Statement from June Campbell on Conversion Practices
Statement from June Campbell on Conversion Practices. Holyrood 23/9/2026
I am a retired psychoanalytic psychotherapist, and I was the lead clinician for 17 years in an NHS service for survivors of CSA and I also worked with transsexual, transvestite and patients with paraphilia. The two areas I will address are the significance of the timing of the Bill and the elephant in the room that is the ideological capture that is driving the Bill’s progress.
1. Phases
1.1. There have been 3 phases in the gradual construction and implementation of gender ideology, but this 4th phase marks a significant shift from policies and services for individuals, to public compliance with one aspect of this ideology - the concept euphemistically called ‘affirmative care’.
1.2. The first phase began with academic theories being uncritically and inappropriately applied within an NHS medical model, which wrongly conflated children with adults, and produced a discredited unitary diagnosis of ‘gender dysphoria’ and dangerous medical treatments for patients with healthy bodies.
1.3. In the second phase, a pipeline was created socially and educationally, in which non-medical professionals, boldened by the authority of the medical profession, adopted another un-evidenced concept, ‘social transition’, and together they completed an irresistible circle of physical, psychological, and social theories, meant to substantiate a false belief in sex change.
1.4. The third phase involved the political rubber-stamping of new institutional infrastructures, designed to consolidate everything, through creating a sense of reality in public spaces and in the public mind, through a prolonged advertising campaign of slogans, flags, guidance, pronouns and new terminology. All this gave an illusion of coherence and legitimacy and many staff were captured.
2. But what is Capture?
2.1. I think we have assumed, wrongly, that being captured by an ideology simply means having a strongly held personal belief, that is explainable. We now know that attempts at rational debate, or questions posed about beliefs are always met with inarticulate responses, even amongst the most erudite and powerful. So, if capture is not primarily about explainable inner beliefs, what is it?
2.2. Firstly, it is not a new phenomenon. We already saw irrational and un-evidenced ideologies in the 80s - the satanic child abuse scandal, in which children were encouraged by professionals to elaborate their experiences in magical, demonic terms, and False Memory Syndrome when adults were prompted to remember incidents of abuse and incest that never happened. Coincidentally, then, as now, issues of sex, child protection, and professional collusion came to the fore and only subsided through legal action and forensic examination of evidence, and certainly long before authorities began threatening to prosecute people for not believing children who they said they were participating in satanic rituals.
2.3. What we observe today in what is known as capture, is clearly not an explainable belief but a fixed certainty that rejects discussion and thinking. It cannot tolerate opposition, or doubt, or complexity. In psychoanalysis this position is referred to as a totalitarian state of mind, in which there is a retreat from reality and a fixation on one immovable viewpoint. Christopher Bollas writes that when these states of mind spread in groups, they become dangerous, because they function through closed systems of thought that no longer make use of reason, and once captured, groups and institutions become idealistic, and self-reflection is treated as weakness. What is more likely is that for many professionals and politicians alike, the capture came through the power of the validating structures which they saw, experienced, and were obliged to participate in, rather than what they rationally thought or believed.
3. Where are we now?
3.1. We have reached a critical moment in which an attempt to produce universal capture, not just of professionals in workplaces but of doubting, open-minded parents and others, could become law, and censorship would be likely to create a moral void in society where boundaries could be broken with impunity. As a defensive rearguard action to shore up an un-evidenced ideology, it is no exaggeration to say that it the bill is an attempt to force the public to comply. This is ironic, because this bill, in their own terms, could be described as a ‘conversion practice’ on the electorate.
3.2. As humans we operate on two registers, our inner private world of thoughts and emotions, and the real world that affects our state of mind. However, history shows that in times of social crisis the priority is the bigger picture of the external structures that house and reflect dangerous ideologies. This is why good governance and a just legal system are vital to the dismantling of organisational structures that hold up very muddled perceptions about the human condition. Grassroots movements such as ScotPAG can do a lot to provide research and knowledge, but we can never alter the status quo solely by tackling what individuals profess to believe.
3.3. The Westminster Bill will affect Scotland, and we could pay the price for years to come, through an increase in paranoia and grievance in the workplace, and the shattering of ethical boundaries. It threatens family relationships and trust in authority, in ways known only to countries that encourage children to report their parents to the police and would be the psychological equivalent of the physical destructiveness already caused by surgical and pharmaceutical interventions, so it must be stopped.
