The Psychologist and the Continuing Decline of Content

Pat Harvey posts……

Two articles have been published in the August 2025 issue of The Psychologist of such poor quality and legitimacy that they suggest personal bias on the part of the editor and further bring into question the operation of editorial policy governance by the British Psychological Society itself.

Context

The Psychologist is the monthly online and hard copy magazine of the British Psychological Society (BPS). It publishes articles, letters, book reviews, news, interviews, and information on careers and professional development in psychology. It purports to be a forum for communication and debate among members of the BPS, reaching a broad audience within the UK’s psychology community, to promote the advancement and diffusion of psychological knowledge (both pure and applied) more widely and to provide a platform for communication among professionals. Its editor, Dr Jon Sutton, has been in post for 25 years. He is an associate fellow of the BPS as well as an employee of the Society, and he has recently been accorded the title of Head of Science Communication.

In the view of some of its longer term members and practitioners, the BPS has moved beyond its core purpose into a weighted focus on social justice, equality, diversity and inclusion. This has also been very evident in its publication. In one area of current controversy and public concern in particular the editor has eschewed inclusivity. He has failed to foster, even to allow, balanced debate around gender ideology and adequately to cover related legal and social policy changes that have been occurring globally and particularly prominently in the UK. The publication has, over recent years, demonstrated an editorial bias by regularly promoting the views of proponents of transgender ideology and by actively suppressing those of gender critical or sex realist psychologists. Very sparse  coverage, and almost no discussion and debate, has been afforded to the Cass Report, the closure of the psychologist-led Tavistock Gender Identity Service (GIDS), and the governmental banning of puberty blockers. The thrust of editorial hostility to these developments could be seen in such articles as A blow to the rights of transgender children [see here] which was ready and published a mere 3 days after the Bell vs Tavistock Judicial review. The editor confirmed to me in writing that this article had been solicited in months previous to the review and amended in the light of the ruling so as to achieve a rapid publication. Whilst the BPS offered support [see here] to psychologists ‘upset’ and ‘unsettled’ by GIDS closure (a unique response over years of NHS upheaval and cuts), The Psychologist has never allowed for the full debate and discussion needed around the multiple research, therapy and service provision issues informed by a psychological child development perspective. Nor, it must be noted, has it ever fully considered that the psychologist-led model might itself be seriously flawed. Indeed, members have reported the refusal of the editor to publish a number of submissions on these topics from senior practitioners.

A frightening agenda for Child Development?

The above gives a concerning context for the editor’s decision to publish the first article Is the future gender creative by Max Davies  [see here – this is a series of articles about creativity, and the reader will have to scroll through towards the end as there is no separate link for it]. 

The author is self-styled as Mx, a nonbinary female doctoral research student whose university profile cites a master’s degree in Equity and Diversity in Society [see here] where we are told the following: 

Max’s master degree dissertation topic focused on raising Theybies and how they navigate within a gendered world.…gender creative parenting…. a new phenomenon where parents do not assign a gender at birth, use they/them pronouns and create an environment away from gender socialisation as much as possible for their children. 

It is unclear how The Psychologist’s editor might have come to commission this article when, given the central relevance of developmental psychology to what might generally be considered extreme parental practices, Mx Davies does not cite a first degree in psychology or membership of the BPS. 

The content of the article is very concerning in terms of child safeguarding. It states: 

As a nonbinary person, traditional gendered parenting did not seem like the right path for me. I sought something different, but I did not know what that was. 

What follows is, in essence, Davies’ blueprint for a highly specific personal agenda. The key points made by Davies are reproduced below:

To begin, I instilled a stronger sense of the existence of LGBTQ people through embodiment, literature, and experiences such as participating in Pride… this is about holding space that one day our child may also be a part of this community, and we won’t cause harm through incorrectly misgendering or raising our children solely one gender or the other from birth… not disclosing or displaying my child’s anatomy publicly, where possible…. I do not allow associative networks to form in others to align a sex to my child… change the meanings of one’s body parts…… disrupting binary language in my vocabulary… I would use a combination of neutral pronouns and would mix pronouns around in reading to reconstruct narratives in stories. Once children move beyond the home into daycare, ….challenge institutions and their assumptions and restrictions (Morris, 2018; Rhailly, 2022. [Author’s note – references not given in usable form). Without challenging institutions, we are sending our children into a very gendered and binary world….we try to disrupt this where possible and limit these interactions as much as we can.

An irony, which appears to be lost on Davies, is the article’s claim:

 What I did through this experience is give my child the freedom to interact with and make their own choices of toys, books, and clothes….

