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Analysis and Health

Will the UK’s plans to ban ‘gay conversion therapy’ succeed?

By Andy Coghlan

4 July 2018

New Scientist. Science news and long reads from expert journalists, covering developments in science, technology, health and the environment on the website and the magazine.

So-called “gay conversion therapies” have been discredited

Zefrog / Alamy

The UK government has announced plans to ban controversial and long-discredited “gay conversion therapies” that claim to help gay people become straight, and transgender people revert to the gender they were designated at birth. The move follows a nationwide survey of 108,000 LGBT people in the UK, which revealed that 2 per cent of them had undergone conversion therapy, and a further 5 per cent had been offered it.

Such treatments, also known as reparative therapy, have long been denounced as pseudoscience and potentially harmful. As far back as…

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