Zefrog / Alamy
By Andy Coghlan
The UK government has announced plans to ban controversial and long-discredited “gay conversion therapies” that claim to help gay people become straight, and transgender people revert to the gender they were designated at birth. The move follows a nationwide survey of 108,000 LGBT people in the UK, which revealed that 2 per cent of them had undergone conversion therapy, and a further 5 per cent had been offered it.
Such treatments, also known as reparative therapy, have long been denounced as pseudoscience and potentially harmful. As …