In 2012, California was the first US state to ban ‘conversion therapy’ for minors, the better to stop the forcible brainwashing of gays and lesbians into fancying the opposite sex. Picture kidnappings, violent fundamentalist interventions, gruelling electric shock treatments and Clockwork Orange aversion therapy. But here’s the rub: most of this stuff was 1) already illegal and 2) not really happening. A solution in search of a problem, then.

Successive UK governments have also entertained a conversion therapy ban. Yet among 108,000 respondents to a governmental LGBT survey in 2018, just 5 per cent claimed to have been ‘offered’ such therapy, while only 2 per cent said they’d undergone it. Even there, the survey didn’t define what constituted ‘conversion therapy’. Did it include an earnest dinner table talk with Dad or a hectoring preacher on Speaker’s Corner threatening eternal damnation? Or being shanghaied, zip-tied to a gurney and zapped with lockjaw-inducing high voltage while being shown racy gay porn? Respondents provided no details.

When a 13-year-old girl announces that she’s really a boy, talk therapy should be the first line of defence

When a 13-year-old girl announces that she’s really a boy, talk therapy should be the first line of defence

The Conservative government commissioned Coventry University to explore the prevalence of this practice and the subsequent report noted: ‘Aversive techniques were not reported by interviewees.’ Believe it or not, it was the NHS that offered electric shock aversion therapy to ‘cure’ homosexuals between 1965 and 1973.

Revived by Labour a year ago but not yet finalised, a UK conversion therapy ban is not merely a........

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