Labour’s Conversion Practices Bill is ‘TERRIFYING for p… — Transcript

Barrister Dennis Kavanagh warns Labour's Conversion Practices Bill criminalizes parents and teachers over transgender identity discussions, risking family separations.

Key Takeaways

The bill criminalizes a wide range of conduct related to transgender identity, beyond just abusive practices.
Parents and teachers face potential prosecution for normal parenting or educational decisions about gender identity.
Social services may intervene in families if criminal cases arise under the bill, risking child removal.
The bill's broad language risks infringing on human rights and free speech protections.
There is significant concern that the bill enforces ideological conformity and harms family relationships.

Summary

The Labour party's draft Conversion Practices Bill proposes up to five years imprisonment for conversion practices related to transgender identity or treatment.
The bill's clause one criminalizes any conduct intended to change a transgender identity, not limited to abusive behavior as ministers claim.
Parents and teachers could be prosecuted for actions like refusing puberty blockers or not using preferred pronouns under the bill's broad definitions.
The bill extends legal protection to transgender and non-binary identities, incorporating them into law under the Equality Act and beyond.
Concerns exist that the bill could criminalize normal parenting decisions and lead to social services intervening or removing children.
Clause two's harm threshold includes serious alarm or distress, which could be triggered by typical parental decisions, making prosecution likely.
The bill is criticized as poorly drafted, potentially non-compliant with human rights and free speech protections.
The discussion highlights fears that the bill could turn criminal courts into battlegrounds over gender ideology, harming families.
The video includes a sponsor message promoting Private Internet Access VPN for online privacy and security.
Experts warn the bill could have chilling effects on healthcare, counseling, and religious institutions related to gender identity.

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Under landmark new proposals, parents, teachers, and doctors could face up to five years in prison if they are found to have engaged in conversion practices relating to transgender identity or treatment. Campaigners argue that the draft conversion practices bill could

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risk criminalizing conversations, with concerns it may penalize parents and teachers for discussing or questioning a child's decision to pursue gender-related medical treatment. Well, joining me now to discuss this is the barrister Dennis Kavanagh. Welcome to the show. Thank you very much,

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Dennis. This bill has been around for a long time since sort of treason May days.

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It's now actually getting closer to reality.

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Yeah, it's terrifying. This could be Labour's Section 28, Josh. This is pure Stonewall law. Clause one of the bill is one of the widest clauses I've seen in a criminal statute. It says a

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person is guilty if they engage in any conduct, just any conduct at all. Not abusive conduct. Ministers have been lying about this and saying it has to be abusive. Clause one doesn't say that.

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Any conduct if they have an intention of changing what the bill calls a transgender identity. And the minister who promoted this bill, Olivia Bailey, who posted a picture, which is it them lying or is it them just not

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understanding their own bill? Who knows? Who knows? I think the ministers are trying to put a spin on it to make out that it'll only catch abusive practices. It's not what the bill says. It says any conduct at all.

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And the minister, Olivia Bailey, who posted a picture of herself with Stonewall and then deleted it from Twitter after the public reaction to it, cited a Gallup report that said if a parent didn't use pronouns or a new name

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for a child, that could count as controlling under the bill. This is terrifying. Absolutely terrifying. We have all sorts of cases, particularly before the family courts, where parents don't agree, for example, about whether or not a child should have irreversible

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medical treatments like puberty blockers or like cross-sex hormones. Now, query under this bill, if you said, "Oh, I'm not going to pay for puberty blockers," would that be economic pressure under the bill, which is criminalized? If you

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said, "I'm not going to use your new pronouns. I'm not going to send you to gender GP," would that be controlling behavior? We think yes, the bill is wide enough to do that because, as I say, while ministers are going out and saying, "Oh,

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it's only abusive conduct. It's only the worst stuff that will be caught," that's not what their own bill says. Clause one says any conduct, and it's so that's wide. But it's also wide in that it sneaks gender identity into law, but it calls it

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transgender identity. And what it does again in clause one, it says a transgender identity is anything that would qualify under the Equality Act, so what we would recognize as the protected characteristic. But then it's quite sneaky. It says, "But it's not limited to

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that." Okay, in addition to that, it says one of the identities it's protecting is someone saying they're neither male nor female.

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So it also sneaks non-binary into law. So it's pure identity politics. It's pure Stonewall. And we can laugh at it because it's quite a badly drafted bill. I don't think it's compliant with human rights. But this is going to be

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terrifying for parents. If a child comes home and says, "I want you to call me they/them," well, according to the minister citing Gallup for support, failure to use pronouns could qualify under the bill. And even if it didn't, frankly,

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even if a jury didn't find you guilty, is this really what the Labour Party want to do? Do they want to drag parents through a criminal prosecution? Do they want to put parenting on trial? Do they want to be known as the government that

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today. Well, isn't it that if there's a criminal case open, then social services have to step in, so there could be other children that would then potentially be taken away from their parents because of this?

