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LEADING ARTICLE

The Times view on the collapse of the Safe to Be Me conference: Undone by Intolerance

The disintegration of a proposed LGBT summit reflects badly on all concerned

The Times
The campaigner Peter Tatchell leads a protest against conversion therapy outside the Cabinet Office last year
The campaigner Peter Tatchell leads a protest against conversion therapy outside the Cabinet Office last year
MAY JAMES/ALAMY

The disintegration of a proposed government lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) conference is a fiasco from which no one emerges with credit. The three-day event in June was to have shone a spotlight on the discrimination against gay and trans people and mobilised campaigns to safeguard them. Instead, it has dissolved into a welter of recriminations, arguments over language and ideology, a boycott by most of the groups who would have attended and anger directed at Downing Street for its refusal to ban conversion therapy for trans people.

The government’s vacillations on the issue of counselling for people wanting to transition to the opposite gender was attacked particularly virulently by Stonewall, the main LGBT lobby group in Britain. It insists the ban on conversion