Every example of abuse the UK Government gives for its draft Conversion Practices Bill is already a crime. Beatings, sexual assault, electric shocks and threats are all illegal now.1
So the journalist Sonia Sodha has asked the obvious question, and that no one from the UK government has answered it: what does this Bill make a crime that is not a crime already?2
The Real Purpose: A law that protects an idea
The answer to Sodha’s question reveals why this Bill exists. It exists to protect an ideology about identity. One where who you are is whatever you declare it to be, and in which refusing to accept that declaration by someone is a harm that the state must punish.
On paper, the Bill forbids pressure in either direction, towards an identity or away from it. In practice, it can see and agree to only one. It measures harm by “serious alarm or distress”, and a young person who is told what she already wants to hear is rarely distressed by it. A young person who is asked to wait, or to question, often is. So the only people safe under this law are those who already agree with it. Pressure to question it can be treated as abuse.
We can see a major belief underlying the Bill in what the Bill leaves out. It uses the term “body/bodies” sixteen times, and not once does it mean a human body. Every use of body is for a company, a partnership or a board of trustees. And the words religion, belief, parent, child and freedom never appear at all.
A law reveals how its authors define a human being through both what it mentions and what it omits. This draft law treats a disembodied self as the fundamental basis of identity—rendering the physical body so malleable, secondary, and unnecessary to true identity that it can be ignored completely.
A Law to Protect Borrowed Feelings
That idea runs against almost everything human beings have believed about themselves. For most of history, in most cultures, a person’s identity was received: from a physical body, a family, a people and, for most of humanity, from God.
What this Bill protects instead is a feeling about who we might be. And feelings, as anyone who has been fourteen will remember, come and go.
Often the feeling is not even our own. The Government’s own review of gender services, led by Dr Hilary Cass, found that greater acceptance could not explain the sudden rise in young people, most of them teenage girls, questioning their sex. It pointed instead to a mix of influences, among them the online world, widespread distress and the confusion of emerging sexuality.3
The philosopher Kathleen Stock puts the problem more bluntly: “nobody can tell now whether a current identity will stick; not even its owner”, least of all when she is young.4
So the Bill does not protect young people from being influenced. It protects one particular influence from all others.
No Debate: A slogan written into law and family life
You need not look far to see where this idea comes from. Stonewall called the Bill’s publication “a momentous step forward”, and it has led the campaign for this ban alongside the Ban Conversion Practices coalition.5 For years it has said that trans people’s existence “is not up for debate”, while insisting that it still debates policy.6
But if identity is determined entirely by self-declaration, the line between questioning a policy and questioning a person's existence disappears. Under that view, asking whether a fourteen-year-old girl is truly a boy becomes an attack on her very existence—and through this Bill, the demand for "no debate" reaches all the way into the family home.
Stonewall’s own former chief executive, Ben Summerskill, has called the Bill a mistake: “If you decline even to enter a debate, you rarely win it.”7 This Bill would settle any debate without having it, by writing “no debate” into law.
The Oldest Act of Love: Now a possible crime
Think about who the Bill impacts the most. A young person is unsure who they are, and the reasons could be anything: the upheaval of puberty, anxiety, autism, a friendship group, a social media feed full of other people’s stories.
A parent, a pastor or a priest gently suggests that something about who they are has been given, written into their body, their past, family, faith and story, and is worth listening to. If that suggestion causes distress, if the people encouraging the young person into their new identity name those conversations as distress, a jury may be asked whether it was abuse, and a court may forbid it in advance.
The barrister Akua Reindorf gives a simple example. A mother who stops her daughter’s pocket money to keep her from buying a breast binder could, she argues, face up to five years in prison.8 Under this Bill, the oldest act of love we have, of telling a child that who they are is a gift, could be treated as a crime. That is not merely perverse.
It is wicked.
Not Just Christians: Who else is refusing it
This is not a peculiarly Christian objection. Stock and Cass quoted above have no church or faith to defend.
The campaign group Sex Matters interviewed thirty mental-health professionals who work with gender-distressed young people, and concluded that the Bill would silence therapists and divide families.9 Cass herself warned that helping a child live as the opposite sex is “an active intervention”, and not a neutral act.10 The LGB Alliance speaks for lesbians, gay men and bisexuals. It fears that children who would have grown up gay will be “converted by stealth”.11
This is where the internal logic of the draft Conversion Practices Bill ultimately leads: a profound double standard in who is allowed to guide a young person. First, the Bill allows adolescents—who do not yet know who they are—to be told who they might be, against the foundation of everything they were ever given, including biology. Crucially, however, this permission goes only in one direction. Only those suggesting novel, self-made identities are legally free to shape a young person’s self-understanding.
Second, the moment that permissible novel suggestion takes hold, the law becomes its enabler, protector and enforcer and a threat to anyone who offers another view. By criminalising counsel and even conversations that seek to reconnect a teenager with their physical body and/or heritage, the Bill effectively treats biology, family, religion, and tradition as intrinsically abusive. Instead of protecting young people from coercion, it codifies a legal monopoly—shielding the promotion of self-created identities while turning a child's foundational ties into something the state must police.
