Lesen Sie die deutsche Version hier.
On 2 September, the Swiss Federal Council brought a nationwide ban on conversion practices within reach. Its report in response to the postulate “Review of the prevalence of so-called conversion therapies in Switzerland and the need for statutory regulation” concedes that existing criminal, civil and professional healthcare law already provides comprehensive protection. Once cantonal provisions are taken into account, it says, further legislation may not even be necessary.
Yet because more and more cantons are preparing or have already enacted bans of their own, the Federal Council is open to creating a uniform criminal offence. No draft exists yet. The pending motion in parliament “Ban conversion practices targeting LGBTQ people and make them a criminal offence” could give it that mandate. This is how a reactionary revolution likes to begin in Switzerland, disguised as a remedy for the patchwork of cantonal rules.
The Federal Council’s bureaucratic prose obscures how radically the subject has shifted under its purview. Conversion practices are no longer to mean only attempts to alter or suppress sexual orientation. According to the council, the term now extends to gender identity and gender expression. What begins as the protection of a gay boy from adults who want to make him straight can therefore end with the state prosecuting adults who disagree when he declares himself a girl.
The crucial question, then, is not simply whether conversion should be banned. It is also which forms of conversion the state recognises and which victims its critics are prepared to see.
The Conversion Therapy No One Wants to See
The British writer and comedian Andrew Doyle is among the more perceptive critics of gender-affirming treatment. In an article for the online magazine Spiked, he accused England’s Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) of continuing an old practice under a new name. He distilled the charge into a single sentence. “The NHS has been practising gay conversion therapy in plain sight.” The charge is justified.
Imagine four children. One boy is attracted to boys and another to girls; one girl is attracted to girls and another to boys. Now put all four through the same gender-affirming care treatment. They are given new names, new pronouns and hormones, and some of them later undergo surgery. Nothing changes about whom they are attracted to. The only novelty is the claim made about their sex or gender. After this reclassification, the gay boy is counted as a straight girl, the straight boy as a lesbian girl, the lesbian girl as a straight boy and the straight girl as a gay boy. Four children, one procedure, four new labels.
Which two of the four children deserve protection from such conversion practices? The question sounds indecent, and that is precisely why it has to be asked. Doyle’s argument supplies an answer, though he does not state it. Only the gay boy and the lesbian girl appear in it. The two straight children disappear. Not out of malice. That would almost be reassuring. They disappear for the worse reason that identity politics and indignation have taken the place of a higher principle.
Doyle’s line, quoted above, is an excellent punchline. Like many excellent punchlines, it brings the thought to an end a second too soon. Gender-affirming treatment does not ask about sexual orientation before redefining sex. It does not merely turn the gay boy into a supposedly straight girl. With equal composure, it turns the straight boy into a supposedly lesbian girl. Anyone who recognises a conversion practice in the first case but sees only a transition in the second is not distinguishing between the acts themselves. He is distinguishing between the social standing of the victims.
“Sexual orientation is not a badge attached to a person independently of the body. It describes a relationship.”
Sexual orientation is not a badge attached to a person independently of the body. It describes a relationship. At one end stands one’s own sex, at the other the sex of the people to whom one is attracted. Think of it as a compass. Attraction is the needle, while the poles give it its meaning. Old-style conversion therapy tried to force the needle to point in another direction. The new version leaves the needle where it is and relabels the poles. The orientation then changes by definition.
This is precisely where the double conversion lies. Transition directly targets sex or gender identity. In doing so, it indirectly redefines sexual orientation as well. For homosexual and heterosexual people, the results are mirror images of each other. For bisexual people, the label for their orientation remains unchanged, but that does not mean their sex is left untouched. What differs among the four children is the identity into which each is recast, not the nature of the intervention.
The Critics Have a Blind Spot Too
In Switzerland, Femina Helvetica makes a related objection. The cross-party women’s association defends women and girls as a distinct sex and warns against the early transition of children. It responded to the Federal Council’s report by pointing to its submission to the Zurich Cantonal Council. There it described affirmative treatment as a modern form of conversion therapy because it steers potentially gay and lesbian children into medical transition. That is correct. It is simply incomplete.
“The straight child has no comparable archive of suffering. And so it does not receive so much as a footnote in this indictment.”
Why does this criticism, too, focus exclusively on homosexual children? Because history yields political capital. For gay men and lesbians, the familiar horrors are ready to hand: religious humiliation, electric shocks, chemical castration and the promise of curing something that is not a disease. That history deserves to be remembered. Yet memory becomes an excuse the moment it obscures the same presumption towards others. The straight child has no comparable archive of suffering. And so it does not receive so much as a footnote in this indictment.
At the European level, Faika El-Nagashi enters the picture. The former Green member of the Austrian parliament heads the Athena Forum. Its briefing, “A Deceptive Label: Briefing on the Dangers and Distortions of Conversion Therapy Bans on Gender Identity/Expression”, describes gender transition with a memorable formula. “Cure the gay” has become “transing the gay away”.
The briefing explicitly states that “Many of these young people would grow up to be lesbian or gay.” Yet nowhere in the document does it mention the children who would grow up heterosexual without transition. The same practice, however, also lays claim to their sex and thereby recasts their sexual orientation.
The briefing thus contradicts its own title. It warns of the “dangers and distortions” of conversion-therapy bans while committing just such a distortion itself. It makes conversion visible when it affects homosexual people and invisible as soon as the victim is heterosexual. A principle that applies to a homosexual victim and vanishes with a heterosexual one is no principle at all. It is interest-group advocacy.
The very critics of identity politics thus adopt its favourite art. They divide people into identities that deserve protection and identities that deserve less, then pass that selection off as an analysis that does justice to its subject and deserves to be called a good argument. It fails on both counts with remarkable thoroughness.
