What exactly is “conversion therapy”? From what I can tell, it’s any therapy that doesn’t involve reinforcing trans identity.
But we know that some people who think they are trans are really just trying to cope with other issues. You want to outlaw therapists from effectively helping them. That doesn’t protect trans people. That harms people.
There's a real "moral panic" going on, stirred up by horrific descriptions of abuse of homosexual men that happened in the past, including electric shock therapy and forced hormone treatment intended as chemical castration. (Ironically, using the very same drugs they now use as "puberty blockers" on chikdren who want to be the opposite sex.) All these things are illegal anyway and haven't happened for many decades.
These outdated and hyperbolic descriptions from the past are being bandied around to paint "conversion therapy" as "torture" with calls to ban it. But what is targeted by the proposed ban isn't that at all.
There are some reservations about a blanket ban even among homosexuals, because it would also cover voluntary treatment, if a himisexual person sought something like CBT in an effort to become straight. We might not think that's a particularly good idea, and doomed to failure, but should the person be banned from seeking it?
The situation on the trans side is very different from the LBG aspect too. Being trans, unlike homosexuality, is liable to set someone on a medical pathway for life. It may involve drugs that have serious side-effects, and/or surgery that is painful and often goes wrong. In the past it has been accepted practice for people wanting to go down this path to have a fairly intensive course of psychotherapy to make sure they understood what they were getting into, were doing it for what seemed to be the right reasons, and weren't likely to regret it. This would be banned by the proposed legislation.
It's even worse with children. In the past it has been observed multiple times that gender-nonconforming children usually grow out of it and become adults perfectly comfortable with the sex they are. Many are simply gay. Nowadays these children are being set on a path that is medically a lot more serious than the adult pathway, as it involves drugs to block puberty (same thing as was given to Alan Turing as "conversion therapy" to stop him being gay) which will cause loss of fertility and secual function in adulthood, as well as having other problems of increasing disease risk.
We know that most of these children, handled sympathetically without drugs or pronouns, will grow up to be normal gay adults, with healthy bodies. But instead the activists insist that they should be pushed on to the transition pathway with nobody allowed to say, could there be another reason for your discomfort with your body and might you be happier in the end if we addressed that.
So basically gay kids are being fed into the trans machine with the aim of producing heterosexual (asexual more like) adults. Doesn't that sound like the real conversion therapy?