The writer has failed to consider the basic realities and the fundamental experiences that have been denied to this baby who was planned to become ’theybie’. These realities include the personal reality of its sexed body and the interpersonal realities of normal social interactions not manipulated or restricted by the extreme controls intentionally being imposed on social encounters. Did Davies ‘correct’ other small children as well as adults using ‘incorrect’ pronouns? What if they asked whether the child was a boy or a girl and what if the child came to ask this themselves? Were they fobbed off? How disruptive of normal social encounters did this prove to be? Did this child go to daycare or to school, and if so, what stringencies were imposed by Davies? Does Davies feel able to let this child go anywhere beyond parental scrutiny and outside the LGBTQ+ community where it might meet alarmingly binaried strangers? The child is displayed prominently in an Instagram photographic record which is annotated with “Max and River, home schooling, travelling, #travellingtogether“. One particular photograph is labelled “This theybie now a fully grown princess taking the world one adventure at a time.” Is this weirdly gender stereotyping a little girl or celebrating a ‘trans’ little boy?

Thirty years of practice in clinical psychology prompts me to express alarm for the emotional development and wellbeing this child. This parent is so patently denying the reality of the effects of their own self-absorbed personal obsessions and needs. The impact on a child so cloistered from the normal diversity social influences may well be a hyper-awareness of that parent’s moods and wants and an acute need for parental approval and reassurance. Adolescence may well be a different story. Davies blithely concludes:

Gender-creative parenting, to me, is about providing space for free creative exploration. A journey of self-discovery to develop a personal and unique sense of one’s own gender, wherever that may lead. Creativity is the embodiment and expression of my gender, and as parents, we can allow our children access to an open art box; they may make a mess on their journey, but the finished piece will always be a beautiful, unique masterpiece.

This approach surely allows no space for a child’s free creative exploration, no access beyond an art box with a limited palette curtailed by a determined parent. The ‘finished piece’, as so many unhappy stories in clinical settings attest, is cruelly all too often not a beautiful masterpiece.  The notion of childhood becoming a ‘finished piece’ begs many questions in itself, and certainly sets off alarm bells in my mind. I therefore suggest that the editor – Head of Science Communication – is to be admonished for irresponsibly publishing this extreme ideological piece.

Further context

Alongside the parlous recent record of coverage and discussion about children, adult transgender issues have fared similarly badly at the BPS and in The Psychologist. By giving the lead role of Chair to a male-to-female transgender activist to produce guidelines for psychologists and their colleagues, the resulting 2019 Guidelines for psychologists working with gender, sexuality and relationship diversity demonstrated the dire consequences of prioritising  lived experience over reflective objectivity. After publication, two of the working group demanded that their names be removed from the highly contentious and professionally embarrassing Guideline. In this document, research was misrepresented and debate had previously been deemed [see here] by the chair to be “…shut. There is not a debate about this anymore…”. Sexuality and Gender were lumped together to the detriment of the proper consideration of their separateness. The publication failed to make clear whether the guidelines applied to children until, following my formal complaint, the guidelines were rebadged as applying to 18s and over.  References to BDSM and Kink, and the inclusion of the word ‘slut’ in using clients’ preferred terms, clearly related to a personal emphasis of the chair who has spoken and published frequently on those matters. Unsurprisingly in such a context the gender guidelines were resolutely ‘affirmative’ and they overtly minimised the importance of co-morbid mental health conditions stating

…While GSDR identities and behaviours are not, in and of themselves, mental health conditions, in some rare cases people may have mental health conditions which present themselves in a similar way…”

as opposed to their view that societal oppression was the prime cause of distress and dysfunction .

In 2024 the guidelines were revised and essentially watered down in terms of the wholly affirmative approach and Kink and ‘Slut’ disappeared. However, the BPS chose to replace the two professionals who had removed themselves from association with the document with two avowedly trans gender activists, making that the stance of all the revision group. Hence the revised guidelines are effectively unhelpful and unbalanced in the current rapidly changing context. 

That context includes a post Cass review of England’s adult gender identity services. The Psychologist has singularly failed to publish discussion and debate as to how psychology and practitioners should contribute to new models of service provision. In April 2025 the UK Supreme Court ruled that the terms ‘man’, ‘woman’ and ‘sex’ in the Equality Act 2010 refer to biological sex (sex at birth) [see here].  This means that biological sex is real and fundamental in legal terms. Crucially, matters of internal or subjective realities figure centrally in gender, and reality is a substantial critical issue for science, philosophy and psychology and one which any editor and Head of Science Communication at the BPS should be flagging up. Instead of that we are subjected to a questionable published article discussed below.

