Fifteen Year-Old Swiss Girl Taken into Care After Parents Refuse to Consent to Course of Puberty Blockers

During last week’s King’s Speech, Sir Keir Starmer set out his legislative programme in this Parliamentary session and made clear Labour intends to bring forward a “full, trans-inclusive ban on conversion practices”.

From a free speech perspective, the problem with this proposal isn’t just that no-one yet knows what he or his Government mean by that enigmatic phrase “full, trans-inclusive ban on conversion practices”. It’s worse than that. If the difficulties encountered by every other Parliamentarian that has attempted to define the phrase “conversion practices” in a way that doesn’t interfere with a person’s Article 9 (freedom of thought) and Article 10 (freedom of expression) rights under the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) are anything to go by, it’s likely Sir Keir and the two Government Ministers with joint responsibility for women and equalities, Bridget Phillipson and Anneliese Dodds, don’t know what the phrase means either.

Of course, there are some forms of “conversion practices” that no sensible person would object to being banned, such as attempts to stop someone from being gay or transgender via exorcism, electro-shock therapy, physical violence or food deprivation. No-one is disputing that ‘treatments’ of this kind are appalling and have no place in a free society. But a bill isn’t required to ban them. Such practices are already illegal in the U.K.

Indeed, when the Government commissioned researchers from Coventry University to study the evidence on conversion therapy, they managed to find just 30 people from the past two decades who claimed to have experienced such treatment, and the only examples of “horrific and life-altering practices” they were able to unearth – during the process of, among other things, trawling through “entries for conversion therapy in Wikipedia” – were drawn from the United States.

As the then Tory MP for Workington, Mark Jenkinson, put it: “From all the published evidence, it is clear that current laws are sufficient to cover the vanishingly rare number of cases of conversion therapy.”

But if that’s the case, then what is it, exactly, that Labour wants to ban?

At the Free Speech Union (FSU), of which I’m the Senior Communications Officer, we fear that if a poorly worded ban is railroaded through Parliament by a Labour Party with a 174-seat majority, it will curtail the speech rights of parents, teachers, religious leaders and health professionals wanting to advise gender-confused children to pause and reflect before embarking on a pathway that leads to irreversible, life-changing surgery.

That might seem like an outlandish fear, but in the Australian state of Victoria, where “suppression practices” have been banned since 2021, a parent who refuses to support his or her child’s request for puberty blockers is at risk of prosecution and could end up spending 10 years in jail.

A similar piece of legislation in Canada, Bill C-4, recently made it an offence to “cause another person to undergo conversion therapy”, with the result that Canadian parents who want to explore the many, varied reasons why their children are showing signs of gender confusion, or who might want their child to see a psychotherapist before agreeing to irreversible medical procedures, now risk prosecution and up to five years in jail.

Closer to the U.K., in Switzerland, where conversion therapy is banned in some cantons, it recently emerged that a Swiss couple are taking legal action to regain custody of their 16 year-old daughter, who has been a ward of the state for over a year, i.e., since she was 15, following a disputed diagnosis of gender dysphoria that led to their withholding consent for her to take puberty blockers.

Having been separated from their daughter since April last year thanks to their refusal to show fealty to gender identity ideology, the couple are now being supported by the Christian legal advocacy group Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) as they attempt to bring their daughter home.

In a case they hope will set a precedent, the parents are appealing a court order forcing them to hand over documents that would enable their daughter to apply for a change of “legal sex” in the civil register.

The demand for the documents came following the parents’ failed appeal to recover legal authority over the appointment of their daughter’s medical professionals, which the court had granted to the Swiss child welfare agency.

Lead lawyer on the case Dr. Felix Boellmann said these parents, who are remaining anonymous for safety reasons and to protect their child, “are living every parent’s worst nightmare. Their child has been taken away from them simply for trying to protect her from harm.”

The ordeal began in 2021 when their then 13 year-old daughter, who had previously experienced various mental health issues, told them she believed she was a boy born in the wrong body.

