During her talk at the meeting, where she was explicitly named as involved in delivering training for NHS CYP gender services, Hutchinson claimed that conversion therapy was largely a thing of the past and had historically been done specifically to “same sex attracted adults,” suggesting that it is inappropriate to use the same terminology to discuss the treatment of “gender questioning children.” Hutchinson further suggests that it is inappropriate to refer to contemporary conversion practices as such, using the extreme harms of aversion therapy (the practice of torturing patients with electric shocks or emetic drugs to alter behaviour) as a baseline and implicitly denying that other conversion practices should be named as such. These claims minimise contemporary conversion practices. Evidence gathered by Galop demonstrates that conversion practices are an ongoing issue that can include serious violence and in some cases sexual violence (also known as corrective rape). The International Rehabilitation Council for Torture Victims’ Independent Forensic Experts Group has previously stated that “All forms of conversion therapy, including talk or psychotherapy, can cause intense psychological pain and suffering.”
As to Hutchinson’s claims that only “same sex attracted adults” were subjected to aversion therapy, there is a wealth of historical evidence that trans people were among those subjected to "aversion therapy" by the NHS and that LGBTQ+ CYP were subjected to serious, violent conversion practices in the period discussed, with one paper identifying cases of LGB children as young as 13 experiencing conversion practices (including one case of sexual abuse of a 14 year old) and BBC reporting detailing the case of a trans woman who first underwent aversion therapy at the age of 17. There are also many accounts of young adults being subjected to aversion therapy, including the account of one gay man who was forced to undergo the process under threat of expulsion from school at the age of 18.
[CN: transphobia, conversion practices, #TransHate]
At a recent talk at the Labour Party conference for an anti-trans organisation, Hutchinson made a number of provably false claims about historical and contemporary conversion practices on the NHS, as outlined in in above article.