ABOVE: Photo via Stonewall’s Facebook page.
More than 80 LGBTQ rights groups, including Stonewall, will pull out of the U.K. government’s first global LGBTQ conference after Prime Minister Boris Johnson reportedly decided to exclude transgender people from a conversion therapy ban.
Johnson’s move was first reported by ITV News U.K. editor Paul Brand, who tweeted last week that legislation would cover “only gay conversion therapy, not trans.”
That was a reversal from a previous ITV report of a Downing Street briefing that said Johnson agreed to not move forward with legislation banning conversion practices, despite years of promises from the government. The fierce backlash to the move caused Johnson to change course.
🚨 U-TURN ON THE U-TURN 🚨
The Prime Minister has changed his mind off the back of the reaction to our report and he WILL now ban conversion therapy after all.
Senior Govt source absolutely assures me it’ll be in Queen’s Speech.
But only gay conversion therapy, not trans.
— Paul Brand (@PaulBrandITV) March 31, 2022
However, the U-turn was not enough for LGBTQ campaigners, who announced they would pull out of the U.K.’s first “Safe To Be Me” conference “due to the prime minister’s broken promise on protecting trans people from the harms of conversion therapy,” Stonewall said in a statement.
“We will only be able to participate if the prime minister reverts to his promise for a trans-inclusive ban on conversion therapy,” it added.
Stonewall said it made the decision with a “heavy heart,” explaining the conference “should be a moment for redoubling efforts globally to improve LGBTQ+ people’s rights and experiences.” However, last week’s plan to scrap the conversion therapy ban and Johnson’s subsequent reversal — which “protects lesbian, gay and bi cis people, but leaves trans people, including trans children, at continued risk of abuse” — left it “with no choice but to withdraw our support,” the organization said.
“It is apparent that trans people have once again been sacrificed for political gain,” the statement added. “Commissioning a separate body of work to unpick something that has already been resolved many times the world over, can only be read as an attempt to kick the issue of protecting trans people into the long grass. This is callous and unacceptable.”
Over 80 LGBTQ rights groups in the U.K. supported Stonewall’s statement, including LGBT Foundation, Mermaids and the Scottish Trans Alliance, according to the Guardian.
“[The government’s] subsequent U-turn was an insulting attempt at compromise that excluded our trans, non-binary and gender-diverse community,” the LGBT Foundation tweeted. “To be clear, our rights cannot be conditional on political convenience or expediency.”
