The British Psychological Society and Gender – an update

Pat Harvey posts….

Transgender ideologues and their activism have colonised and sequestered, through social media and institutional capture, the various mental health vulnerabilities of children and young people and directed them into a narrow medicalised funnel which has pushed them towards physical treatments which are often irrevocable and cause life-long bodily dysfunction. Mental health professionals have either adopted an “allyship” to this ideology, unfortunately subsuming the diversity of individual ages, people’s lives and difficulties into one supposed oppressed “trans community”, or they have mostly been bullied into silence and avoidance. The British Psychological Society (BPS) has resolutely taken the first position.

In what is an extraordinary paradox, psychologists fired by “allyship” and underwritten by the BPS, have led services which eschew psychological formulation in favour of prioritising affirmative acceptance of the diverse reasons for a person’s rejection of their biological sex status and push them unreflectively towards transitioning drug treatments and surgery. 

Actual access to the dominant specialised gender services which promulgate the hope that “transition will alleviate your distress” has been so limited that children and families languish in waiting throughout their adolescence for access to the favoured transition pathway mode. Local services, stretched to their limits across the board, have been only too relieved to offload such clients. At the time of writing, many practitioner psychologists will openly admit they do not consider working with clients and families where gender is an issue. They feel the risk of approbation has become too evident in an intimidatory climate especially when they cannot resort to any reasonable form of support from their professional body for anything other than the affirmation and medicalised approach. The BPS produced Guidelines for Psychologists Working with Gender, Sexuality and Relationship Diversity  in 2019. These are unlike any normal professional guidelines from that body, or indeed others. They unequivocally assert a quasi-moral requirement to adopt a particular approach – affirmation – as the default position. 

These guidelines are currently subject to a “midterm review” which has been going on for some time. It has to be assumed, as this information is not available to members, that the review is taking place under the purview of the trans rights activist chair – Christina Richards. This was an inappropriately partisan choice to lead the production of the 2019 document. In the review Richards will presumably be supported by three of the original members of the working party: two of the original 2019 working party members had requested their names be removed part way into the life of that document. It will be a source of great surprise, therefore, if the revised document is in any significant way different from the original, or if it changes the default affirmation edict, acknowledges controversy, removes the discredited WPATH reference and offers an any more balanced up-to-date reference base. 

The 2019 document was amended, following my complaint, to indicate it should only be read as applying to adults and young people (aged 18 and over). This has meant that the British Psychological Society has conspicuously failed – during the scandal-ridden rise and fall of a psychology-led national Gender Identity Disorder Service and the creation of the Cass Review – to provide any authoritative guidance whatsoever on a psychological approach to this area of practice with children and young persons. This. too, is a scandal. We hear informally that there may be BPS efforts to address this deficit, but, given the tardiness and lack of independence of the current BPS regime from trans-activist capture, it will be surprising if anything at all surfaces before the BPS renders itself irrelevant to the changing situation around psychological understandings of gender-related distress.

Meanwhile Dr Anna Hutchinson, a clinical psychologist and former employee who blew the whistle on the discredited Tavistock child gender service and contributed to Time to Think by Hannah Barnes, has called for therapists to return to “ordinary best practice” when treating children with gender confusion. She stated that

….therapists now needed to return to the non-medicalised methods they previously used to help the type of young people who sought help from GIDS. Speaking at the First Do No Harm conference, she said: “In ordinary practice we know lots about what children can understand at certain ages of development. We know the last 20 years there’s been a growth of understanding of the sensitive development that goes on in the adolescent brain.

Clinicians know how to work with complicated presentations to develop sets of hypotheses of how to best help distressed children that attend to all parts of their lives. That’s ordinary best practice. We know how to safeguard children, put them at the heart of interventions and how to protect them from possible harms.”