In Doyle’s case, this selective approach can even be quantified. Citing the Cass Review, he writes that 89 per cent of girls and 81 per cent of boys referred to England’s GIDS service were homosexual or bisexual. The percentage sign is the halo of the modern argument. It does not make a claim true, but makes it look as though the data had blessed it. On Doyle’s own breakdown, that leaves eleven per cent of the girls and nineteen per cent of the boys who were not recorded as homosexual or bisexual. If they were heterosexual, why does their conversion not count? Why does Doyle not write the corresponding sentence, “The NHS has been practising straight conversion therapy in plain sight”? The treatment affected their bodies no less, was no less invasive, and the new label imposed on them was no less false.
Numbers Are No Substitute for Logic
The statistics answer the wrong question. They may show how frequently a particular group appears at a clinic. But they cannot determine what kind of act is being performed there. Cohorts, questions and figures can change. Eighty per cent today, sixty tomorrow. The nature of the treatment does not change with them. Whether something is conversion depends on the act’s aim and on what necessarily follows from that aim. Gender transition is intended to change a person’s sex or gender identity. Because a person’s own sex is one of the reference points of sexual orientation, that orientation is redefined at the same time. Cass can illuminate the scale. How many children undergo such treatment is an a posteriori question, answered through empirical observation. Why the procedure counts as conversion is determined a priori, by definition and logic.
The distinction between these two ways of knowing is easily illustrated. To discover how many bachelors have broken feet, we would have to examine the bachelors one by one. The answer depends on observation and is therefore a posteriori. By contrast, we can answer how many bachelors are unmarried men without looking at a single bachelor. All of them are, because that is what the word “bachelor” means. That answer is a priori. Likewise, only empirical investigation can establish how many children undergo gender-affirming treatment. That such treatment counts as conversion, by contrast, follows from the definition of the act and its aim.
Nor does the objection that many patients feel better after transition get us anywhere. Practitioners of old-style conversion therapy could likewise have cited individual patients who reported relief after prayer, pressure or years of self-denial. No one with a shred of moral judgement would therefore call the transing of a child good. Whether it succeeded is morally irrelevant. Even a successful reorientation would remain wrong. Satisfaction is not an alchemical agent capable of turning a wrongful aim into a legitimate one. Anyone who treats wellbeing as an acquittal for one form of conversion while rejecting it as a defence for the other has no coherent moral standard.
Zurich shows what this can mean in practice. The cantonal draft of the ban on conversion therapy would make it an offence to subject minors to practices aimed at changing or suppressing sexual orientation, gender identity or gender expression. Then a trapdoor opens in the ban. “Medically indicated treatments for gender incongruence” are exempted, with the exemption expressly covering, “in particular”, hormonal and surgical interventions. No one writes an exemption for something that plainly falls outside the offence in the first place. This clause therefore reveals more than any Athena Forum briefing. Namely, that transition falls within the definition of conversion, yet is to remain permitted.
“If treatment leads away from a declared trans identity, criminal punishment looms. If instead it subjects the body to a child’s self-declared gender identity, it is called medicine and affirmation.”
The law proposed in Zurich would therefore draw no line between conversion and non-conversion. It would merely give different names to two directions of the same overreach. If treatment leads away from a declared trans identity, criminal punishment looms. If instead it subjects the body to a child’s self-declared gender identity, it is called medicine and affirmation. The method, the risk and the irreversibility are secondary. What matters is whether the change moves in the politically approved direction. Conversion once required a pastor. Its modern incarnation comes with a clinic, a public authority and perhaps soon a criminal law to protect it.
At this point, Doyle, El-Nagashi and Femina Helvetica become surprisingly modest. They want to protect the consulting room from being gagged by the state, remove gender identity and gender expression from the bans, and protect minors from blockers, hormones and surgery. These are important demands. But in doing so, they merely clear an escape route. They leave the woke edifice itself standing. Part of that edifice is the notion that conversion becomes wrong only when the victim’s medical record happens to contain the right sexual orientation.
Identity Politics with the Signs Reversed
“The gay boy is granted the status of historical victim; the straight boy is reduced to a statistical remainder. The lesbian is given a political biography; the straight girl is not even mentioned in the small print as a victim of the same conversion therapy.”
Anyone who takes the anti-woke critics seriously should not let them get away with this half-measure out of politeness. For years they have rightly mocked woke morality for demanding to see a person’s group-membership card before seeing the person. Now they are distributing the cards themselves. The gay boy is granted the status of historical victim; the straight boy is reduced to a statistical remainder. The lesbian is given a political biography; the straight girl is not even mentioned in the small print as a victim of the same conversion therapy. This is not a universal critique. It is merely a rival form of identity politics.
The proper dividing line does not run between gay and straight, or between religious practice and a white coat. It runs between accepting a person and attempting to rewrite that person to fit a preferred identity. Anyone who wants to oppose conversion must therefore look at the act, its aim, its means and its necessary consequences. Then every one of the four children counts. Gender transition then proves to be conversion not occasionally, but by definition. And all that remains of the proposed bans on conversion therapy across Europe are their real purpose. They are designed to punish the form of conversion they dislike and endow the favoured form with the authority of the state.
“Every gender transition, whether of a child or an adult, is by definition a conversion practice in every single case.”
Anyone who takes the matter seriously must therefore acknowledge the decisive point. Every gender transition, whether of a child or an adult, is by definition a conversion practice in every single case. This is not an empirical conjecture. It follows from definition and pure logic.
And a state that punishes one form of conversion therapy while legally legitimising and protecting the other has not banned conversion. It has enshrined conversion therapy practices as state policy.
