The conversion therapy bills proposed for England and Wales, and separately for Northern Ireland, explicitly exclude transgender people from their protections. This means that practices aimed at changing or suppressing a person's gender identity remain legal, while the same practices applied to sexual orientation are banned. That is discrimination written into the law itself.
What is conversion therapy, and why does it matter here?
Conversion therapy is a broad term for any attempt to change, suppress, or "cure" a person's sexual orientation or gender identity. It covers a wide range of practices: prolonged prayer sessions and religious rituals designed to make someone straight or cisgender, talking therapies that treat being trans as a pathology to be resolved, and in more extreme cases, coercive interventions that have been widely documented as psychologically harmful. The people most often subjected to it are young, vulnerable, and frequently dependent on the adults around them. The harms are serious and well-evidenced: depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress, and in some cases suicide.
The consensus among major health organisations is clear. Conversion therapy does not work, it causes harm, and it should be prohibited. That consensus covers gender identity as well as sexual orientation. The two are not the same thing, but the logic is identical: you cannot and should not try to coerce a person out of who they are.
What do the UK bills actually say?
The bills proposed for England and Wales and for Northern Ireland both contain an explicit carve-out. They ban conversion practices aimed at changing sexual orientation. They do not extend that protection to gender identity. This is not an accident, and it is not a gap in drafting. It is a deliberate political choice made under pressure from groups who argue that "trans" requires a different approach, that questions of gender identity are more contested, or that protecting trans people from conversion practices might somehow compromise something else.
None of those arguments hold up when you look at them directly. The practices are the same. The harm is the same. The vulnerability of the people subjected to them is the same. And yet the law, as proposed, treats a gay teenager and a trans teenager entirely differently: the gay teenager is protected, the trans teenager is not.
Scotland's different position
It is worth noting that Scotland has taken a different approach. The Scottish Government has consistently indicated that any conversion therapy ban it brings forward would cover both sexual orientation and gender identity. Scotland is not bound by the England and Wales bill, and its inclusion of trans people reflects a more coherent reading of what equality actually means. That does not resolve the situation for trans people in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland, but it does demonstrate that the exclusion elsewhere is a political choice rather than a legal inevitability.
Why is the exclusion discriminatory?
Some people argue that the exclusion is a reasonable precaution: that questions around gender identity are more complex, that the law should not impede exploratory therapy, or that protecting trans people in the same way as LGB people would prevent legitimate clinical practice. I want to take each of those apart, because they sound reasonable only if you don't examine them closely.
The argument about complexity does not hold. Gender identity is not more philosophically complex than sexual orientation when you are in a room with a therapist who is trying to convince you that you are not really trans. That experience is not complex. It is coercive. It causes harm. And the law should prevent it.
The argument about exploratory therapy is a red herring, and a cynical one. Good exploratory therapy, the kind that helps a person understand themselves at their own pace and in their own direction, does not try to steer someone towards a particular identity. No reputable clinician or therapist argues that conversion practices are a form of exploration. What they actually are is an attempt to achieve a predetermined outcome: to stop someone being trans. That is what the ban should prohibit, and protecting trans people from it would not touch legitimate therapeutic practice for a moment.
The argument that including trans people would somehow compromise something else is the most telling of all, because it never quite specifies what that something else is. It gestures at women's spaces, at safeguarding, at parental rights, but it never makes a coherent case for why protecting a trans teenager from being subjected to coercive practices would threaten any of those things. It is a political objection presented as a principled one.
What this means for trans people now
Right now, in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland, a trans person can be subjected to practices that would be illegal if they were gay. A religious leader can run a programme aimed at convincing a trans young person that God made them the gender they were assigned at birth, and that their trans identity is sinful and wrong. A therapist can conduct sessions whose explicit goal is to stop someone from transitioning. A parent can send their child to residential camps or programmes designed to eliminate their gender identity. And under the proposed bills, none of that is prohibited.
That is not a neutral policy position. It is an active choice to leave a group of people without protection that their peers have. And the group it leaves unprotected is already among the most marginalised in the country: trans people face higher rates of mental health crisis, higher rates of family rejection, and, particularly among trans young people, higher rates of suicidal ideation than almost any other group. Choosing not to protect them from a practice that causes serious psychological harm is not caution. It is a decision with consequences.
The international context
The UK is not alone in this struggle, but it is behind many comparable countries. Several jurisdictions have passed bans that cover both sexual orientation and gender identity without the sky falling in. Canada, France, Albania, Greece, and New Zealand have all moved in that direction. The arguments used to exclude trans people in the UK were used elsewhere too, and they were shown to be unfounded. The result in those countries was not the collapse of exploratory therapy or the erosion of parental rights. It was simply that trans people got the same protection as everyone else.
The UK's failure to include trans people is not a reflection of good policymaking. It is a reflection of a political moment in which trans people have been placed at the centre of a culture war, and the cost of that culture war is being paid by real people subjected to real harm.
What needs to happen
The bills need to be amended before they become law. The fix is not complicated: include gender identity alongside sexual orientation. That is it. The protections for sexual orientation can remain exactly as they are. Trans people simply need to be brought inside the same framework.
If the bills pass without that amendment, the damage is not only practical. It is symbolic. It tells every trans person in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland that Parliament looked at the harm being done to them and decided it was acceptable. That message lands, and it lands hard, in communities where trust in institutions is already thin.
People tell me, over and over, that what trans people need most is simply to be treated the same. Not special treatment, not exemptions, not a different set of rules. The same protection under the same law. The conversion therapy bills, as currently drafted, refuse them even that.
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