Here is my conviction. Because that idea is the Bill’s purpose rather than a slip in its drafting, no amendment can mend it.
It should be withdrawn. 12
Many people pressing for this Bill want to protect people they love. But you do not protect people by making a crime of the very questions, and access to understanding identity that might help them. The abuses they rightly fear are already against the law.
A Cat, and a Creed: Enforcement of a fiction
If identity is whatever you declare it to be, where does it stop? In 2023, a teacher at Rye College in East Sussex was recorded telling Year 8 pupils that “how you identify is up to you.” When one girl argued that identity is tied to the sex organs you are born with, the teacher called her view “despicable”—an exchange the press reported was sparked by a classmate identifying as a cat.13
The school later denied that any pupil identified as an animal—and perhaps none did. Yet the teacher’s logic leaves her with no answer to a child who claims, “I am a cat.” This Bill shares that same flawed premise: its list of gender identities is “not limited to” the examples it names, setting no boundary on where the list should stop.
Kathleen Stock argues that a statement like “trans women are women” is best understood as a fiction a person may choose to immerse themselves in, much as we lose ourselves in a play or a game.14 People are free to do that. The trouble begins when everyone else is not only required to play along, but is forced to by law.
A fiction we choose is a game. A fiction we are made to comply with and speak is a creed.
That is already happening. In 2023, a maths teacher, Joshua Sutcliffe, was banned from the profession, partly for not using a pupil’s chosen pronouns, and the High Court upheld the ban the following year.15 This Bill will see the same prosecutions enter the home. The Free Speech Union warns that under this Bill parents could be prosecuted for misgendering their own children.16
A new law that measures harm by distress means that the words a parent uses at home become evidence. That should chill every one of us, whatever we believe. This bill lets admits only one answer - a disputed question on identity - yet punishes all others, and offers no safeguards.
This Bill is an identity creed with penalties for non-belief attached.
The Fragile Self: Why it needs a law to survive
Once detached from the body, the self has nothing objective left to stand on. Philosopher Charles Taylor charted how the modern West came to believe that everyone has an authentic inner self that depends on outside validation to survive. As early as 1994, he foresaw the logic of the 2026 Bill, noting how the modern self views a lack of recognition as something that “can inflict harm, can be a form of oppression.”17
Let’s follow the logic. If who I am rests on nothing but my own self-declaration, only other people’s agreement can sustain my identity. A question about my identity then feels like an attack on my very existence, and an attack on someone’s existence becomes something we want the law to stop. How ironic. An identity that cannot survive questions has to be protected by law from questions.
The Bill explicitly exempts legitimate healthcare, but counsellors face substantial legal, regulatory, and professional vulnerability due to vague statutory wording. And the Bill leaves parents and priests completely exposed.18 It treats distress as proof of harm, as though upset and offence could tell you whether you were being hurt or healed.
Anyone whose sense of self depends on other people’s agreement lives with a particular kind of fear, and many young people carry it. And this is deeply and utterly tragic.
Created Without a Creator
At every Catholic infant baptism, the priest begins with a question to the parents: “What name do you give your child?” They answer, and then he traces a cross on the child’s forehead and says, “I claim you for Christ our Saviour by the sign of his cross.” 19 The child is named by those who love her, and claimed by the God who made her. The family and friends who stand at the font are made suspects by this Bill. The former president of Ireland and canon lawyer Mary McAleese has recently claimed and argued that infant baptism is a breach of human rights and a form of abuse.20
Underneath everything I have outlined above is something older than any law, and is about the nature of human beings. The first temptation in Scripture was not to deny that God exists. It was to stop receiving identity from him: “you will be like God” (Genesis 3:5). This Bill writes that temptation into a legal statute. It separates the creature from the Creator, and then asks the state to keep them apart.
To be a created creature is to receive. We did not bring ourselves into existence, and we do not hold ourselves in it for a single moment.
16 For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him.17 He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. - Colossians 1
Only one being in Scripture names himself. When Moses asks God his name, God answers, “I am who I am” (Exodus 3:14). Everyone else is named by the only one who can name himself:
But now, this is what the Lord says ... “Do not fear, for I have redeemed you; I have summoned you by name; you are mine.” (Isaiah 43:1)
Even when Scripture renames people- Abram as Abraham, Jacob as Israel, Simon as Peter- it is God who gives the new name, and the name tells them what he is making of them. Christians believe in transformation more than anyone. We simply believe it is received, not self-made.
A law that makes self-declaration, self-creation, the foundation of identity hands the creature an identity that belongs to God alone.
Pope Benedict XVI saw where this leads. When the freedom to be creative becomes the freedom to create oneself, he warned, “the Maker himself is denied”, and the human being is stripped of his dignity as a creature.21 The Vatican’s declaration Dignitas Infinita calls self-determination cut loose from the gift of life “a concession to the age-old temptation to make oneself God”.22
And Augustine knew why a self-made self never settles:
You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.23
The instability so many people, especially young people, feel is not a flaw peculiar to them. It is the condition of every heart that has been told to find its rest in itself.
