If they do not affirm

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July 8, 2026

The government has published a draft bill to ban “conversion practices”.

While there are improvements on previous drafts of this law, it remains an attempt to shift “Stonewall Law” – now slowly being driven out of workplaces and services – into homes and classrooms.

It puts parents, therapists, teachers and partners at risk of being subjected to investigation if they do not affirm that someone is “male” or “female “ (or both, or neither) based on their personal declaration rather than their biology.

Um. That’s an incredibly low bar for being investigated. Terrifyingly low.

It also hands the power of private prosecution to organisations like the Good Law Project and Nancy Kelley’s Trans Solidarity Alliance.

So Jolyon Maugham will be empowered to punish people for not pretending a man is a woman.

The bill defines “conversion practice” as any conduct with the intention of causing the individual to have or not have (or to believe that they have or do not have) a particular sexual orientation or transgender identity. The question of whether conduct amounts to an abuse is a question of fact “to be determined by reference to all the circumstances of the case”.

Hey you know what else is a question of fact? The whole idea that men can be women. The relevant fact is that they cannot. Many other relevant facts flow from this one. Will the courts be keeping that in mind?

The offence of carrying out an abusive conversion practice on an individual is defined in terms of causing “serious harm” to the individual’s physical or mental health, or “serious alarm or distress to the individual which has a substantial adverse effect on their usual day-to-day activities”. This could potentially mean a wife telling her husband to stop wearing her clothes, parents telling a child they will not pay for puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones, or a school insisting on referring to all children accurately as girls or boys, in line with its safeguarding responsibilities.

And the potential is all the greater because of years of catastrophizing about “transphobia” and genner idenniny.

Comments

10 responses to “If they do not affirm”

Your Name’s not Bruce?

Jul 8, 2026 11:50 AM

The bill defines “conversion practice” as any conduct with the intention of causing the individual to have or not have (or to believe that they have or do not have) a particular sexual orientation or transgender identity.

By this standard, convincing ANYONE that they have a “gender identity” at all should count as “conversion practice.” And since “gender identity” is in fact bullshit, that would indeed be correct. Can we start the prosecutions now, please?
Mike B

Jul 8, 2026 11:55 AM

“a particular sexual orientation or transgender identity”

They are not the same, so fuck the law.

I do not even need to be “”Afffermed”” in my sexual orientation, so no thank you.
Sumi

Jul 8, 2026 12:11 PM

So, it’ll now be conversion practice to tell gender non-conforming gay kids that they’re really trans and should be medically sterilized through gender affirming care? Things ought to get interesting at the NHS.
Artymorty

Jul 8, 2026 3:33 PM

The problem, as I see it, is the “identity” part of “gender identity”.

The debate focuses so much around the word “gender”, that “identity” tends to slip right under the radar. Which is weird when you think about it, because the gender part really isn’t an issue.

Debates about gender expression are long gone. No one cares anymore about women wearing pants and not shaving their arm and leg hair, or men wearing blouses and painting their fingernails, or whatever. The difference between the past and the present is that now we’ve hitched people’s fluid and diverse modes of personal “gender expression” to a rigid collection of distinct, sacred & holy “gender identity” categories.

(To boot, we then convinced everyone that some of these categories necessitate supposedly life-saving medical “treatments”, and then we declared that no one is allowed to question anyone’s vibes about their magic “identity” categories.)

In the sense that “gender identities” are socially constructed categories whose relevance is derived from a cultural system of belief rather than any material basis of distinction — the difference between a man and a “trans woman” is purely a matter of tribal/identitarian feelings — they have a lot in common with the religious/cultural/ethnic concept of castes.

And we’ve always known that it’s a bad idea to mix such concepts with legislation.

The UK has explicitly grappled with this issue over the past decade and a half. Discrimination against people based on their perceived “caste” is obviously bad and should be prohibited by law. But the problem is, by explicitly naming caste as a freestanding protected characteristic, the government risks making the category of caste look official, stable, and administratively real.

Following a landmark 2014 employment tribunal over caste discrimination — Chandhok & Anor v. Tirkey — Parliament undertook a public consultation to determine if caste should be addressed solely through case-law under the existing anti-race and anti-religion discrimination framework, or if it should instead be promoted to its own explicit legal protection category within the UK’s definitive anti-discrimination guidebook, the one we’re all familiar with by now: the Equality Act 2010.

In 2018, the results of the consultation were released, and the response was overwhelmingly opposed to reifying “caste” as a legislatively salient category separate from existing case-law surrouding ethnic, religious, and racial discrimination. The reasons cited were that caste is almost impossible to define, and that naming it might perversely incentivize employers, universities, landlords, and other agencies to explicitly ask people about their caste status.

