The Police Will Not End Conversion Therapy
Why I can not support a criminal ban
Content note for discussion of abuse. Also I would like to make clear that my opinion here is on the fringe, and I’m putting it out in public in the hope of prompting critical discussion.
[additional note: since writing this I’ve had useful feedback from Lee Leveille, who like Ky Schevers was also part of the ideological detransitioner community which he has since left]
I have been saying on Twitter for a while now, that as an abolitionist, I can not support the campaign for a criminal ban on conversion therapy. But actually I feel I must reverse that statement.
The more I research conversion therapy and more specifically the networks that perpetrate it, the stronger my concerns grow that criminalisation just won’t work, and may even do some amount of harm the same way that other forms of criminal prohibition have failed.
I need to be very clear about what I mean by that as someone who is a regular critic of the practice and legitimisation of conversion therapy and the organisations trying to take action to protect it as a continued practice: I have no problem with conversion therapists facing consequences for their actions, I do not think it is a legitimate practice which must be accepted. I think conversion practices are harmful and cowardly, exploiting systematic and emotional vulnerability of its victims. The majority of the time conversion practices are targeted against young people, and both clinical and religious conversion efforts are still very much around. My critique here of the plan to ban conversion “therapy” should no more exonerate it than a critique of the failures of the criminal justice system to do anything useful about sexual violence ought to be considered validation for rapists.
I should make clear, that I am not a conversion therapy expert. People subjected me to multiple forms of violence, shaming and emotional manipulation when I was young which might be considered a form of conversion practice but I’m not currently in a position of identifying as a survivor of conversion therapy or trying to lay out expertise on that basis. My expertise here is as what I have previously described as a “hate researcher”. I’m in a process of adjusting that designation, my interests aren’t focused on hate so much as various forms of organised harm targeted at trans people. Much of what I have to say comes from monitoring discussions among people promoting or even advertising conversion practices, seeking to engage in conversion practices, looking for help with directing conversion practices, seeking medical authority to legitimise conversion practices, rather than the activity itself.
Conversion practices must be stopped and their victims must be listened to, provided with the necessary resources to start to heal from what they have been through, and to seek compensation from those who harmed them. Those practicing in ways that seek to change or suppress a patients’ sexual orientation, gender identity or expression must have the trusted roles, and powers that have enabled them to harm their patients stripped of them so they can not harm anyone else.
There are big challenges that need addressing though along the way and I think criminalisation may make these worse rather than better:
1. Many survivors are made to feel that they chose conversion therapy.
For young people subjected to conversion practices, this is often done by the people who are their primary carers, a source of support and warmth, family members they have deep ties to. For adults in transphobic or homophobic communities, conversion practices are often participated in voluntarily and can be driven by internalised transphobia or homophobia and a desire to deepen bonds with a community despite wider alienation.
One way or another, a function of conversion practices is that people subjected to them are manipulated into internalising the “problem” of homophobia or transphobia in their communities, seeking out explanations within their personal feelings, history, or just explaining the inherent conflicts between community morality and their personal feelings as a sickness or pathology. Negative thoughts and suffering that results from attempting to go along with conversion practices become further internalised adding to shame and inwardly directed violence. The film “Pray Away” is a fairly good source for testimony of experiences like this, but away from religious conversion practices, there are experiences like those of former radical feminist detransitioner Ky Schevers who has spoken out about how she and other detransitioners, as part of a wider transphobic community, ended up innovating techniques for maintaining the inner dissonance of transphobia and unresolved gender dysphoria through support group activities directed at maintaining each other’s commitment. In fact the proliferation of self-help based support group techniques where there is not a hierarchy of conversion therapist and victim so much as there are organised groups of people building mutually reinforcing communities engaged in conversion practices should ring big alarm bells for those who hope to understand the harm being done here through a framework of victim and perpetrator.
This set of arrangements creates a situation where victims are not always able to clearly recognise these practices as harmful until they’ve both managed to actually leave the community in question and undergone a degree of healing to reframe what they have gone through and process the harm done.
