A response to John Higgon’s post “EDI – where did it all go wrong”

David Pilgrim posts….

John has offered us a clear critique of the mess we are in in relation to the battle between transactivists and their opponents. Rather than counter anything John has said I want to extend the implications of some of his statements (hence I cite these directly and then comment). My points make links directly to British psychology in general, which includes how the BPS has managed ideological trans capture.

“But, to sex realists, sex and gender are different.  Sex refers to biology, gender refers to the expectations that culture places on men and women to behave in particular ways….” 

This is a standard and legitimate truism. However, since the shift from a largely empiricist tradition in British psychology in the 1980s towards postmodernism, a whole generation of recruits to the discipline has been exposed to the idea that ‘everything is socially constructed’. This has softened them up more generally to uncritically accept what Noam Chomsky called ‘postmodern gibberish’, epitomised in the writing of the third wave feminist Judith Butler. Reality is old hat and language is everything. To me this epistemic nihilism is a form of collective psychosis offered to us by idiots with high IQs. It has fitted hand in glove with transgender activism.

“The rights of various groups often clash, and society has to find a way to balance these opposing rights as best they can be.  This is where we find ourselves now.  Trans-identifying people should of course have rights and should not be subject to unreasonable discrimination.  But it is not self-evident that their rights should trump women’s rights.” 

The chances of clashing rights to citizenship increased with the expansion of identity politics and the emergence of an Olympics of victimhood. This is not that complicated: key groups such as the poor, women and children share clear objective criteria of vulnerability to oppression and detriments to their wellbeing. However, once subjective self-identification began to over-ride this starting point, then anyone could claim an equivalence of vulnerability. 

This has culminated in special pleading from men who believe that they are women (and demand others must agree with them), men who want to claim the right to have sex with children and men who reserve the right to pursue their autocratic theological authority (see Pilgrim (2022) for more on this point about the interaction of neoliberalism and patriarchy). The original materialist focus of intersectionality, on overlapping points of structural inequality affecting social groups, has been superseded by a version where self-identification now predominates. Now the self-declared victimhood of individuals has become a narcissistic faux-criterion of social justice.

“Trans activists have also been very successful in finding their ways into influential positions within organisations.  The BPS is no exception.  Once there, they have a more or less free rein to make whatever pronouncements they see fit, all with the implied backing of the organisation which they represent.” 

John correctly celebrates the pressure now on trans activism created by the Cass Review and the Supreme Court ruling. That strain is showing at last in the BPS. The cadre of transactivists enjoying their hegemony, say two years ago, is now fragmenting, with key figures either departing or re-grouping and licking their wounds about the battles they are losing in public policy settings.  Stonewall and Mermaids are enjoying far less patronage from public and private recently. This particular culture war is not going well for transgender activists The cases John cites of female nurses fighting back, with public support, about their privacy signal this trend. A caveat to this is that in the context of the wider culture wars, the sex/gender controversy is unusual but it is not unique (Pilgrim, 2024). 

“The problem for public sector organisations is that a whole generation of employees has been exposed to gender ideology and actively dissuaded from critically appraising it.  The challenge now is to re-engage our critical faculties so that we can develop new strategies for supporting gender-non-conforming and gender-dysphoric individuals, ensuring that those strategies are evidence-based and do not lead us into situations where one group’s rights come at the expense of another’s.  Psychologists have a role here.  We are trained to think critically.  If you are not convinced by gender ideology, surely nobody can blame you for asking an innocent question at the next team meeting.”

This is the only point where my interpretation of psychology differs from John; that psychologists trained to think critically – is that true? Certainly, during most of the 20^th century, the fact that the discipline was inherently contested led to psychology students being obliged to compare and contrast conflicting theoretical approaches to experience and behaviour. However, in the past thirty years that norm has shifted. Critical appraisal has given way to a soggy consensus about methodological rigour, evading an examination of underlying metaphysical divisions and theoretical incompatibilities (Gao, 2014).

This move to ‘methodologism’ in the discipline has then been compounded by the influence John points up about the EDI movement in higher education and settings in which psychologists are now employed. This has created a disabling pincer movement, which now undermines the confidence and willingness of young psychologists to speak their minds (about anything that legitimately comes to their minds). My personal impression now on clinical courses is that trainees are culturally divided. There are the virtue signallers enjoying the glow of self-righteous performativity and quickly pointing out when they are offended or ‘feel unsafe’, when certain words are ever uttered in their presence. These are the ‘new puritans’ who thirst for the judicial logic of Salem (Doyle, 2022). However, epistemic violence and real violence are really not the same. Feeling unsafe is warranted when your village is being bombed but not because people say things that upset you. As van der Kolk, the psychiatric proposer of PTSD noted correctly, being asked to read Othello is not really the same thing as being gang raped.  

Alongside the virtue signallers are others harbouring their moral and intellectual doubts but who are wary to speak out. They may still think critically but that cannot speak critically. This scenario is a product of the betrayal of the post-Enlightenment value of freedom of expression in general and its close cousin but not twin, of academic freedom in particular. The depressing cultural outcome is not peculiar to one discipline but permeates the academy and the organisations that employ graduates. 

Thankfully there is a fightback, organised by those like the Committee for Academic Freedom and Academics For Academic Freedom. The more of us who join their ranks the better. Hovering above the tedious ‘culture wars’ is a more important consideration: can critical thinking be expressed without fear in academic settings? At present a climate of intimidation dominates higher education. Psychologists are constrained by this norm as much as any other group. I am not confident that they have any special insight or privilege to develop and articulate a needed critique but maybe John is right, and I am wrong. The fight back I think must be multi-disciplinary.

Doyle, A. (2022) The New Puritans: How The Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World. London: Constable

Gao, Z (2014) Methodologism/Methodological Imperative . In T. Teo (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Critical Psychology, New York: Springer

Pilgrim, D. (2024) Identity politics: The sex/gender controversy Is unusual but not unique. Archives of  Sexual Behavior, 53, 2431–2443.

Pilgrim, D. (2022). Identity Politics: Where Did It All Go Wrong? Oxford: Phoenix Books.