Somewhere in Britain, a person believes they're a cat. Under a bill the Labour government drafted, you could go to prison for trying to talk them out of it.

That's the conclusion of a report from Policy Exchange, one of Britain's best-known think tanks. The report quotes the bill's own language and concludes that "a person may face imprisonment for trying to persuade another that they are not, in fact, a cat."

The maximum sentence is five years in prison, plus an unlimited fine.

The bill is called the Conversion Practices Bill, and Labour published the draft in June. On paper, it bans abusive attempts to change someone's sexual orientation or transgender identity. That covers the horror stories everyone already agrees on, like electric shock therapy and corrective rape.

Those are already crimes in Britain. The bill goes much further.

The trouble starts with how the bill defines transgender identity. It includes anyone who identifies "as neither male nor female or as not solely male or female." According to the report, that opens the door to "hundreds" of identities. One of them is "catgender," which describes someone who feels a strong connection to cats, or who believes they actually are one.

The bill then makes it a crime to apply "emotional pressure" that leads someone to believe they do or don't have a particular identity. Telling a grown man he's a human being and not a housecat starts to look like a five-year offense.

The report's authors would know. One is Baroness Kishwer Falkner, who until recently chaired Britain's Equality and Human Rights Commission, the government's own human rights watchdog. The other is barrister Akua Reindorf KC.

"This draft bill appears oblivious to human rights law in Britain," Falkner said.

That's the woman who used to run Britain's human rights watchdog, saying the government's bill ignores human rights law.

The report is called "Not What It Says On The Tin." It calls the bill "ideological, authoritarian, unworkable and wholly unsuitable legislation for a democratic and pluralistic society."

The cats are the funny part. The rest of the report is about parents and kids.

The authors warn that parents could be prosecuted for refusing to go along with a child's gender transition. Children as young as ten could be prosecuted for asking a classmate questions. The bill also creates something called Conversion Practices Protection Orders, which the authors say could be used against ordinary parental discipline, gender-critical groups and church pastoral care.

Reindorf put it plainly. The bill's scope, she said, "extends well beyond these sorts of obviously harmful and unjustifiable practices."

Former Olympic swimmer Baroness Sharron Davies called the report "essential reading." She said criminalizing "ordinary conversations between parents and children, or teachers and children" would be an unconscionable intrusion into family life. She also said it would bring in gender self-ID "by the back door."

The government's answer was a short statement. A spokesman called the report "misleading and based on a number of inaccurate claims," and said the bill "targets a specific form of abuse, it does not touch regular parenting."

If that's true, it should be easy to show. The report quotes the bill's own definitions back at them. So far, the government hasn't pointed to the line that protects a mother who tells her ten-year-old he's a boy.

Equalities minister Olivia Bailey says the bill will "prevent and protect." Labour has had a giant majority since July 2024, so nobody in Parliament can stop it. It's still only a draft, which means somebody read this language and sent it out anyway.

That's what the left does with full control. Somebody in Whitehall wrote down that a person who identifies as a cat is protected by criminal law, and nobody in the room was in a position to say no.

As of this morning, Democrats have both houses of Congress. They've introduced their own national conversion therapy ban more than once.

In Britain, the price for disagreeing would be up to five years, for telling someone they're a person.