no matter what kind of therapist you are, you will probably be registered with BACP, NCS, UKCP BABCP or HCPC.
Having read the ethical framework for all of them, they all mention the care of clients. The first four are much clearer on some form of non-maleficence than HCPC who only say ‘you must encourage service users (where appropriate) to maintain their own health and well-being’, where each of the others specifically mentions avoiding harm.
The majority of people reading this are registered with one of the above groups.
As a therapist bound by a code of ethics that says you must not harm a client, you are bound not just by the memorandum of understanding on conversion therapy (which some ‘gender critical’ therapists have argued is “confusing”), but by your ethical framework itself to basically ‘do no harm’, and many of them also have a note on beneficence (do good).
The government, in considering this law, commissioned Adam Jowett and colleagues at Coventry University to do some research for them on this topic. Jowett et al’s research (activate link here) found no research of good quality that showed that ‘conversion therapy’ works, and no evidence that undergoing ‘conversion therapy’ has any benefit to clients. Their research also finds that LGBT people who have undergone such ‘therapy’ also have higher suicidal ideation and more suicide attempts, suggesting that not only does ‘conversion therapy not help, but that it actively harms.
I suggest that this means that you cannot be an ethical therapist under the main counselling-related bodies and participate in ‘conversion therapy’, whether this is requested by an over 18 year old who ‘consents’, or whether it’s because of being trans (the same evidence applies).
If you offer conversion therapy, you risk harming your clients, upto and including the risk of being directly responsible for their deaths, as well as losing your own ethical body membership, and the risk of being sued.
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