The barbaric history of early conversion therapy in the UK
Credit: Dangerous Minds / University of Liverpool Faculty of Health & Life Sciences
"People have this idea that transgender people are forced or duped into transitioning before they’re ready, which is either a lie, ignorant or stupid. Or, perhaps, all three.
The truth is that NHS waiting lists for gender affirming care are typically between five and seven years long. This is a marked improvement on what it was in the late 2010s, when the waiting list could, in some cases, be up to 15 years.
Yet still, people parrot tales about kids who are pressured into making “irreversible decisions” by NHS doctors, who are allegedly desperate to change their gender for some inexplicable reason.
The idea that this desire to change people’s genders comes from the NHS is also patently ludicrous. Conversion therapy has been baked into the very fabric of the NHS ever since it was established in 1948, with some of the most harrowing cases coming from the 1960s and ’70s.
It’s bad enough that anyone ever had to go through this abuse via therapy or prayer, but at this time, the NHS thought it prudent to put some of its most vulnerable people through something even more barbaric.
When queer and trans kids had been referred to them, more often than not via their teachers, priests and GPs, rather than themselves or their parents, they saw fit to “treat” their “mental illness” with Electric Shock Aversion Therapy.
In 2025, a number of them spoke to the BBC about their experiences living through this state-sponsored torture, but their story wasn’t exactly rare.
They were a mere smattering of the 250 people who underwent the same torture at the hands of their own doctors.
The three survivors who spoke to the BBC were Pauline Collier, Jeremy Gavins and Carolyn Mercer. Each of them didn’t just undergo this treatment; they had this treatment performed on them without their knowledge or consent.
Mercer, for example, had told her priest at the age of 17 that she felt more female than the male she was assigned at birth, so he’d gone behind her back in order to get her signed up to this shock treatment.
Gavins bravely detailed his experience in the article, saying that at no point during his time in hospital was he ever prepared or even informed about what he was going in for. He recalled of arriving at Bradford’s Lynfield Mount Hospital, “A male nurse came to see me and said, ‘Come with me’. He said, ‘Take all your clothes off and put them in this locker’. I sat on this chair, he fastened a strap around my left hand, and then did the same with my right hand. He played with a switch, and I got a pain in my arm. He said, ‘Did it hurt?’ and I said, ‘Yes’ and he said, ‘Good, it’s meant to’.”
This is corroborated by Collier, who said, “I don’t think they ever said, ‘We’ll be sitting you in a chair and giving you electric shocks’. I don’t remember that. And I think, at the time, I was just so psychologically vulnerable that I just accepted it all.” That last sentence is the most important of all, I think.
Only someone truly devoid of empathy would describe this as anything other than the torture of vulnerable people. While the practice has decreased in use, neither conversion therapy nor electroshock therapy is illegal today.”
In my last incarnation for work I was a member of the BAPC (British Association of Counsellors and Psychotherapists) and still fervently stand by their early approach and policy against conversion therapy (so called) and believe it to be abusive
