UK draft conversion practices bill opens door to asexual inclusion, Yasmin Benoit says

Asexual activist and model Yasmin Benoit says the UK government’s long-awaited draft Conversion Practices Bill is a significant move forward for asexual representation, but not a final answer.

The draft was published on 25 June, just before the end of Pride Month. On the same day, Olivia Bailey, the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Inequalities, said in the chamber that asexual people will be included in the remit of the bill.

Benoit says that for the first time in memory, asexuality was acknowledged on the parliamentary record, and that the commitment created a rare sense of certainty after years of campaigning.

She traces the issue back to 2018, when then prime minister Theresa May announced the LGBT+ Action Plan and pledged to ban conversion practices. That same year, the Government Equalities Office released the National LGBT Survey, which documented the extent to which LGBTQ people were offered or subjected to conversion “therapy”.

Benoit notes that the survey also found asexual people were 10% more likely than people of other orientations to have that experience, yet asexuality was left out of the conversation despite the government’s own data.

In her account, one of the earliest moments that sharpened her focus on the issue came during a conference, when an asexual person described being pushed through healthcare-based conversion practices, including invasive tests and psychosexual therapy intended to persuade them to become heterosexual. Benoit says that led her to work with Stonewall on a report into asexual discrimination, with a substantial section devoted to healthcare.

She says she later spent years meeting MPs and building support in Parliament. Benoit also points to continued legal limits: asexuality is still treated as a medicalised orientation under the World Health Organisation’s International Classification of Diseases, and it is not recognised as a sexual orientation under the UK Equality Act 2010.

She says advocacy outside Labour helped keep pressure on the issue. In 2017, the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy published a Memorandum of Understanding on banning conversion practices, backed by 25 organisations including NHS England, and it called for asexuality to be clearly included. The Green Party became the first party to explicitly include asexual people in its call for a ban, through equality and diversity spokesperson Ria Patel in 2022.

Benoit says she then concentrated more heavily on the Liberal Democrats and Labour. In 2025, she says, the Liberal Democrats published their LGBT+ Agenda, written by Christine Jardine, and acknowledged the medicalisation of asexuality while calling for its inclusion in a ban.

She describes the draft bill’s definition of conversion practices as people being caused “to have or not to have” a particular sexual orientation as wording that appears to allow for asexual inclusion even without recognition under the Equality Act. But she also warns that a possible exemption for those providing a health care service could leave people, including asexual people, exposed to harm in the setting where conversion “therapy” is often most common.

Benoit says Robert McKenna MP helped press the issue by asking Olivia Bailey about that concern in the chamber and securing what she describes as an unprecedented answer from a Labour politician on the record. She says the exchange between two gay MPs showed the issue was being taken seriously.

She adds that the bill will still need to be strengthened, but says the current direction gives her more confidence that asexuality is being properly considered.

Her remarks come against the backdrop of Niger’s new penal code, which Benoit says makes it the first country to criminalise asexuality. She says the penalty can reach 10 years in prison and a fine of up to 100 million West African CFA francs, equivalent to more than £100,000 GDP. The law also criminalises lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and intersex “practices,” as well as “indecent or unnatural acts.”

Benoit says that development underlines the global pressure facing LGBTQIA+ rights and why asexual people cannot be left behind.

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