UK government has “no current plans” to ban gay ‘conversion’ therapy
By Micah Sulit
UK health minister Jane Ellison said the government has no plans to ban ‘gay conversion therapy’, despite cross-party support from Tory and Labour MPs.
The Huffington Post reports that during a parliamentary debate on Tuesday (November 3), Tory MP Mike Freer called for a ban on the so-called ‘conversion’, ‘reparative’ or ‘gay cure’ therapy – an umbrella term for methods employed by health professionals to change patients’ sexual orientation or reduce their attraction to the same sex.
“Being gay is not a disease, it is not an illness and it is not something that I or any other gay man or woman can be cured of. To suggest otherwise is not only demeaning, but morally and medically wrong,” Freer said.
“Allowing conversion therapy to try to turn our straight colleagues gay would not last a day, yet we allow therapists to peddle the myth that they can ‘cure’ people of being gay,” he added.
Labour MP Wes Streeting said “the suggestion that there could be a gay cure makes all LGBT people, and young people in particular, feel that they are different and somehow alien”.
“That is what causes them mental ill health,” he added.
But health minister and MP Battersea Jane Ellison has announced said there are no plans to regulate or ban such therapies.
“This Government does not believe that being lesbian, gay or bisexual is an illness to be treated or cured,” she said. “I fully understand the concerns about so-called gay conversion therapy as they’ve been expressed, but the Government has no current plans to ban or restrict it via legislation.”
Statutory regulation of psychotherapists, which Freer also called for, isn’t on the agenda either, but Ellison promised to reflect on the “challenged” issue after the debate.
Earlier this year, a YouGov poll for LGBT advocacy group Stonewall revealed that one in 10 health and social care staff have witnessed colleagues express support of ‘gay conversion therapy’.
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