Background
This report draws on in-depth interviews with 30 mental-health professionals, many with long experience of working with gender-distressed and trans-identifying clients, regarding the government’s draft Conversion Practices Bill, which was published on 25th June 2026 and moves to pre-legislative scrutiny in October 2026.
The bill covers both sexual orientation and transgender identity, but this report focuses on the latter. It shows that the bill has little to do with what most people understand by conversion practices, which are already unlawful. Instead it would criminalise therapeutic and personal conversations relating to transgender identity, scientific reality and healthy child development, including within families, when they are perceived by someone with a transgender identity, or by individuals or organisations acting on their behalf, to cause such an individual distress.
A person found guilty of a criminal offence could receive a fine, a prison term of up to five years or both. Criminal-offence provisions in the bill are presented alongside “conversion practice protection orders”. These would require a lower standard of proof than the criminal standards. There is little practical limit on them. Breaching a protection order could also result in a fine, imprisonment for up to two years or both.
The bill has an exemption for healthcare professionals unless they “act in a way that falls far below the standards reasonably expected of a person in their position”. Interviewees fear that these poorly defined standards will be set or informed by professional bodies and regulators. Many of these organisations have already adopted the position that affirmation should be used in place of ordinary psychotherapy with clients who identify as transgender. Interviewees did not trust this supposed safeguard to protect them from unreasonable or vexatious complaints.
The bill contains no exemption for any other personal or professional group such as parents, other family members, friends, teachers, social workers, researchers or legal professionals. Representatives of organisations (“bodies corporate and unincorporated bodies”) could also be found guilty of relevant offences.
The bill defines a conversion practice as conduct carried out with the intention of causing an individual to have or not have, or to believe that they have or do not have, a transgender identity or particular transgender identity.
An “abusive conversion practice” is defined as a conversion practice that causes “(a) serious harm to the individual’s physical or mental health, or (b) serious alarm or distress to the individual which has a substantial adverse effect on their usual day-to-day activities”.
The definition of “transgender identity” includes, but is not limited to, circumstances in which “(a) the individual is undergoing, is proposing to undergo or has undergone the process of gender reassignment, (b) the individual is transsexual, (c) the individual identifies as neither male nor female or as not solely male or female”.
https://sex-matters.org/posts/updates/criminalising-conversations/
NB This is only the introduction!
Sex Matters have published quite a long and detailed report which needs to be read in full.