That is why a received identity can bear to be questioned. If God gave me who I am, it does not need your agreement to survive, or even mine on a bad day. Paul tells the Colossians that their life “is now hidden with Christ in God” (Colossians 3:3). A life hidden there can be misunderstood, argued with, even mocked, and still be fully owned.
A self we have made for ourselves has nowhere to hide but behind a law.
That is why the draft Conversion Practices Bill’s borrowed word should trouble us greatly. Conversion, the turning of the whole person towards the God who made it, is simply the Christian life.
You Disagree: Three things I want you to know
If you think I have misread the Bill, I would be grateful to know where. Please do read the Bill, as the article is about it.
If this reads to you as transphobic, I understand why the word comes to mind so quickly, because many trans people have met contempt, some of it from Christians. But I am writing from neither fear nor hatred. I am arguing about what a person is, what a law should forbid, and what it should not.
If you fear I do not care, I can only say that care is why I wrote this. I have sat as a pastor for twenty-five years with people in anguish about their bodies, and I do not doubt their pain. To accompany someone is not always to agree with them. It is to care, love and stay.
The UK Government’s examples are listed in Office for Equality and Opportunity, Conversion Practices Draft Bill: Explanatory Notes, updated 30 June 2026, https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/draft-conversion-practices-bill/explanatory-notes. The draft Bill itself is CP 1604 (June 2026), https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/draft-conversion-practices-bill.
Sonia Sodha, “The conversion practices bill: vibes-based legislating”, https://soniasodha.substack.com/p/the-conversion-practices-bill-vibes.
Independent Review of Gender Identity Services for Children and Young People (Cass Review), Final Report, 10 April 2024.
Kathleen Stock, "The conversion paradox", UnHerd, 3 July 2026, https://unherd.com/2026/07/the-conversion-paradox/.
Stonewall, "Government finally publishes long overdue draft Bill to ban conversion practices", 25 June 2026, https://www.stonewall.org.uk/news/government-finally-publishes-long-overdue-draft-bill-to-ban-conversion-practices; on Stonewall's leadership of the Ban Conversion Practices coalition, see https://www.stonewall.org.uk/news/government-fails-to-meet-timeline-to-ban-conversion-practices.
Stonewall, "Trans equality", including "The background to the 'No Debate' slogan", https://www.stonewall.org.uk/resources/lgbtq-hubs/trans-hub/trans-equality.
Ben Summerskill, letter to The Guardian, 30 April 2025, https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/apr/30/stonewall-policy-of-no-debate-on-trans-rights-was-a-mistake.
Akua Reindorf, “The gender conversion ban could land parents like you in prison”, The Spectator Australia, 3 November 2026, https://www.spectator.com.au/?p=10946968.
Sex Matters, report drawing on interviews with thirty mental-health professionals, October 2026, https://sex-matters.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/Criminalising-conversations.pdf.
Cass Review, Interim Report (2022), reaffirmed in the Final Report (April 2024); see Sex Matters’ summary, https://sex-matters.org/?p=41745.
LGB Alliance campaign statement, quoted in Attitude, https://www.attitude.co.uk/news/lgb-alliance-to-lobby-mps-against-conversion-practices-bill-530968/.
The committee examining the Bill is taking written evidence until 16 November.
"The cat self-identity row gripping an East Sussex school", The Week, June 2023, https://theweek.com/news/education/961351/the-cat-self-identity-row-gripping-an-east-sussex-school; for the school's statement, see Schools Week, https://schoolsweek.co.uk/gender-row-school-none-of-our-pupils-identify-as-a-cat/.
Kathleen Stock, Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism (London: Fleet, 2021).
Sutcliffe v Secretary of State for Education (High Court, 2024); see "Court upholds ban on Christian teacher who refused to use pupil's preferred pronouns", Christian Today, https://www.christiantoday.com/article/court.upholds.ban.on.christian.teacher.who.refused.to.use.pupils.preferred.pronouns/141969.htm.
"'Abuse' threshold in new conversion therapy bill worries free speech campaigners in the UK", Brussels Signal, July 2026, https://brusselssignal.eu/2026/07/abuse-threshold-in-new-conversion-therapy-bill-worries-free-speech-campaigners-in-the-uk/.
Charles Taylor, "The Politics of Recognition", in Amy Gutmann (ed.), Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 25.
On the health-care exemption, see the Explanatory Notes; the double standard is drawn out by Revd Dr Mark Bratton in Psephizo, 2 July 2026, https://www.psephizo.com/life-ministry/the-conversion-practices-draft-bill-right-and-helpful-or-fatally-flawed/.
The Order of Baptism of Children, Reception of the Children.
https://www.thetimes.com/world/ireland-world/article/mary-mcaleese-ban-infant-baptism-catholic-church-t62s03g38
Benedict XVI, Christmas address to the Roman Curia, 21 December 2012, https://www.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/speeches/2012/december/documents/hf_ben-xvi_spe_20121221_auguri-curia.html.
Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, Dignitas Infinita (2024), para. 57.
Augustine, Confessions I.1, trans. E. B. Pusey (1838).