As a service specifically highlighting and challenging the role of rigid and limited gender ideas in the perpetuation of violence, Engender Equality welcomes the draft Conversion Practices Prohibition Bill 2026.
Engender Equality is a specialist family violence service, that has long recognised the ways in which gender stereotypes and other gendered drivers of violence against women intersect and overlap with cis and hetero normative ideas that enable ongoing violence towards LGBTIQA+ folk. A commitment to LGBTIQA+ rights and inclusion has been evidenced in much of our work including in the development of LGBTIQA+ practice guidelines and in our current Dads for Gender Diversity project focussing on enhancing the capacity of fathers to affirm the gender identity of their trans children.
Just as gender inequity drives men’s violence against women, conversion practices arise in a society in which LGBTIQA+ folk are considered unequal to cisgender and heterosexual people. In such a context, forms of violence towards LGBTIQA+ folk such as conversion practices are too easily minimised and condoned.