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Yeah, that's an excellent point, Josh. And as you probably know, the barrister Sarah Filmore, who is a family law expert, thinks yes, that would happen. And her reasoning is this. A local authority has to act under the

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Children Act where a child is at risk of significant harm. Now, if one parent is accusing the other or if someone at school or a teacher or even if the child is the child themselves, they pass an act

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that turns children against parents, shall we? If they do that and say that someone is committing a criminal offense against them that's causing them harm, which I'll say something about in a moment if I may, then a local

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authority, in Sarah's opinion, would have a duty under statute to intervene to either get a supervision order, which is where the local authority intervenes in the children's life to check what's going on, or a care order, which is where

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you would remove children from the parents. This is mad. And just if I may, circling back to the harm concept, ministers have been saying, "Oh, we're only going to catch serious harm." But if we look at clause two of the bill,

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under you have to cause serious harm, it then says or serious alarm or distress that has a serious substantially adverse effect on a person's day-to-day activities. Now look, if you deny a child puberty blockers, and

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this is very serious. Children are turning up to these clinics and they're desperate for them because they've been told online this is the solution to all their unhappiness. If you denied a teenager puberty blockers in those circumstances, I think it's entirely

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possible that they would say, "I was seriously distressed by that." And you know what? I think I believe them that they probably were seriously distressed. That's enough to trigger this bill. That's enough to land you with, "Well, my son was seriously distressed, my

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8-year-old, because I didn't allow him to go on a sleepover last." Well, why? And how many, how often does saying no, particularly to a teenager, cause serious distress? You know, it's in the essence of parenting that you

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do have to make decisions that are controlling. This bill says we're criminalizing controlling behavior.

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Parents are expected to control children. some aspects of children's life and we call that safeguarding. If you're not controlling the medicine, your child is getting off the dark web, right? As a parent, you're probably failing as a parent. But this bill says

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no, that's controlling behavior. Listen, I think the general public uh might see this go. Oh, the conversion bill. Yes, I think it's bad that uh that gay young men are told that they're they're be they're evil and that they're being

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whipped uh because to sort of get the the sin out of their skin or whatever it is, those kind of things happen. I believe that sort of behavior is already illegal. But what they're doing is they're by putting the sort of TQ plus

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on to the LGB, then they're basically really, as you said, making this more about trans ideology and legitimizing it. This isn't about us as speaking as a gay man, right? Um there was a survey to try and find evidence of um gay

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conversion in the United Kingdom. Um there was also a report by Coventry University that Malcolm Clark has written extensively about. They found three cases in 20 years. And I have to say I do resent as a gay bloke quite

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often the trans activists will take our pain and our history, right? Lesbians have in the past been correctively raped or married off or had their children taken away from them by family courts.

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Gay men like Alan Cheuring were chemically castrated with drugs that we now call puberty blockers which are given to kids. We have a real history of pain here. This has happened to us. But yet again, we're allowed nothing under

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this government. We can't have anything of our own. It has to be transincclusive. And I I need the government to tell me, well, what is transgender conversion? Because if my child comes home and I think she's a lesbian, for example, and she says,

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actually, dad, I want to cut my breasts off and I want cross- sex hormones. And if I say to my child, look, I want you to grow up to be a happy lesbian, right?

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I don't want you to be a lifelong medical patient. Am I then guilty of committing any act um with an intention to change her quote transgender identity? I think I could be at risk under this act. And you can see, can't

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you, that we know that in the 2012 patient survey at the Tavvertock, 80 to 90% of the kids there with samesex attracted, so either gay, lesbian, or by identifying, 30% were autistic. We shouldn't forget how this affects autistic um children in all of this.

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What's going on at the Tavver? What went on at the Tavvertock in my opinion was gay conversion therapy. And as I think I've said to you before, that was the view of lots of the staff there. The Times famously reported there was a dark

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joke among Tavvertock staff. Soon there will be no gay people left. It's kind of stuff these guys joke about apparently.

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Um but that sort of stuff. Now, is this government going to remove the last line of defense? When Sonia Applebeby, the head of safeguarding, said, "I'm concerned that most of these kids seem to be just to be simply gay." Or when

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Dr. David Bell said, "I'm concerned that mermaids um are potentially convincing gay kids that they're actually should be a straight impression of the alternative sex." Dr. Hillary Cass, I believe, made a speech just the other day about about

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a 2 and 1/ halfyear-old who was basically their parents kind of uh her parents basically trans this baby, this this toddler.

