The UK Government has published the draft Conversion Practices Bill, which would ban so-called ‘conversion therapies’ in England and Wales: a range of practices intended to change a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity. Anyone found guilty of such abuse could face an unlimited fine and up to five years in prison.
According to the Labour Government, the criminal offence would apply to conduct intended to change a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity ‘through abusive acts that seriously harm the victim’. Alongside the criminal offence, the Bill introduces a new civil measure - a conversion practice protection order - designed to provide preventive protection for people at risk, modelled on existing orders used in cases of forced marriage and female genital mutilation. The comparison is deliberate: it indicates the level of seriousness with which legislators view the issue.
It is a milestone that has been years in the making. Eight years ago, Theresa May’s Conservative government was the first to commit to action in this area, but progress later stalled amid hesitations and reversals. Boris Johnson’s government at one stage appeared ready to abandon the ban altogether, before proposing a watered-down version limited to sexual orientation and containing no reference to gender identity. The move prompted a fierce backlash and forced the Government to cancel the international LGBTQ+ rights conference it had been due to host. Only with Labour has the promise returned to the political agenda.
What these practices really are
The name is misleading. The word ‘therapy’, of Greek origin, means ‘healing’. Conversion practices are the opposite of that. The 2020 report by the United Nations Independent Expert Victor Madrigal-Borloz, presented to the Human Rights Council, stated this plainly: they treat nothing, because there is nothing to treat, and they inflict pain and suffering that can leave lasting scars on body and mind.
The report gathered more than one hundred first-hand accounts. Behind the reassuring label of ‘therapy’, documented cases included beatings, isolation, the forced administration of medication, verbal humiliation and, in some settings, even exorcisms. The UN Expert concluded that such interventions constitute a serious violation of the rights to physical integrity, health and freedom of self-expression. When imposed by force, they also breach the prohibition on torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment. This was the basis for the call for a global ban. The Catholic Church bears grave responsibility in this area. For many years it promoted priests such as Amedeo Cencini, who, through public interventions, books and conversations with Catholic seminarians, advanced a theory with no scientific basis: that there is one form of homosexuality that can be ‘cured’ and another that cannot. Such a distinction inevitably reinforces the idea that homosexuality is something from which a person can - and should - recover.
In 2022, Marco Felipe Perfetti, editor of Silere non possum, initiated disciplinary proceedings against the priest. The Veneto Order of Psychologists, with which Cencini is registered, nevertheless defended him, maintaining that his statements did not amount to professional misconduct.
Italy, where legislation against these practices is still not even being considered, thus confirms its inclination to protect figures such as Amedeo Cencini: people who, for years, have contributed to the suffering of candidates for the priesthood by leading them to see themselves as wrong, inadequate, abnormal or ill.
This is neither an isolated position nor an activist claim. The scientific consensus has been clear for decades. As early as 2016, the World Psychiatric Association stated that there was no evidence that an innate sexual orientation could be ‘changed’. Minors are particularly vulnerable because they have little or no say in decisions affecting their health, and because it is often family members or communities that impose these processes on them. Clinical literature consistently links such experiences to anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and suicidal ideation.
The issue that directly concerns Catholics
On 5 May, the Vatican published the report of the Study Group established during the Synod on Synodality. It addressed the ‘devastating effects of reparative therapies aimed at recovering heterosexuality’ and, in an unprecedented move, included the testimony of two gay believers - one Portuguese and one American - who had undergone such practices. The document does not alter Catholic teaching on homosexuality or marriage in any way, and it reiterates that pastoral accompaniment must remain ‘in full accord with the teaching of the Church’. But it does acknowledge the harm. It recognises the Church’s own share of responsibility for the ‘solitude, anguish and stigma’ endured by these people and their families.
That distinction needs to be kept clear, because it also lies at the heart of the British debate. It is one thing to preserve the freedom to preach, to pray and to propose a path of chastity to someone who freely seeks it. The draft Bill explicitly safeguards ‘legitimate healthcare and therapy, open conversations and free speech’, while Olivia Bailey, the Equalities Minister, has said that the legislation is intended to close ‘legal loopholes’ that leave people exposed to harmful acts. Coercion is something else altogether: the demand to ‘repent publicly or leave the community’ which Matthew Hyndman, who grew up in an evangelical setting, said was imposed on him. ‘My vocation, my community, everything was so intertwined,’ he told The Guardian. The boundary between those two realities is the line that separates the proclamation of faith from abuse disguised as care.
The unresolved front
Not everything has been settled. Many religious groups still exist, including Catholic circles that describe themselves as ‘traditionalist’, which oppose such legislation because they know it would place limits on practices and language for which they have been responsible for years. The issue is all the more serious because, even in countries where laws have been introduced to protect the most vulnerable, those protections can be dismantled in the name of political ideology. On 31 March, for example, the United States Supreme Court ruled in Chiles v. Salazar that Colorado’s ban on so-called conversion therapy, as applied to the claimant’s verbal psychotherapy, amounted to a viewpoint-based restriction on freedom of speech. The Court set aside the lower courts’ rulings and sent the case back for the law to undergo the most demanding level of constitutional scrutiny. It did not formally strike down the entire ban, but it weakened its practical basis and, with it, a protection designed for minors.
Yet one point remains that British legislation seeks to establish clearly: no one is ‘broken’, and no one needs to be ‘fixed’. A person’s dignity cannot be negotiated through treatment. Wherever the pressure comes from - a doctor’s surgery, a family or the basement of a parish - once it claims to correct what a person is, it ceases to be care and becomes an affront to a fundamental right.
Robert Evans
Silere non possum