Long demanded by associations, the ban on “conversion therapy” is now looming. The right-wing majority Senate gave the final green light on Thursday to a proposed LREM law to ban these practices aimed at imposing heterosexuality on lesbian, gay, bi and trans (LGBT) people, before its final adoption scheduled for Tuesday in ‘National Assembly.
Deputies and senators had reached an agreement in a joint committee on this text carried by the presidential majority, in the wake of LREM deputy Laurence Vanceunebrock. The compromise text was adopted by a show of hands, unanimously by the senators present in the hemicycle.
Concretely, it creates a new specific offense punishing these practices with two years’ imprisonment and a fine of 30,000 euros. The penalties may increase to three years’ imprisonment and a fine of 45,000 euros in the event of aggravating circumstances.
“We had to go further”
“Conversion therapies” are already punishable via a large number of offenses, “but we had to go further”, underlined Elisabeth Moreno, Minister in charge of Equality between women and men, Diversity and l ‘Equal opportunities. “No, being yourself is not a crime,” she insisted, stressing that “conversion therapy is the antithesis of our republican values.”
Questioned in September by Le Parisien, the rebellious deputy Bastien Lachaud, also co-rapporteur of the text, explained that he wanted to “cause global awareness around this subject”. “That people who have experienced these therapies recognize themselves as victims, that they can go to the police station and hear that what has been inflicted on them is prohibited by law,” he said.
If the text had been the subject of a unanimous vote in the National Assembly on October 6 in first reading, it had not been the same in the Senate, despite a largely favorable vote. A total of 305 senators voted in favor of the bill, 28 once morest, all from the Les Républicains group, including their leader Bruno Retailleau.
The latter had subsequently assured that he was “obviously once morest conversion therapies which aim to force homosexual people to change their orientation”. But he had justified his vote by the fact that the text “also evokes gender identity, in the name of which people ask to change sex, which goes far beyond the question of the protection of homosexual people”.
“A barbaric practice”
On behalf of the LR group, Laurent Burgoa welcomed Thursday “a text of balance”, specifying that “a majority” of the group would vote in its favor. “These are tortures”, affirmed the ecologist Mélanie Vogel, calling for “a European start”, while the socialist Marie-Pierre de la Gontrie denounced “a barbaric practice which destroys children and adolescents”.
There is no national survey in France to assess the extent of the phenomenon of conversion therapy, which can take a wide variety of forms. During a parliamentary mission in 2019, Laurence Vanceunebrock and Bastien Lachaud had mentioned a “hundred recent cases”, being alarmed by “the increase in reports”.