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Yeah. I mean, we're through the looking glass here, aren't we, Josh? And I understand that Baroness Cass spoke about that as if it was some sort of good thing. Um, some sort of some sort of desirable thing. I haven't watched

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it but see that would be abusive behav to me. That would seem like that's abusive behavior. That's the kind of legislation that government should be writing to prevent happening.

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Yeah. Well, you know what? What sense of coherent identity does does a 2 and 1/2year-old have, Josh? I This is extraordinary. And look at what this bill potentially does. If you did anything to try and stop those parents,

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bang, you're guilty of a conversion practice. So, an act that says that it's going there to defend gay people is actually there to stop gay people being defended. And not only is this act wide in terms of the stat the terms that it

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uses, I want to emphasize this as well. Two points if I may. One, this can be privately prosecuted, right? Um the government could have put in um a fail safe called attorney general's permission to stop organizations like Stonewall and other appalling gender

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organizations going after people. But there's no safeguard here. This could be privately prosecuted by activist groups who can go after people. they could go after parents. And more worryingly, it contains a section further on in in the draft bill that says you can go after

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organizations as well and you could prosecute their directors um or their part members of the partnership or whatever. And I think that's specifically been put in place to go after fantastic organizations that try and look after dransitioners and look

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after children. I think that that is what it is about. And I am deeply, deeply, deeply concerned that what we're going to do is take the gender debate and we're going to drive it into criminal courts. And we're going to turn

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criminal courts into a battleground uh about this ideology and in the process bang up a load of parents, ruin their lives, set their children against their parents. Well, the government you had the you had people from the government

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or and people MPs this week talking about asexuals talking about are they them but they genuinely seem to believe that they were doing something good here. But this is the argument I guess would be that this is a legitimization

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as you said of of this ideology. Yeah. But do you see that there could be any way this bill be this bill could be if if those clauses that you had talked about if they had if they tightened up

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the language is there any way that this bill could be saved that could do that it could do good I just don't see how you make it compliant with human rights Josh because we have an article 8 right yeah which is

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to private and family life right and the way that that is interpreted generally by the family courts because we don't use it much in crime right is to say as long as you aren't harming your children there's a big there's loads of different

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ways to parent your kids. I don't see how you make this act article 8 compliant. I also don't see how you make it compliant with free speech if you're going to go after organizations who are exercising free speech in this area. I

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also don't see how you make it article 5 compliant um which is just quality of law about having definite terms. And and finally, I don't see how you make it compliant with most religions to be honest. Now look, I'm a gay bloke. I'm

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not, you know, I'm not a fan of religions who who have, you know, homophobic views, but at the same time, I'm not a fascist and I'm not going to go into synagogues and mosques and, you know, evangelical churches and tell them

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what to say. Um, this act potentially um is is completely removing um religious freedom and ministers have not told the truth about that. They've said you'd be free to practice your religion, but there's no carve out in this bill for

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religion at all. I don't think they'll be taking mosques to court. Well, well, who who knows? Who knows what hap what happens if there's a report. I mean, I guess you're right.

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You've got to situate this. I mean, I'm they might take other religious institutions as well.

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Yeah, they might do. And I guess if we put this bill into reality, it's more likely one side will be arrested or the other.

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Well, thank you so much. And the interesting other point which you haven't really covered is why are they doing it now? Yeah, that's another point there. Well, big round of applause, please, for Barisa.

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Dennis, have an ask. A government spokesperson said, "Our proposed ban will categorically not prevent parents from choosing how to raise their children. This is about preventing a very specific severe form of abuse, not dictating how a parent or teacher

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supports a child's identity. We are clear that healthcare providers will only be within the scope of the offense and if they fall far below the standards reasonably expected of a person in their position. This will ensure they have

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clarity to work with confidence and mitigates against unintended chilling effects across wider healthcare provisions such as therapeutic or counseling spaces. The critical threshold for conversion practices is abusive acts that aim to change someone's sexual orientation or transgender identity and seriously harms

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the victim. Lay.

Topics:Conversion Practices BillLabour Partytransgender identityparents rightsgender identity lawStonewallhuman rightsfree speechfamily lawLGBTQ+ legislation

Frequently Asked Questions

What does the Conversion Practices Bill propose regarding transgender identity?

The bill proposes criminalizing any conduct intended to change a transgender identity, with penalties up to five years in prison, affecting parents, teachers, and doctors.

Could normal parenting decisions be criminalized under this bill?

Yes, actions such as refusing puberty blockers, not using preferred pronouns, or other controlling behaviors could be prosecuted due to the bill's broad definitions.

What are the concerns about social services involvement under this bill?

If a criminal case is opened, social services may intervene under the Children Act, potentially leading to supervision or care orders and removal of children from parents.

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