Against her parents’ wishes, she then requested to “socially transition” at her private school. As the Interim Report of the Cass Review points out, social transition is “not a neutral act” but actually a major psychosocial intervention that may lead to children embarking on a medicalised pathway that leads to irreversible, life-changing surgery.

Her parents believe she came to the conclusion she was born in the wrong body during the Covid lockdowns, when she spent a significant amount of time alone in her room on the internet – as previous academic research suggests, the sudden onset of gender dysphoria is often associated with increased internet and social media usage.

The parents took their daughter to a hospital for help, and after a brief consultation with doctors she was shown an LGBTQ-approved “gender unicorn” diagram, which depicts a sliding scale of male, female and other identities, with the spectrum of different genders beginning at one end with “sex assigned at birth”, a woke euphemism for biological sex.

It remains unclear whether the medical staff considered if the child’s gender confusion might be related to her mental health problems, or if adopting a “watchful waiting” approach might be the appropriate one. According to this approach, rather than steering a child towards a pre-determined outcome, a health professional recognises that developmental change is an intrinsic part of childhood and understands that the most likely explanation for why children are gender-confused is that they are in fact gay. In other words, the reason they’re attracted to people of the same sex is because they’re gay, not that they’ve been born in the wrong body.

However, that wasn’t the approach favoured by the Swiss hospital the parents took their 13 year-old daughter to. Following the consultation, the doctors recommended that the child should take puberty blockers – a treatment that can cause irreparable harm, including sterility. Naturally, the parents rejected this recommendation and sought private mental health care instead.

During this time, the school began to “socially transition” the girl – give her a new name and pronouns in accordance with her wishes, even though the parents explicitly rejected this approach.

After the couple objected, the school‘s resident psychologist said she was worried the girl would commit suicide if she wasn’t allowed to “transition” – a familiar argument made by the trans activist lobby and without any evidential basis – and alerted the Swiss state’s child protection agency, Service de Protection des Mineurs (SPMI). Tellingly, it also liaised with trans activism charity Le Refuge.

In April 2023, a meeting was arranged between the parents and the child welfare agency Service de Protection des Mineurs (SPMI), in which they were accused of “abuse” for not going along with what the authorities suggested, i.e., taking a dangerous drug that could cause their daughter serious harm.

Following this meeting, their daughter was removed from the family home, hospitalised and put into a Government-funded youth shelter.

In a statement, the family said Le Refuge had pushed for the teen’s gender transition and blamed an “alliance between the school, the Swiss Child Protection Agency and the Swiss hospital in Geneva” for persuading their daughter that they weren’t acting in her best interests.

“We were very clear with the school that we did not believe it was up to the school to socially transition our daughter,” the parents said. “We learned that the school psychologist was getting in and was feeding our daughter with materials, putting her in contact with Le Refuge.”

“I feel powerless,” the girl’s mother said, adding: “I love my child. She is only 16 years-old. She cannot make such a decision. She needs a mother and her family.”

The fact that the Swiss state has separated a gender-confused child from her parents because they wanted to explore other treatment options before she took a dangerous course of drugs may well seem like an egregious aberration, but it is in fact the logical endpoint of any “full, trans-inclusive ban on conversion practices” since deviating from the “gender affirmative care” approach, e.g. affirming the child’s self-diagnosis and immediately packing them off on an irreversible medical pathway, is exactly what the advocates of such a ban want.

Given the severity of the implications of this Bill for free speech, the FSU is urging its members and supporters to voice their concerns about any proposed conversion practices ban by reaching out to their local MP.

Please take a couple of minutes to fill out this form using our automated campaigning tool to send an email to your MP setting out your concerns.

It’s a simple, fast process that can have a significant impact. We’ve even provided a template email, but feel free to personalise it.

Your voice matters and this is an important opportunity to make it heard.

Dr. Frederick Attenborough is the Free Speech Union’s Senior Communications Officer. You can find him on Substack here.