It's hard to think of a more chilling piece of legislation than the draft Conversion Practices Bill, a new law designed to criminalise attempts to change a person's sexual orientation or transgender identity.

The idea might sound reasonable in theory. 

After all, when most people hear the phrase 'conversion therapy', they think of horrific treatments such as the administering of electric shocks to gay men to 'cure' them, or the 'corrective rape' of lesbians.

But all such acts have long been illegal here in Britain. The sort of abuses the proposed new Bill purports to address are much more subtle and defined in such woolly language that there is a clear potential for the Act to be weaponised by activists.

They include 'controlling or coercive words or behaviour', 'use of economic pressure', 'use of psychological or emotional pressure' and, ominously, unspecified 'other things'.

The trouble is that some of these examples are common features of ordinary parenting.

A mother or father who prevents a teenager from associating with certain peers, or confiscates their phone, is quite literally exercising 'control and coercion'. If this is abuse, then virtually every responsible parent is guilty.

The Government should have no say in how law-abiding citizens raise their children. Parents should not have to worry that family disagreements might one day become a matter for the police.

It is a case of the nanny state at its most intrusive and the stakes are high, as the proposed offence carries a sentence of up to five years in prison.

Giving evidence last week to the parliamentary committee scrutinising the legislation Dennis Kavanagh, a respected barrister, pointed out that the Bill imports its language from a statute designed to regulate coercive control in adult relationships.

As Kavanagh put it: 'Reference to controlling and coercive words and behaviour belongs nowhere near thinking about family life. We control our children on occasion, and we have to coerce them.'

Anyone with any experience of families knows this to be true. We surely all remember those fraught arguments we had with our parents during our teenage years, and how even well-intentioned disagreements could escalate into tantrums.

But this Bill does not protect parents from prosecution even if they had intended no harm. The decisive question is whether they were actively trying to change the child's sexual orientation or 'gender identity', and whether their conduct meets an undefined threshold for 'abuse'.

For instance, a teenage girl who announces that she is 'non-binary' – neither male nor female – may have a parent who is simply honest enough to point out that such a thing is impossible, and that human beings are biologically either male or female. The parent may also refuse to use 'they' and 'them' pronouns. Such a disagreement might well cause genuine distress. The child could even go on to play truant or commit acts of self-harm, but that would not in itself mean that the parent had acted abusively.

If Labour's Bill is passed, however, ordinary family disputes of this kind could end up in court. This is why the draft law is so disturbing.

The Government says it is aimed at criminalising abusive practices. But, as Akua Reindorf KC and Baroness Falkner, a former chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, observe in a new report, that could have far-reaching consequences.

They note the common tendency among trans activists to perceive 'misgendering' – using the pronouns that relate to someone's innate sex rather than their more numinous 'gender identity' –to be a form of abuse.

They also point to a 2026 report by a hardline LGBT charity, Galop, which was cited by the Government in its own 'impact assessment' and included the 'intentional refusal to use a chosen name or pronouns' among examples of 'conversion practices'.

The truth is that the draft Bill's description of 'transgender identity' is so broad it could encompass hundreds of alternative gender labels – even, as the Mail reported this week – 'catgender'.

That possibility is not quite as fantastical as it sounds. In June 2023, an audio recording from Rye College in East Sussex in which a teacher could be heard reprimanding two Year 8 girls for challenging the idea that another pupil could identify as a cat went viral.

Similar claims subsequently emerged from other schools. One pupil reportedly identified as a dinosaur, another as a horse, while a third wore a cape to lessons and insisted on being called a moon.

These examples may be outliers, but they illustrate just how contested the notion of 'gender identity' can be. Labour's draft Conversion Practices Bill does nothing to resolve these ambiguities.

Worse still, it threatens to criminalise parents who refuse to 'affirm' whatever identities their children have adopted.

We are right to ask serious questions about this. Why is the Government so intent on dictating how parents should raise their children? What business is that of the state?

The authors of this draft Bill seem to have forgotten that there are numerous reasons why parents might challenge a child's sense of self.

Religious families may object to homosexuality or gender transition on grounds of faith. Others will be aware that gender nonconformity in youth is a reliable predictor of homosexuality in adult life. This means that many boys and girls who believe themselves to be transgender are at risk of being medicalised and often undergo irreversible treatment when they are simply gay.

Many parents of children identifying as transgender and agitating to be given puberty blockers will also have read studies raising concerns about the drugs' possible negative effects on bone development and fertility.

In other words, parents acting out of genuine concern for their children's welfare could find themselves accused of abuse and dragged through the courts under Labour's new law.

In truth, genuine examples of abusive conversion practices are vanishingly rare. The Government-backed Conversion Practices Helpline received just 29 reports about such practices over three years: fewer than ten a year. And many of these are likely to have already been criminalised under existing law.

Given the zeal with which Labour has pursued this Bill, it is curious to note that its draft version prohibits little that is not already illegal, while threatening to criminalise perfectly lawful behaviour.

It's a piece of legislation, which was framed by Labour's ex-Minister for Equalities, Olivia Bailey MP, and presented to Parliament in June, that amounts to the promotion of a highly contested ideology of gender at the expense of freedom of expression and freedom of conscience.

No wonder it has been opposed by a slew of high-profile figures, from Tory leader Kemi Badenoch and Reform founder Nigel Farage to the former Olympic swimmer Baroness Sharron Davies and Harry Potter creator JK Rowling.

A law that represents a dangerous intervention by the state into family life has no place on the statute book. So long as they are breaking no laws, parents should have the right to raise their children as they see fit. When the Government tries to step into our homes, it must be resisted.

READ MORE: Revealed: How Labour conversion therapy ban could land company bosses in court