Stonewall’s absurd ‘conversion’ claims: a flawed basis for policy

We’ve previously written about how Stonewall’s claim that nearly one-in-three people who identify as LGBTQ+ in Britain have been subjected to ‘conversion therapy’ collapses under even the faintest scrutiny. 

Yet the Westminster Government’s decision last week to cite this suspect survey as justification for bringing forward a draft conversion therapy Bill shows why these arguments bear repeating. (See page 63.)

In March 2025, Stonewall published a survey of 2,000 LGBTQ+ respondents alleging unprecedented levels of abuse — almost exclusively against younger LGBTQ+ people — as part of its campaign for a conversion therapy ban.

Among its more astonishing findings is the claim that one-in-five LGBTQ+ 18 to 34-year-olds have experienced ‘corrective rape’ or sexual assault aimed at changing their sexual orientation or gender identity, compared with none among those aged over 65.

This break between younger and older respondents is striking, since, as professional pollster and barrister Andrew Hawkins pointed out: “If true, the poll would indicate that as public attitudes have become significantly more liberal, so conversion therapy practices have escalated exponentially.” In other words, it implies that those who grew up during a period of less liberal social attitudes were arguably better off.

Equally eyebrow-raising is the claim that one-in-ten LGBTQ+ people have been ‘exorcised’ (equivalent to some 260,00 people). Among trans-identifying individuals, this figure rises to a surreal 30 per cent. When considered in light of the number of the estimated number of church ministers in Great Britain — around 30-40,000 — the claim seems not just unlikely, but fantastical. Even taking the higher estimate, it would mean that every minister in the country had conducted no fewer than six exorcisms specifically with the intention to change or alter someone’s sexual orientation or gender identity.

The timing of publication has also drawn scepticism, since the results were published a full year after polling concluded. If Stonewall genuinely believed it had uncovered abuse on the scale alleged, why wait so long to raise the alarm?

The results become still more dubious when compared with the Government’s 2017 National LGBT Survey, which claimed that two per cent of respondents had experienced conversion therapy — a figure already regarded as implausibly high, not least because the survey failed to define ‘conversion therapy’. The public is therefore being asked to believe not merely that conversion therapy has become more widespread, but that it has increased fifteen-fold in just seven years.

Finally, the survey co-opts wildly different behaviours into the single capacious category of ‘conversion practices’, conflating serious abuse — such as physical assault (already illegal) and sexual violence (also illegal) — with prayer and subjective feelings of social exclusion. The result is not reliable data, but activist research dressed up as evidence. As sex-realist campaign group Sex Matters has argued, what emerges is less a picture “of real-world violence than of narrative capture — a redefinition of ‘harm’ so expansive it could cover anything from being prayed for to not being invited to brunch”. And it is precisely these everyday actions that Stonewall is calling on the Government to criminalise.