Broad Door, High Bar: Reading the Draft Conversion Practices Bill

By Joanne Lockwood (she/her) FIEDP FRSA FPSA – Written from lived experience, not from the sidelines.

Applies to England and Wales. Published 25 June 2026 by the Office for Equality and Opportunity as a draft for pre-legislative scrutiny — not yet law, and liable to change before it ever reaches the floor of the House. I read it here as an inclusion practitioner working from lived experience, not as a lawyer; nothing below is legal advice, and organisations should take their own.

Link here: Conversion practices draft bill - GOV.UK

In summary

After years of promises, drafts, abandoned drafts and white-hot argument, England and Wales finally has draft text. The Conversion Practices Bill does two things at once that are worth holding together in your head, because the whole story lives in the tension between them. It draws the door wide — it names, in protective statute and for the first time, not only gay, lesbian and bisexual people but trans, transsexual and explicitly non-binary people as those it sets out to protect. And it sets the bar high — nothing becomes a crime unless conduct is abusive and causes serious harm. Broad door, high bar. That single design choice is the most important thing in the document, and it is the thing that will be fought over from both directions: by those who think the door is too wide, and by those who think the bar is too high.

For anyone who builds inclusive cultures for a living, the bill is not a spectator sport. Tucked inside it is a provision making directors, managers, partners and trustees personally liable where they permit a conversion practice or fail to take reasonable steps to prevent one. That is a governance question, and it lands on desks that say “Head of People,” “General Counsel” and “Chair of Trustees.” This piece walks the draft section by section, pulls out what each provision actually does, and weighs the opportunity and the risk — particularly for trans and non-binary people, who are the population this law most directly reaches.

Section 1 — What counts, and what doesn’t

Everything starts here, because Section 1 is where the law decides who is in and what is out. A “conversion practice” is conduct aimed at an individual with the intention of changing or suppressing their sexual orientation or transgender identity — including making them believe they do or do not have one. The wording runs in both directions: trying to cause someone “to have or not to have” an identity. That symmetry is deliberate. It means the law is not a one-way street; on its face it catches attempts to push someone toward an identity as much as away from one.

Then comes the broad door. Section 1(8) says a transgender identity includes someone undergoing, proposing to undergo or having undergone gender reassignment, someone who is transsexual, and someone who identifies as “neither male nor female or as not solely male or female.” Read that last clause again, because it matters more than its quiet placement suggests. This is the first time non-binary identity is named inside the protective text of a statute in England and Wales. The Equality Act 2010’s gender reassignment characteristic has never clearly reached non-binary people. This bill does, expressly.

Opportunity. For trans and non-binary people, statutory naming is not mere symbolism. It creates a fixed reference point — a place in the law where “we exist and we are protected” is written down in black letter. For inclusion practitioners, it is a gift of clarity: the protected population is defined more generously than the Equality Act, and you can build training, policy and culture work on top of an explicit definition rather than an inferred one.

Risk. Breadth bought cheaply can be narrowed cheaply. Because non-binary inclusion appears here rather than in the Equality Act, it sits on a single, contested provision in a draft bill — and it is precisely the provision critics will press hardest to trim in scrutiny. Treat its survival to enactment as uncertain, not banked. There is also a quieter coherence problem: the statute book would now carry two different definitions of “trans” — the Equality Act’s and this one — which is the kind of cross-instrument mismatch that generates argument for years.

Section 1(3) and 1(9) — The healthcare carve-out

Conduct delivered “in the course of providing health care services” is not a conversion practice — unless the person “acts in a way that falls far below the standards reasonably expected of a person in their position.” Healthcare is defined broadly enough to capture procedures that resemble medical or surgical care even where there is no underlying medical condition.

This is the most consequential sentence in the bill for trans and non-binary people, and the least predictable.

Opportunity. The carve-out protects legitimate, careful clinical practice — genuine exploratory work, watchful waiting, honest conversation — from being recast as a crime. That protection cuts both ways and is, in principle, a good thing: clinicians supporting a young person should not practise in fear of prosecution for doing their job properly.

Risk. The protection is only ever as strong as the standard of care it points to — and that standard is contested and, post-Cass, moving toward caution. “Falls far below” is a high bar; suppressive practice dressed in clinical language can sit comfortably within a defensible professional standard and so never reach it. For non-binary people, where care pathways are thin to non-existent, “standards reasonably expected” may carry almost no protective content at all. The bill does not resolve where exploratory therapy ends and conversion begins. It relocates that argument from Parliament to the consulting room and, eventually, the courtroom.

Section 1(4)–(6) — What makes it “abusive”

Being a conversion practice is not enough. It must also be an abuse — a question of fact on all the circumstances, with weight given to whether the conduct involves words or behaviour of a sexual nature, violent or threatening behaviour, controlling or coercive behaviour, economic pressure, or psychological or emotional pressure.

Opportunity. This list is recognisably the architecture of coercive control — and that is the right frame. It reaches the controlling household, the coercive religious programme, the threat to withdraw money or love. Most conversion harm done to trans and non-binary people happens in exactly these settings, not in a clinic, and the abuse test is built to see it.

Risk. “Abuse” plus the serious-harm gate that follows means a great deal of real-world pressure never qualifies. Persistent misgendering, cold disapproval, conditional affection, the relentless “just wait and see” — the slow water-torture by which many trans and non-binary people are worn down into desistance — will often fall below the line. The law targets the acute and egregious. The chronic and corrosive mostly survives it.

Section 2 — The offence, and the height of the bar

Here is the bar in full. An abusive conversion practice is only an offence if it causes serious harm to physical or mental health, or serious alarm or distress with a substantial adverse effect on the individual’s usual day-to-day activities. Maximum penalty: five years on indictment.

