and perhaps refer it to the Crown Prosecution Service for a charging decision. And who knows what the CPS would decide? It’s a new law, the definition of transgender identity explicitly covers non-binary identities, the definition of “abuse” is open-ended and the threshold for “harm” is low. Unusually, the bill includes no defences to the crime, once the thresholds above are met — no requirement to have intended harm or been reckless regarding whether there would be harm, no defence that the actions were reasonable or in the best interests of the supposed victim.

And then, who knows what a court might decide? With definitions this vague it will take a lot of cases before the courts settle where the boundaries in a statute that doesn’t spell them out lie. Particularly because the criminal-justice system is not accustomed to adjudicating family conversations, still less conversations on a subject so fraught and about which there is such bitter disagreement.

Even if the mother was not ultimately convicted, getting to that point would take a long time, probably around two years. And even if the CPS decided not to prosecute, the main damage would already have been done. A mother who is being investigated by police for a crime against her child that is sufficiently serious to attract a jail sentence of up to five years may well be considered a significant risk, not just to that child but any other children. She may be subjected to bail conditions or a child-protection order that bar her from caring for or even seeing the children. The family would be split up, and if she is a single mother and has no relatives capable of stepping in, the children would have to be taken into state care. A law that is supposed to protect that 11-year-old girl will instead have ruined her life, and the lives of the rest of her family too.

It seems extraordinary to me that the government’s lawyers seem not to see all this. I suppose they start from the misconception that someone’s “gender identity” is a real thing, on a par with their sexual orientation, and that trying to change it requires a bit of effort. They think, in other words, that entering the funnel towards conviction envisaged in this new law won’t be easy — that you would have to do something like the “conversion therapy” meted out to gay people in the past. They clearly don’t understand that activists think referring to the sex of someone who doesn’t want you to, and then acting on that information, is a conversion practice — and the way the law is written, those activists will be right.

And once someone has entered that funnel towards criminalisation, there is very little stopping them sliding the whole way to the point where the police think there’s enough to investigate. The exercise of normal parental authority or the enforcement of sex-based rules in public places, workplaces or schools will be experienced as “coercive” by people who regard it as their right to use spaces and services designated for the opposite sex: that ticks the box for “abusive”. The unjustified entitlement that developed over the past two decades as a result of the trans lobby’s misrepresentations of the law means that many of the people it misled will respond to a rejection of their unreasonable demands with “serious alarm or distress which has a substantial adverse effect on usual day-to-day activities”: that ticks the box for “harm”.

The main effect of the new law would probably be a chilling effect, as people changed their behaviour in order to avoid being caught in this extraordinarily widely cast net. For trans-identifying children this will be a slow-motion disaster. Their parents are the only people who stand between them and ideas that at best seriously interrupt their normal psychological and social development and at worst put them on the path to irreversible physical harm and lifelong medicalisation. It’s already extraordinarily difficult for parents to counter the myriad influences pushing susceptible children towards trans identification. The threat of criminal prosecution will be the final element making it pretty much impossible.

I think there will also be lots and lots of reporting and investigation, and probably also a significant number of prosecutions. Other jurisdictions with similar laws have experienced a serious chilling effect, but few or no prosecutions (some children have, however, been taken away from their parents). But the trans lobby has had a much tougher ride in the UK than in any other country, and consequently it has had to be far more vicious and inventive in its use of regulatory harassment and lawfare.

Gender-critical professionals such as doctors and lawyers are constantly being reported to their professional bodies. Journalists and media outlets are reported to the statutory regulator, Ofcom; charities are reported to the Charity Commission. A few years ago transactivist groups dragged the Charity Commission through judicial review of its decision to register LGB Alliance as a charity; if that had worked it would have been the end of it for any gender-critical organisation that aspired to charitable status.

And transactivists already misuse criminal law. Regular readers will know that three years after I appeared on a panel with trans-identifying man Freda Wallace, I am still dealing with a vexatious and ill-founded crime report about a handful of Twitter posts about that event. That report was based on me calling Wallace by a man’s name and male pronouns, sharing a picture of him taken from the audience during the event and quoting his self-description as a fetishist. It didn’t fit the definitions of harassment or malicious communications well enough for the police to actually investigate the report, but they still recorded it all as a crime, and included my name against that record. The trans-identifying man who made that report, Lynsay Watson, is still trying to judicially review the decision not to prosecute me, and recently Wallace himself made a new crime report about me, claiming a course of conduct amounting to harassment that started with the event three years ago and continuing since as I wrote about the whole saga.

In other words, these people will (mis)use whatever legal tools the government gives them — and this new bill is in many ways the best yet. It doesn’t have to be twisted to cover “misgendering”; the notion of a “transgender identity” is at its heart, and although the people who wrote it may not understand this, a significant number of people genuinely think that words or actions based on prioritising sex over trans identities is a conversion practice. The thresholds for abuse and harm are really easy to meet when you’re an entitled, aggrieved obsessive who insists that the world pretend you are the sex you are not — or simply a confused, miserable child who has got caught up in those obsessives’ bizarre, reality-denying belief system.

Such prosecutions, and the threat of them, could force all sorts of people to avoid acting in ways we have spent the last decade establishing are perfectly lawful. My colleague Maya Forstater’s precedent-setting judgment that, under the Equality Act, you are free to believe that sex trumps self-declared gender identity and to say and act upon that belief, without losing your job will be useless if those beliefs and words could lead to criminal charges. The Cass Review’s rejection of gender-affirming care will mean nothing if parents are at risk of prosecution for exactly the cautious approach Cass recommended.

The For Women Scotland Supreme Court judgment will be largely a dead letter if trans-identifying people who don’t want to obey sex-based rules can turn to criminal law to force employers and service providers to flex the rules for them, or to get rid of single-sex spaces and services entirely — and to bully individuals who complain into silence. Schools won’t be able to obey statutory safeguarding guidance that instructs them to record children’s sex accurately and set sex-based rules for using single-sex spaces if affirmative parents complain that applying these rules to their children constitutes an abusive conversion practice that meets the threshold for harm.

I really hope the committee performing pre-legislative scrutiny can be woken up to the all this. Tomorrow I’m appearing before it, and will give it my best shot. The hearing will last roughly two hours, from noon to 2pm. During the first hour the committee will hear from representatives of three trans lobby groups: Stonewall, Galop and the Ban Conversion Practices coalition; during the second it’s me, Dermot Kehoe from LGB Alliance and Dennis Kavanagh from the Gay Men’s Network.

If you want to know more of what I and my colleagues have been doing on this subject, visit the Stop the Conversion Practices Bill section of the Sex Matters website. One of the things you can find there is a briefing describing 21 scenarios like the one above, in which ordinary people — parents, teachers, employers, charity workers, members of informal groups — act in ways that meet the threshold for prosecution set out in the bill. It was published on Monday and already we are receiving emails with new examples we hadn’t thought of.

If you live in the UK, and after reading the scenarios you realise that this law might catch you — at home, at work or in your social life — submit written evidence to the committee explaining this (there is a guide on how to submit here). If you live abroad in a jurisdiction where there is already a conversion-practices ban and have experience of the chilling effect or other harmful impacts, you could also submit evidence responding to Question 4 and nothing else. This asks what lessons can be learned about any successes or unintended consequences in other jurisdictions.

And finally — this was meant to be a short post! — if you want to watch tomorrow’s parliamentary committee, you can watch live on Parliament TV or later on catch-up once it’s been archived. I’m sure there will also be clips posted on X — I’ll repost, if you want to look out for them.

Wish me luck!