Kemi Badenoch has told MPs there is ‘strong evidence’ young people who are gay are being convinced they are transgender instead.
The Equalities Minister said that children may act in a ‘gender non-conforming’ way at an early age, long before they realise they are attracted to people of the same sex.
But this can be ‘misinterpreted’ as a sign they want to identify as the opposite sex, and lead to them receiving irreversible medical treatment.
In a letter to the Women and Equalities Committee she cited a string of studies backing up the claim she made last year that gender treatment is ‘a new form of conversion therapy’, and there is ‘almost an epidemic’ of young gay people ‘being told they are trans’.
She told MPs: ‘I committed to providing further details on the evidence that children likely to grow up to be gay might be subjected to conversion practices on the basis of gender identity rather than their sexual orientation.
‘Both prospective and retrospective studies have found a link between gender non-conformity in childhood and someone later coming out as gay.’
Mrs Badenoch said the ‘strong link’ has been known about for ‘many years’, including in a Dutch study from 1999 which stated: ‘Not all children with Gender Identity Disorder (GID) turn out to be transsexuals after puberty… prospective studies of GID boys show that this phenomenon is more strongly related to later homosexuality than to later transsexualism.’
A ‘clear pattern’ was found in a 2012 report, she said, showing that in follow-up studies a ‘much larger proportion’ of gender dysphoric children were found to ‘have a homosexual sexual orientation’.
German clinicians also noted in 2008 that ‘early hormone therapy may interfere with the patient’s development as a homosexual’.
They cautioned: ‘This may not be in the interest of patients who, as a result of hormone therapy, can no longer have the decisive experiences that enable them to establish a homosexual identity.’
Mrs Badenoch also quoted data from the NHS’s controversial Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS), showing older patients were ‘overwhelmingly not heterosexual’.
Analysis of 218 people referred to the gender clinic in one year found that 67.7 per cent of female patients were ‘recorded as being attracted to other females only’ while 21.1 per cent were bisexual and only 8.5 per cent heterosexual.
She also quoted interviews by former GIDS staff who said they feared the clinic was performing ‘conversion therapy for gay kids’ and ‘making them straight’.
And she highlighted overall figures for GIDS showing its referrals soared from just 50 a year in 2009 to 5,000 in 2021-22.
‘As I said in my evidence session, this trend represents an explosion in numbers of referrals.’ Her remarks will be seen as a riposte to a Labour MP on the select committee who accused her of likening ‘young people coming out as trans to the spread of a disease’.
In a furious clash in December, Mrs Badenoch told Kate Osborne: ‘You are lying. I have never ever used the word disease.’
Last night Bev Jackson, co-founder of the LGB Alliance charity, said: ‘[We’re] delighted the minister has recognised the concerns that we have been raising for a long time.
‘The evidence is clear. The vast majority of young people being put on to irreversible medical pathways are attracted to their own sex.’