2. Conversion therapy is already undergrounded.
Literally. Here’s Carys Moseley of the evangelical pro-conversion therapy charity, the IFTCC (International Federation for Therapeutic and Counselling Choice), explaining that:
There is no one Christian ministry in the UK that is focussed exclusively on helping people to be free of gender confusion, because this kind of work has been taken underground. The reason is obvious — the climate of calling anything critical of transgender or LGBT philosophies as “hateful” and “harmful”. We already know that churches and faith-based organisations are being targeted by the GEO on this issue. Now we also know that the caring professions more broadly are being targeted. This puts Christian work with children, young people and the elderly at particular risk
Side note: it’s damning that anti-trans hate group Transgender Trend are cited as the one “secular” resource for targetting trans identities.
The fact that it is undergrounded though, does not mean these practices have stopped. Conversion therapy advocacy is actually extremely active, particularly of late now that banning it is on the cards, with numerous groups forming both public and more secretive to establish an ecosystem to make its continuation feasible.
1, and 2 combine together to create a situation where there are people who will willingly use (or be put by their families through) conversion practices, and people who are willing to do them illegally underground taking whatever measures will be necessary to protect their business or organisational interests in performing these harmful treatments.
Criminalisation adds a third element — that of the potential for exploitation of people undergoing conversion therapy to make them complicit in the harms to others going through the same process and create incentives against speaking up even if they leave. This is a feature of organised criminal abuse in nearly every market facing prohibition from drugs to the sex industry and beyond. The inherently harmful nature of criminalisation is something which former drug enforcement police have spoken up about, as have abolitionists in numerous different jurisdictions.
What do I think might work instead?
Education and clear messaging is absolutely key. We had widespread issues with measles outbreaks as a result of the Andrew Wakefield “MMR vaccine” hoax, and ultimately the thing that solved this was clear positive communication around vaccines that there was absolutely no evidence that they cause autism. We are currently facing a well of moral panic around young trans people (who are now transitioning earlier in life, but not necessarily in higher numbers than we observe trans people in the wider population). This has (like the Wakefield hoax) resulted in newspapers driving a huge moral panic driven by claims of an “exponential rise in trans kids”, which has not been similarly balanced on the other hand by the evidence that although the age of transition has fallen, the numbers for those referred to the GIC have stabilised and even slightly declined within a few years. People need to be informed as early as possible so that they are less vulnerable to being exploited by the expanding array of “parent support groups” promoting conversion practices.
Another important bedrock is the availability of support with healing and compensation for victims: Harms done by conversion therapy are serious. These are estimated to result in a life long doubling of suicide risk, and can cause victims to develop or exacerbate depression, eating disorders, self harm, and PTSD symptoms, and that’s alongside primary harms of conversion practices which may involve sexual or physical violence, and the fact that where money is involved, these practices are extorting funds by selling services to people that do not work and that they do not need, making it fraudulent, as well as personally harmful.
Beyond that, practices like these should become a serious liability to any institution that practices, promotes, or organises them or allows people to do this with its resources and trust. Charities and religious organisations engaged in conversion practices should have their charitable status at risk. Clinical conversion practitioners should risk their license to practice, their professional registration or both. Systems in general which serve to place trust and power in the hands of individuals must be engineered so as to withdraw that power from those who use it harmfully. In the UK there is an extent to which some of this is technically in place — in the form of the MOU2 — but nevertheless this regulation itself is under attack, and most of the professional bodies who are signatories to it are quick to exonerate their colleagues and anxious to avoid establishing serious plans to actually enact disciplinary proceedings on people associated with conversion therapy, leading to a growing number of clinicians connected with anti-LGBT campaigning bodies to open call for psychiatry to replace accepting trans people’s identities with no real pushback professionally.
It’s that last part that really makes me concerned that criminal penalties will be a bust in practice as well, because there are no short cuts to winning the public conversation happening about conversion therapy bans in the UK. If we lose that people will continue to make excuses for conversion therapy and be motivated to do so by the fact that not doing so means a potential prison sentence from someone they believe to being doing necessary therapeutic work.
