‘You Do Not Have Free Will with a Loaded Gun to Your Head’: The Traitors UK Star Is Fighting to Ban Conversion Groups After Church Tried to ‘Cure’ Him
The fourth season of The Traitors UK has already given us plenty to talk about, from backstabbing to shameless lies to unexpected exits and masterful manipulations, but the most important conversation of the series is happening somewhere in the fine print, and it might just end up outlawing, or at least limiting, one of the most backward practices in Britain.
If you’ve watched The Traitors, you already know Matthew Hyndman—the contestant who spent the first few episodes so quietly invisible that to say he flew under every viewer’s radar would be an understatement. But it didn’t take long for the self-described ‘shy’ player (per Yahoo!) to make his presence known, suddenly issuing ultimatums to Traitors like a mastermind who’d been biding his time all along but pretending otherwise.
Matthew is a 35-year-old creative director from Northern Ireland who has founded Ban Conversion Practices, a movement aimed at securing legislation to end the so-called conversion therapy for LGBTQ+ people in the UK.
As Matthew himself explained in an op-ed published on Independent in 2021, he used to be a missionary on a ship in the Indian Ocean. Matthew had struggled with his sexuality for years, dealing with feelings of guilt that he’d been told would ultimately lead to his “eternal damnation.” After rumors about him spread, The Traitors star was once approached by a personnel manager and asked to determine, “on a scale of 1 to 10, how gay I was. I lied, as I always had, and I always supposed I would.”
But things really took an irreversible turn when Hyndman accidentally sent a three-month WhatsApp conversation about his sexuality to roughly 100 members of his Northern Irish congregation, which included his family, his pastor, and his friends back home.
The fallout was swift. Hyndman was pressured in front of 400 fellow missionaries to undergo conversion therapy and ordered to publicly confess and repent. “I am glad that I had the strength of mind to refuse, and recognize that I didn’t need to change or ‘cure’ myself. Somehow, I got myself to London, where I found people who would help me build a new life and a new community,” he writes.
But not everyone is as lucky. For many, “refusing conversion therapy means losing your family, faith, community, career, friends – your entire life.”
We have an interesting relationship with what we consider to be consensual when peer pressure and social coercion are involved, Matthew points out. “This must be questioned when someone’s whole life is at stake. It can seem impossible to even imagine another life. You do not have free will with a loaded gun to your head.”
Why then, are we still having this conversation in 2025?
The UK still hasn’t banned conversion therapy
Here’s the part that should infuriate you. Conversion therapy still isn’t banned in the UK, despite the government promising to pass legislation to outlaw it in 2018 as part of the LGBT Action Plan. Cornell University previously concluded, based on assessing 47 peer-reviewed studies, that most of the primary researchers show conversion therapy is ineffective at best and harmful at most.
Even the UK government’s own evidence assessment concluded: “There is no evidence that conversion therapy can change gender identity. There is limited but reasonably strong evidence that self-reported harm is associated with conversion therapy.” Which makes you wonder, what’s really stopping them from just scrapping the practice altogether?
Well, the truth is, this stopped being about science a long time ago. Nobody really knows what to do with the issue of sexual orientation anymore, and balancing the left and right in this debate is its own headache. And so, the government has been kicking this particular can down the road since 2018, hoping that people will just kind of forget about it. Well, not if Matthew Hyndman and organizations like Ban Conversion Practices have anything to say on the matter.
Who is The Traitors contestant Matthew Hyndman? And what is Ban Conversion Practices’ mission?
Matthew is a creative director working out of Edinburgh, who originally hails from County Tyrone in Northern Ireland. He’s also a photographer and nude model – yes, you read that correctly – known for his “Upended” series, which features him performing naked headstands in scenic Scottish landscapes. (Again, I’m just as surprised as you are, but it turns out playing people against each other isn’t Hyndman’s only talent.)
He describes the work as “an act of defiance and liberation,” and pieces have been exhibited at Edinburgh’s Bard Gallery during the Edinburgh Art Festival. A single framed photograph will set you back more than £1,000, in case you’re in the market.
As for The Traitors, Matthew entered the fourth series as a Faithful, and his game plan is to simply lay low and survive the chaos.
Matthew Hyndman has been advocating for LGBTQ+ rights for years, both through his Ban Conversion Practices org and by campaigning for marriage equality in Northern Ireland before same-sex marriage became legal in 2020. His wish? To end conversion therapies in the UK once and for all.
“We’re now working with Stonewall, along with a range of LGBT+ organizations, professional bodies and mental health charities, to call on the UK government to finally make good on its commitment to ban all conversion therapy across the UK. These degrading and discriminatory “treatments” ruin the lives of LGBT+ people. We must outlaw them now.”
Matthew may or may not win The Traitors, but he’s been fighting a far more important battle for years. And unlike the one in that Scottish castle, this one actually matters.
The Traitors UK is currently airing on BBC One and BBC iPlayer.
(featured image: BBC)
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