By Charlotte Cadden, co-chair, LGB Business Forum

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Workplaces are infinitely kinder places than they were just a few years ago. Suffered a bereavement? Paid leave, no questions asked. Sick child? Family comes first. Winter blues? Take a duvet day, feel better!

But what if an employee has seen her own daughter run away from home after she questioned the child’s new pronouns? You’d think such a devastating loss would be worth a day or two off work.

Somehow, it’s difficult to imagine this mother mentioning this to a manager if her workplace proudly displays symbols of the political ideology that’s driven the child to do it. Or when it holds fundraisers for child transition advocates like Mermaids, or bedecks the workplace in Progress Pride flags. It’s hardly going to fill employees with the hope they’ll get a hug from HR.

This highlights the unspoken contradiction at the heart of “bring your whole self to work”. This noble philosophy has no doubt saved thousands of employees from burnout or worse. But when someone’s emotional wellbeing is entangled in a live, contested political issue, where does the personal end and the political begin?

If businesses are serious about their workers’ wellbeing, they need to extend the same compassion to every employee. That includes the heartbroken mothers of estranged children, or fathers devastated at their daughter’s decision to undergo double mastectomies and take opposite-sex hormones that will render them permanently sterile. Regardless of a business’ stance on the sex versus gender debate, these parents should have the same level of support as an employee suffering from a bout of anxiety.

I get it: no one wants to bring politics into the office. But the ‘ostrich strategy’ of pretending the debate doesn’t exist, or that employees are unaffected — that’s simply untenable. And increasingly unavoidable, thanks to a new law put forward in the last King’s Speech. The draft Conversion Practices Bill promises to inflame the issue, and businesses can’t count on remaining loftily aloof.

The proposed law conflates genuinely abusive practices with talking therapies and ordinary domestic disagreements. Don’t believe me? One of the Bill’s prime movers is the charity Galop, which catalogued hundreds of stories via its (government-funded) LGBT+ helpline. These include parents refusing to use a child’s new names or pronouns, and trying to set them up on opposite-sex dates.

Galop’s report was thankfully short of the horror stories we typically associate with “gay conversion therapy”: forced prayer, beatings, electrodes and “corrective rape”. Perhaps this is because all these practices are already highly illegal under existing legislation. It would therefore be easy to dismiss Galop’s report…if it hadn’t been cited by the then-minister for equalities, Olivia Bailey, as justification for the Bill.

If this Bill becomes law, then the everyday domestic disagreements Galop classes as ‘conversion therapy’ could be punishable with an unlimited fine and up to five years in prison. No wonder parents are worried. Parents like Penny, whose 14-year-old daughter cut off all contact after her mother refused to ‘affirm’ her as a gay man. Penny is just one of the mothers (and detransitioners, and desisters, and therapists) who has spoken to LGB Alliance about her concerns with this ill-conceived, badly-drafted, and fundamentally dishonest piece of legislation.

But Penny isn’t just a mother: she has to wake up every day, put on her workface, and pretend to be OK. Agree or disagree with her politics, but doesn’t she — and thousands of parents like her — deserve to bring her whole self into work, too? And to have the bad days made a little easier by knowing HR has her back? Small kindnesses, like allowing her not to add pronouns to her email signature, can make a big difference.

We should celebrate the fact that so many businesses give their employees an emotional safety net. But if it’s to be anything but lip service, it must apply equally to all — and that means supporting, not shaming, employees who refuse to salute the flag that led their children away.