Conversion Therapy: No Evidence. No Complaints.

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This article has been guest written by James Kennedy, the Northern Ireland Policy Officer for The Christian Institute.

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It is the basic principle of good governance that legislation should be grounded in evidence. In Northern Ireland, we are now witnessing a troubling push for a new law on so-called ‘conversion therapy’. So, where is the evidence?

I sent Freedom of Information requests to every Health Trust in Northern Ireland, and the responses paint a remarkably consistent picture: in practically all cases, no complaints have ever been received relating to conversion therapy.

The same response came back from the official body for patients (the Patient and Client Council); the Public Health Authority; the Regulation and Quality Improvement Authority; and the Public Services Ombudsman. No one had ever received a complaint about a medical practitioner, practice or other body.

The single exception was the Belfast Trust, which cited ‘fewer than five’ complaints (refusing to be more specific – it might have been a single complaint for all we know). Crucially, the Trust added that “no concerns were identified by the Trust relating to clinical treatment and care provided.”

Yet there remains significant pressure for a new law to tackle this apparently non-existent problem. Why are groups like Stonewall and The Rainbow Project so keen to push this through?

We need only look at recent legal developments to understand the broader context. Many of the same organisations advocating for this legislation were central to the misinterpretation of the Equality Act – insisting that ‘sex’ included self-declared gender identity. The Supreme Court has now clarified what most of us knew all along: that sex means biological sex. Sadly, the false, ideologically driven position has been parroted by too many public bodies.

This same ideology, and the same willingness to redraw the legal language, is also at the heart of the conversion therapy debate. A ‘ban’ risks criminalising ordinary, compassionate conversations – between parents and children, teachers and pupils, church leaders and their congregations, doctors and patients.

What does ‘conversion therapy’ even mean in this context? Many of the campaign groups now consider it abusive to ask a young person to take time, to reflect, to consider the long-term implications of a decision to medically transition. You can see why their claims of widespread ‘abuse’ aren’t entirely consonant with the on-the-ground reality.

You’ve maybe seen Stonewall’s latest figures – 31% of everyone who identifies as LGBT in Great Britain has been through devastating ‘conversion practices’, it says. Or The Rainbow Project, Northern Ireland’s Stonewall equivalent, which points to statistics from Galop to claim that 43% of trans people are “subjected to conversion practices”. These figures sound alarming, but they are completely at odds with what official sources say.

So small was the number of complaints received by health bodies in all of Northern Ireland that to be more specific “would reduce numbers to discoverable limits where individuals could be identifiable”, the Trust responsible said. That surely tells us something about the over-inflation of Stonewall’s, Galop’s and The Rainbow Project’s figures.

When pressed for concrete cases, the data evaporates. Last year, James Esses’ Substack looked at a study carried out by The Rainbow Project on behalf of Northern Ireland’s Department for Communities.

The researchers set out to interview just fifteen people. They couldn’t even find that many. After ten interviews, they declared that the research had reached “saturation point”. And yet, even within those ten interviews, not a single example emerged to justify the introduction of a new law.

To his credit, the current NI Communities Minister distanced himself from the report entirely:

“I emphasise that the findings and recommendations are those of the authors and do not represent the views of my Department. They are not government policy.”

The lesson from Northern Ireland, then, seems pretty clear: look for the evidence and you’ll be left wanting. Sure, there are broad surveys that are ill-defined and ask questions of a population that has been coached in what to say by Stonewall. But try to find actual examples of ‘conversion therapy’ going on, and you’ll come up with very little indeed.