This is the high bar that defines the whole statute. Three gates must all be passed — intention, abuse, and serious harm — before anyone is at risk of conviction.

Opportunity. The height of the bar is what lets this law exist at all. A broader offence that criminalised non-coercive prayer or gender-critical speech would be litigated to death under Articles 9 and 10 of the Convention, or chilled into a dead letter. A narrow, serious-harm offence is built to pass and to stick — and a law that survives protects people more than a bolder one that is struck down. For the perennial fear that affirming support could be caught: it cannot realistically clear these gates, because affirming, consent-based care is not abusive and does not cause serious harm.

Risk. A high evidential bar protects the most egregious victims and leaves the rest with a law that looks like protection but rarely reaches their lived experience. Proving intent to the criminal standard, against conduct presented as love and concern, is genuinely hard. And the people most exposed — trans and non-binary young people still living with hostile families — are the least able to gather evidence or come forward.

Section 3 — The overseas route

A UK person who, from England or Wales, encourages or assists a conversion practice carried out abroad on a UK individual commits an offence — with foreseeability alone expressly not enough to prove intent.

Opportunity. This closes a real and well-documented escape hatch: the family that sends a trans or non-binary young person overseas to be “fixed.” Naming it as an offence at home is a meaningful protection, not a theoretical one.

Risk. Enforcement across borders is hard, and the intention requirement is a high hurdle. The provision’s value may be more deterrent than prosecutorial — which is not nothing, but is not the same as a remedy.

Sections 4 and the Schedule — Conversion Practice Protection Orders

This is, quietly, the most practically protective part of the bill. Conversion Practice Protection Orders are civil and family orders modelled closely on the Forced Marriage and FGM protection-order regimes. They can be applied for by the individual themselves, a chief officer of police, or a local authority — and by others with the court’s leave. A court can make one of its own motion in family or criminal proceedings, and without notice in urgent cases. Breach is itself a criminal offence, carrying up to two years.

Opportunity. This is the route that does not require a criminal trial, a conviction, or even the protected person bringing the case themselves. A trans or non-binary young person at risk does not have to stand up in court against their own family; a local authority or the police can act to protect them, fast, and pre-emptively. For real-world safeguarding, this is the most usable tool in the bill.

Risk. It works only if the bodies with standing actually use it — and consistent, confident use by police and local authorities is an assumption, not yet a fact. Protective architecture is only as good as the will and resourcing behind it.

Section 5 — Where this lands on your desk

If you lead people, govern an organisation, or sit on a board, this is your section. Where a body commits an offence under the Act, an individual director, manager, partner or member of a governing body also commits it if they authorised it, permitted it, participated in it, or failed to take all reasonable steps to prevent it.

That phrase — “all reasonable steps to prevent” — will be familiar to anyone tracking the direction of travel on the duty to prevent harassment. It is the same logic: liability attaches not only to the act but to the failure to govern against it.

Opportunity. This is the systemic lever. It reaches the organisations that run conversion programmes — some faith bodies, some unregulated therapy providers — at the level of the people who steer them. It turns “we didn’t know” into a weaker defence and rewards organisations that build genuine prevention into their governance.

Risk. For mainstream employers, charities and providers who would never dream of running a conversion practice, the exposure is indirect but real: a coercive manager, an ill-governed chaplaincy or employee-assistance arrangement, a “wellbeing” provider operating off the books. The reasonable-steps standard means the question is no longer only “did we do it” but “did we govern against it being done in our name.” That is a board-level assurance question, and most organisations have not asked it.

Section 6 — Scope and timing

England and Wales only. In force two months after passing. Scotland and Northern Ireland are on their own tracks.

The jurisdictional point matters for anyone operating across the UK: this is not a UK-wide settlement, and any policy, training or guidance you build needs the three-nation split preserved on its face. A single “UK conversion therapy policy” will be wrong in at least two directions.

Watching brief

Three things deserve a standing place on the watch list, because they are where this bill will actually be decided. First, the non-binary definition in Section 1(8) — the most progressive line in the draft and the most politically exposed; its survival through scrutiny is the single clearest test of whether the broad door stays open. Second, the healthcare carve-out in Section 1(3) — its real-world effect on trans and non-binary people is hostage to a contested, shifting clinical standard of care, and the same words could protect trans people from defensive medicine or shield suppressive practice depending entirely on where the profession sets “reasonably expected.” Third, the reasonable-steps liability in Section 5 — the provision that converts this from a criminal-justice story into a governance story for every organisation, and the one most likely to need translating into board assurance, training and policy long before it is ever tested in a courtroom. Track the explanatory notes and impact assessment when they land; they will tell you far more about intended reach than the bare clauses do.

The takeaway

Read it as broad door, high bar. The bill is more inclusive than the Equality Act in who it names — reaching non-binary people expressly — and more cautious than its advocates hoped in what it actually criminalises. That asymmetry is not a flaw to be tidied away; it is the deliberate price of a law built to survive challenge and reach the statute book. Whether it protects trans and non-binary people in their real lives, rather than only on paper, will be settled less by these clauses than by three things the text cannot control: how the courts read “serious harm,” where the clinical professions set “reasonably expected,” and whether organisations treat “all reasonable steps” as a genuine duty or a box to tick.

The naming is done. The hard part — turning a protected category into a protected experience — starts now.

This is part one of two. Part two — Constructive Desistance, which lands tomorrow— turns from what the bill can see to the harm it never will: the lawful, perpetrator-less tightening of everyday life that no conversion law will ever reach.

Hold the rope.