Dear Member of the UK Delegation
The Council of Europe PACE Conversion Practices Resolution
We are a collective group of lesbians and gay men, writing to express our deep concern about the forthcoming vote (on 29 January) in the PACE on the resolution tabled by Kate Osborne in the Committee on Equality and Non-Discrimination (and unanimously accepted there, to our dismay), on so-called ‘conversion practices’.
LabourLGB and Lesbian Labour are groups of active Labour Party members, often engaged in cross-party discussions with LGB groups affiliated to other political parties, as this is not a left/right issue. The Supreme Court judgment clarified that, in UK equality law, ‘woman’ means a female and ‘man’ means a male, and we are all relieved at the protection this offers to our sexual orientation.
Opponents of hard-won sex-based rights, wishing to promote transgender views, continually threaten going to Europe as a way of overturning UK law (and commonsense). We fear that Kate Osborne’s proposal is just another example of that approach.
LabourLGB and Lesbian Labour are, of course, implacably opposed to the sort of conversion practices that led to many lesbians and gay men being damaged in the past (Alan Turing is just one UK example). However, all the now well-understood coercive forms of conversion practice are already illegal under UK law. We are also concerned about attempts to dissuade people from acknowledging and expressing their sexual orientation. But the scope of this resolution goes far beyond such actions and poses considerable problems for anyone involved with those claiming a transgender identity – parents, teachers, counsellors and psychotherapists, medical personnel.
Firstly, the resolution conflates ‘gender identity’ and ‘gender expression’ with sexual orientation. These are two entirely different aspects of human experience. You will recall that it was recognised that conflating all non-white people under the umbrella of BAME meant that the specifics of each group were not properly addressed. The same is even more true of the ‘LGBTQI+’ conflation. Sexual orientation is evidenced in the attraction to, and formation of relationships with, people of the same sex. Gender identity, however, has no evidence beyond the assertion of the individual, and the various theories around it are much disputed. This must mean that the approach to the two things should be entirely different.
Secondly, it is sadly true that the ongoing prejudice against lesbians, gay males and bisexuals has led to bullying and harassment, with the result that some will declare themselves (sometimes after persuasion or social media contagion) to be transgender in order that they can love who they love, under a pretence of being heterosexual. There is evidence that 89% of female children and 82% of male children claiming that they are ‘in the wrong body’ are most likely to grow up same-sex attracted. Hence unexamined acceptance of such claims may in fact be damaging.
Thirdly, properly-trained psychotherapists will always probe and question the issues and assertions brought by their clients – not to dissuade them, but to help the client understand themselves better. It would be a dereliction of duty to merely affirm any statement of transgender identity without enabling the individual to think about what has led them to this decision, what it means to them in their life, and what the implications might be. Yet this proposed ban on conversion practices would make it impossible for psychotherapists to do their job properly. This would make any real psychological work impossible, and would be particularly disastrous with children who may, on the basis of a declaration of transgender identity, make decisions affecting the rest of their lives which they cannot fully understand at a young age. Many UK psychotherapists are already avoiding work with clients with a transgender identity because of the impact of the Memorandum of Understanding to which most psychologically-based registers adhere, as evidenced in this article:
There are many other unintended consequences and problems raised by this resolution. There is no doubt that it would be damaging to gay men, lesbians and bisexuals in the UK and across Europe. We, our supporters, and on behalf of our friends in Europe, hope that you will vote against its adoption at PACE.
Yours sincerely
LabourLGB and Lesbian Labour
