Following revelations by QueerAF that Health Secretary met with a group of parents who advocate against trans healthcare, and who have been exposed previously as promoting abusive and coercive practices targetting children, including restricting access to rape counselling to prevent trans children who have been victimised through sexual assault from accessing supportive therapists who might affirm their gender, Trans Safety Network has received leaks from a member of their internal forum.
Given that these shed a stark light on the intentions and the self-understanding of the group’s true pro-abuse ideology behind closed doors, we have chosen to make these leaks public.
After one user responded to the news saying, “I’m just checking that we don’t actually promote conversion therapy” another responded: “If advising kids to accept biological reality is conversion therapy I’m all for it.”
Another responded: “I think most of us would agree is that we promote the opposite- namely that we want to help our loved ones to feel more comfortable in their own bodies rather then thinking that they can go through a process to convert them to the opposite sex”.
Other users tied themselves in knots trying to argue that transition is the real conversion therapy, and that they are against it.
In other words, what Bayswater Support Group consider to be normal internally, is that trans children should be encouraged to reject their trans gender identities and accept a cisgender identity and life pushed on them by their parents. Which is categorically what Gender Identity Change Efforts are trying to do, as understood by health professionals researching the subject around the world.
Another followed up, saying “No ethical therapist these days would be telling people what to think - it’s listening, exploring, asking questions. But for some trans people even this is too much”. This erases the fact, exposed in prior leaks to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism showing how Bayswater parents do not only ask questions, but destroy their trans childrens’ possessions and actively restrict their access to support.
Parents groups like Bayswater exist to create safe spaces for parents who reject their trans childrens’ identities to have their biases against trans people affirmed by other parents, and to create a feedback loop to normalise conversion practices and other forms of abuse in service to gender identity change efforts.
And Bayswater isn’t the only group involved in these sorts of practice. Trans Safety Network previously found evidence of therapists associated with the anti-trans campaigning organisation Genspect encouraging parents to inject needles into their children to scare them away from transition. Youtuber Caelan Conrad found the same pattern when they went undercover into a Gender Critical parents network, with parents routinely sharing tips and affirmation amongst each other in aid of isolating and degrading their trans children whose identities they profoundly disagree with.
We call on Wes Streeting, and the Labour Party more widely, to stop enabling harmful child abuse by legitimising these groups and compromising with their harmful agenda which is in direct contradiction of the human rights of trans children.
Proposed laws to ban conversion therapy may have some effect in deterring professional therapists from engaging in these harmful practices, the majority of gender identity conversion efforts, according to the Gender Identity Conversion Therapy Survey (published in 2021) nearly half of trans people who undergo conversion practices were children when these happened.
Furthermore, family disapproval was found to be the leading factor in those who went through conversion therapy voluntarily, and family members were key participants in practicing conversion efforts.
Conversion therapy must be recognised as domestic or child abuse. It is urgent that safeguarding professionals are trained to recognise signs of conversion efforts, and that it is understood that these sorts of parents groups where these practices are normalised will grow and grow while the Health secretary and national health infrastructure continues to hold an ambivalent attitude to parental abuse of trans children.