The following year, the Women and Equalities Committee found that the community was still overlooked by health and social care services, despite being significantly more at risk of mental health issues. In 2018, a government survey showed that a quarter of LGBTQ+ people had tried to access mental health services the year before, but less than a third said they found it easy. ‘This seems to be a pattern,’ says Andrew Gilliver, one of LGBT Foundation’s Pride in Practice Coordinators, ‘not just in our understanding of LGBTQ+ people’s healthcare, but also in accepting the diversity and validity of recognising each individual’s right to be respected as the person they say they are.’ It wasn’t until 2018 that it stopped listing trans identities as such, either. Until 1992, the World Health Organisation still listed homosexuality as a mental illness. Just this April, the UK government agreed to ban conversion therapy aimed at changing a person’s sexuality – but crucially, performed a radical U-turn on also banning conversion therapy of gender identity and trans people. Professor Helen Stokes-Lampard, Chair of the Royal College of GPs, said: ‘Being gay or trans is not a disease, it is not a mental illness and it doesn’t need a cure.’ The Royal College of General Practitioners, a network of more than 50,000 family doctors, were the only medical royal college to co-sign. In 2015, a group of major UK organisations published a Memorandum of Understanding condemning conversion therapy, updating it in 2017 to warn against conversion therapy in relation to gender identity. The same year, a government survey of LGBT people found that 5% of respondents said they had been offered conversion therapy. In 2018, the Conservative Party pledged to make it illegal, but have since suggested there may be religious exemptions, which led a member of the government LGBT+ advisory board to resign.
But since then, private practitioners have still been allowed to tell patients they can be ‘cured’.Ĭonversion therapy is still legal in the United Kingdom. In 1980, the NHS condemned the use of conversion therapy, a pseudoscientific practice designed to ‘cure’ LGBTQ+ sexual orientation or gender identity. For elder, disabled or people of colour, discrimination and barriers to access are even more significant.