(Arguments about caste are taking place across North America, too. For one example, in 2023, California Governor Gavin Newsom vetoed legislation that attempted to add caste as an explicit protected characteristic, and he cited more-or-less the same reasons for opposing it.)

Another argument for keeping caste out of legislation is that it essentially associates South Asians with the caste system whether they like it or not. Which is why the overwhelming majority of Hindus and South Asians who responded to the UK consultation opposed reifying it in the language of law.

Many LGB people feel exactly the same way about the government reifying “gender identity” in law: it’s a hazy concept that is strongly associated with us, but which many of us don’t want to be forcibly associated with. Gays who oppose the whole gender identity ideology are in many ways a lot like Hindus living in the UK who oppose the caste system: they are a subgroup within a minority group, who are at risk of discrimination because the majority fails to recognize and protect them.

There’s one big difference between caste and gender identity, though: “gender identity” proponents want to see the label reified in law beacuse it confers advantages to its believers at the expense of everyone else — they benefit from it. There is a sizeable activist group who want their identity to be forced on everyone else. Whereas with caste, it’s the opposite: there is a sizeable activist group who want out of the discrimination they face because caste is imposed on them against their wishes. It’s lower castes who have it imposed on them, whereas with gender activists, it’s everyone else, ordinary men and women not involved in gender world and just trying to go about their business, who end up losing their rights.

The draft bill to “ban conversion therapy practices” is a trojan horse campaign, mounted by extremist “gender identity” true believers, whose primary objective is to insert their mystical concept of gender identity into law, thereby reifying it and making it “official” and “real”, and forcing everyone else in the country to play along with their personal way of dividing and organizing and categorizing and grouping society.

Those who oppose this legislation should be bringing forward the parallels with caste legislation, and driving home the point that this is a quasi-religious activist group that is motivated to impose its own discriminatory worldview on everyone else.
Ophelia Benson

Jul 8, 2026 4:22 PM

Brilliant comment.
Sumi

Jul 8, 2026 6:15 PM

Canada criminalized sexual orientation and gender identity conversion therapy in January 2022. Causing another person to undergo conversion therapy is a criminal offence punishable by up to 5 years in prison. Promoting, advertising or profiting off conversion therapy is punishable by up to 2 years in prison.

More than four years later, a search of two legal search engines turns up no cases on point. Yet, when parliament passed the law by unanimous consent we were told that conversion therapy was a social ill so pressing that only criminalization was appropriate. So, what happened to the anticipated prosecutions? Was this nothing more than a heavy-handed way of getting therapists to adopt an affirmation-only approach to counselling?
Ophelia Benson

Jul 8, 2026 6:43 PM

If the shoe fits…
Artymorty

Jul 8, 2026 7:41 PM

I fleshed this comment out into a full-blown essay at my Substack. And I stole your choice of image, Ophelia!

(Thank you for the guest post, and for the image inspo.)

https://artymorty.substack.com/p/the-uk-conversion-therapy-ban-caste
Ophelia Benson

Jul 9, 2026 3:52 AM

Great essay.
maddog1129

Jul 9, 2026 3:24 PM

The bill defines “conversion practice” as any conduct with the intention of causing the individual to have or not have (or to believe that they have or do not have) a particular sexual orientation or transgender identity.

If you look at it a certain way, the sex realists should not have anything to fear from this statute. The key thing to remember is that sex is different and separate from “gender” or “gender identity.” The genderists scream at us all the time that we’re the ones mixing everything up, when in fact they are the ones constantly and conveniently equivocating sex and gender.

Mostly, nobody is interested in gay conversion any more, except (1) the traditional religionists who think homosexuality is sinful, and (2) now, the transgenderists who are persuading gay kids that they are not really gay, but transgender, born in the wrong body.

The transgenderists had better watch out, lest conversion therapy charges be levelled against them, and prosecution brought by intervening busybodies.

Anyhow, on the “gay conversion” prong, the sex realists shouldn’t have anything to worry about, because we don’t care if someone is gay, and we are not interested in talking anyone into or out of being gay.

On the transgender prong, the sex realists also should generally not have anything to worry about, because, again, we don’t care about the fantasies in their heads. What we care about is the reality of sex. If we correctly-sex a transgender person, we don’t have any “intention of causing them to have or not have … a gender identity.” They can claim whatever gender identity they want. That’s not important to us. Sex is what is important in a lot of contexts, and we are only talking about sex. We are only guarding against people lying about their sex.

Having “G” gender identity does not give that person license to lie about their sex. That’s our issue, not whether or not someone claims a gender identity.