The LGBT+ community has lost trust in the government following the debacle over a ban on so-called conversion practices, with many seeing the exclusion of trans people as a hostile act, according to a leading campaigner.
Jayne Ozanne, a former government adviser on LGBT+ issues, said the approach, announced on Thursday evening after a double U-turn, “left the most vulnerable group completely unprotected”. She added: “This debacle has set the Conservatives back 20 years in their relations with the LGBT community.”
Conversion practices attempt to change or suppress a person’s sexuality or gender identity.
On Thursday it emerged in a leaked briefing paper that Boris Johnson was shelving a pledge to outlaw them. But faced with a backlash by campaigners for a ban and MPs from all parties, he U-turned again within hours.
The government is now pressing ahead with making conversion practices illegal – though only those relating to sexual orientation, not gender identity. This means the ban, to be introduced in the Queen’s speech in May, will cover gay and bisexual people in England and Wales but not trans people.
The foreign secretary, Liz Truss, who also holds the equalities brief but was kept in the dark over the first U-turn, met Johnson in Downing Street on Friday on returning from a trip to India. Her allies said she was relaxed with the government’s position following its second U-turn of the day.
But LGBT campaigners said Truss was “livid” at the sequence of events, which came on the international day of trans visibility. Ozanne, who resigned from the government’s LGBT advisory panel in March last year in protest over foot-dragging on the promised ban, said excluding trans people from legislation was “a message of impunity” to those whose actions were harmful.
“My fear is that the prime minister has succumbed to an anti-trans narrative when he should be protecting this very vulnerable group of people,” she added.
Paul Farmer, the chief executive of Mind, said the mental health charity was “deeply disappointed to see that the UK government has chosen to exclude trans people from the ban on these harmful practices. The government’s own research suggests that trans people are much more likely to have undergone, or been offered, conversion therapy, so this exclusion simply makes no sense … We need a complete ban, without loopholes, which protects everybody.”
The Conservative MP Alicia Kearns tweeted: “We cannot exclude our trans friends – why should quacks and charlatans be allowed to continue to cause lifelong harm to them?”
The Labour leader, Keir Starmer, said the government should “keep to its promises on this”. Instead it was “trying to get us all to talk about conversion therapy because they don’t want us focusing on the cost of living crisis”, he added.
Supporting the government’s approach, Nikki da Costa, a former director of legislative affairs at No 10, said including trans people could inhibit non-coercive discussions about complex issues of gender identity. “Doctors, therapists and parents would be deterred from exploring with a child any feelings of what else may be going on for fear of being told they’re trying to change a child’s identity,” she told the BBC.
But Ozanne said Da Costa was “confusing good healthcare practice with conversion therapy. The latter is about being told that you can only be straight or cisgendered, that you cannot explore who you are.”
Ozanne said she had been inundated with messages of support from MPs of all parties who had “properly engaged with the issues”.
Truss was at a dinner in India when the leaked document emerged, and boarded a flight to the UK shortly afterwards.
The government briefing paper said: “While Liz is not ideologically committed to the legislation, she is likely to be concerned about owning the new position, having personally committed to delivering the bill.”
Truss’s allies insisted that she was happy with the government’s position. “It got us back to where she thinks we should be: with common sense carve-outs for freedom of speech, and to make sure we protect under-18s from making irreversible decisions on transgender,” said an aide.
