Ian Smith, a 56-year-old Cardiff resident, gave evidence this week to the parliamentary committee weighing a UK conversion practices ban, BBC News reported Friday, Nov. 6. “They laid hands on me, spoke in tongues and shouted at the demons they believed were inside me,” Smith told the BBC of a session when he was about 20.
There’s no ban yet, and current law in England and Wales only reaches conversion practices that involve physical violence, threats or injury, the BBC reported. “Ian was subjected to exorcisms because he was gay and was brought to the brink of losing his life,” Nathan Stilwell of Humanists UK told the BBC. “Yet most of what he endured would still not clearly be illegal today. That is why this law matters.”
The government published a draft Conversion Practices Bill on June 25, and a joint committee of six MPs and six peers is scrutinizing it. “No one should be told they have to change who they are, LGBTQ+ people are not broken or in need of ‘fixing’,” Stonewall chief executive Simon Blake said that day.
Ian Smith’s Decade of Attempts to ‘Cure’ Him
Smith grew up in northern England and moved to Newport at 18 to study film, the BBC reported. “I struggled with my sexuality, my sense of gender and what it meant to be a man,” he said.
From 1987 to 1997, he looked for change through churches and support groups in Wales and Bristol, and when nothing worked, he was told he hadn’t prayed enough. “No-one considered that the attempts to ‘cure’ me might be causing the harm,” Smith said. In his diary at the time, he wrote, “The past is to be forgotten, the present tolerated and the future feared.”
He eventually attempted to take his own life and was admitted to a psychiatric unit, where a psychiatrist told him there was nothing wrong with being gay. “I have never forgotten how close I came to losing my life while trying to become someone I wasn’t,” Smith said.
He trained as a counselor and now runs Helpu, a men’s mental health project in Wales that aims to reduce male suicide. “The institutions that were apparently overseeing the kind of practices that I was involved in still exist today,” he told the BBC.
What the UK Conversion Practices Ban Would Make a Crime
The draft targets attempts to change a person’s sexual orientation or transgender identity. Under the bill text, a transgender identity includes identifying “as neither male nor female or as not solely male or female.”
Its main offense covers practices that cause “serious harm to the individual’s physical or mental health,” or serious distress that disrupts daily life. A second offense covers encouraging or assisting an abusive practice outside England and Wales, and courts could issue protection orders. In Crown Court, either offense could bring “imprisonment for a term not exceeding 5 years,” the draft says.
Prayer would only be caught if it were abusive and caused serious harm, ITV News reported in June. “I remain concerned as to whether the ban will fully cover ‘praying the gay away’ and the thorny issue of consent,” campaigner Jayne Ozanne said, according to ITV.
Liberal Democrat MP Tom Gordon flagged another gap in the Commons on Sept. 9. “The Bill talks about ‘abusive’ conversion practices, but that risks implying that non-abusive forms exist, leading to a potential loophole,” he said, according to Hansard. Equalities Minister Simon Lightwood replied that the government is “committed to protecting the dignity and safety of trans people” and is “introducing a full trans-inclusive ban on conversion practices, per our manifesto.”
“Transgender respondents were much more likely to report having been subjected to conversion practices (43 per cent),” the government’s King’s Speech briefing said in May, citing a 2022 Galop survey.
Christian Institute and Gay Men’s Network Push Back
“The bill would see parents, professionals and pastors having to answer to the police for innocent conversations that trans activists claim are ‘abusive,'” Simon Calvert, deputy director of the Christian Institute, said, ITV reported.
A November Policy Exchange report by Akua Reindorf and former Equality and Human Rights Commission chair Kishwer Falkner called the draft “a piece of proposed legislation of exceptionally low quality.” At the committee’s Oct. 29 hearing, criminal barrister Dennis Kavanagh, speaking for the Gay Men’s Network, said prosecution threats against doctors and parents amount to “a chilling effect of the most tyrannical kind,” the Christian Institute reported.
In the U.S., the Supreme Court sided in March with a Colorado counselor who challenged that state’s ban in Chiles v. Salazar. Stilwell called freedom of religion or belief “vital.” “But it has never meant freedom to harm,” he told the BBC.
Scotland Waits on Westminster as Northern Ireland Weighs Eóin Tennyson’s Bill
In Scotland, campaigners say the SNP promised its own bill in the parliament’s first year if Westminster’s plan fell short, the Scottish Daily Express reported in July. “There is no place for conversion practices in Scotland in 2026,” said Rebecca Don Kennedy, chief executive of the Equality Network. The Scottish government’s first-year legislative program, published Sept. 1, lists nine bills, none on conversion practices. Three days later, Simita Kumar, Scotland’s minister for equalities and international development, wrote to a Holyrood committee that the government is “committed to working with the UK Government in good faith to explore extending the Bill to cover Scotland following the pre-legislative scrutiny period.” Should the UK government “fail to deliver,” Kumar wrote, “we will introduce our own Bill to end conversion practices in Scotland.”
“No-one in our society should be abused, harmed or coerced simply because of who they are or who they love,” Alliance Party deputy leader Eóin Tennyson said as Northern Ireland’s Assembly debated his bill Sept. 15, PA Media reported. His Conversion Practices (Criminalisation) Bill passed its second stage Sept. 28 and is now in committee, with a maximum sentence of two years. Ulster Unionist Party leader Jon Burrows opposed it, saying, “This Bill makes good parenting hazardous.”
Nov. 16 Evidence Deadline and the Jan. 22 Committee Report
The joint committee is taking written evidence until 5 p.m. UK time (9 a.m. PT) on Monday, Nov. 16, Christian Today reported. Lightwood told MPs in September that the committee “aims to report by 22 January,” after which a final bill would still need to pass both houses.
“It has taken us over eight years to get a draft bill,” Galop wrote in October. The King’s Speech on July 17, 2024, said, “A draft Bill will be brought forward to ban conversion practices.”
This year’s speech, in May, added a word. It promised “a draft Bill to ban abusive conversion practices.”
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