Reality, Normality and the pursuit of a lucrative selling point?

The second article of serious concern in the August 2025 edition is Becoming a gender specialist: What’s normal anyway? by Laura Scarrone Bonhomme [see here].

Ironically this article is dignified by a heading which includes the tabs Ethics and Morality.  Google Laura’s name and she is identified immediately. This psychologist is a private practitioner who offers an explicitly and unapologetically affirmative approach [see here].

Dr. Laura Scarrone Bonhomme is a Consultant Clinical Psychologist and global leader in gender-affirming mental health care. With over a decade of experience across the UK, Spain, and Chile, she’s supported hundreds of trans, non-binary, and LGBTQ+ clients through therapy, research, and clinical supervision. A chartered member of the British Psychological Society, she’s also the co-founder of Affirm, a global training platform equipping clinicians to provide inclusive, trauma-informed care. Dr. Scarrone Bonhomme is the author of Gender Affirming Therapy: A Guide to What Trans and Non-Binary Clients Can Teach Us and a regular voice in international media and conferences, challenging bias in mental health systems and advancing care rooted in dignity, self-determination, and liberation.

A Reddit user tells us [see here] on the first Google page:

Laura is a great consultant at £500 for an 80 minute consultation and £150 for a follow up appointment (if necessary) – with a referral for HRT if diagnosed”

Hence Laura is easily identified by those who want a fast track to medicalisation. She is easily verifiable as a psychologist willing to meet their affirming gender journey demands. She confirms her membership of WPATH  (the World Professional Association for Transgender Health) where health has come mostly to mean medicalisation with drugs and surgery on demand as of right. WPATH has attracted damning criticisms about suppression of research and of its latest Standards of Care 8 which have now included eunuch identification.  Individuals assigned male at birth who identify as eunuchs may also seek castration to better align their bodies with their gender identity because WPATH sees this as valid reason for surgery, as with other gender affirming care. Laura is also a member of BAGIS, the British Association of Gender Identity Specialists, which is the UK’s version of WPATH, a body which NHS England is now more reluctant to consult.

Examination of this article again leads to astonishment that it was sought and accepted by the editor. It makes what can only be regarded as outlandish and extraordinary statements for a psychologist in a publication of this sort:

As psychologists carrying the weight of medicalisation, it can often feel as if we are perpetually searching the ‘holy grail’ of what’s wrong…. And you realise that, perhaps, and only perhaps, there are things we cannot comprehend.

I have realised that you are more likely to become pregnant using contraception (between 0.1% and 28%) than you are to regret having transitioned (between 0 and 13.1%). After over a thousand patients, I have come to terms with the possibility that some people might look back and wish they didn’t. Though, having transitioned might have been a crucial step in their realisation. (MY EMPHASIS) My question here is: if this is such rare occurrence, why draw so much attention to it? What narrative is being created as a result of it? I’ll leave you pondering.

The stark reality is that, in the UK, trans people are denied body autonomy. Brazilian butt lifts, liposuctions, and dermabrasions. Botox, fillers and even vaginal rejuvenations. We lift, we suck, we burn and freeze to your heart’s desires. Any cosmetic treatment a cisgender person requires is granted reasonable but daring to feminise a body that wasn’t assigned female at birth, or masculinise a body that wasn’t assigned male at birth… that, I am afraid, is a step too far. It seems like we still believe that men should be masculine and women feminine, and anyone outside those boxes is subjected to close examination. Even treatments that could be classed as cosmetic and not necessarily gender-affirming, like facial feminisation surgery, are frequently gate-kept from trans and non-binary individuals. Why these differences? What is it about sexed characteristics that makes us so protective and afraid?

I saw myself as the Gok Wan of psychotherapy, helping people feel and look… just fab! Even though my vision didn’t materialise, unexpectedly a world unfolded, as I realised the ways in which I too had been boxed by people’s expectations. My trans, non-binary and gender-questioning patients taught me more than I can express in words. They revealed a world of distress I didn’t know existed. They uncovered a wealth of creativity, a profound analysis of society. They bared the shame, the stigma, and the fire required to live outside of ‘what’s normal’.

The non sequiturs in this starry-eyed world view, the conviction of her own worthy position as helping to deliver ‘liberation’, the minimisation of serious risky life-long medicalised trajectories is alarming. Is that what psychologists should be offering at £500 for 80 minutes? Perhaps most fearful is her proposition that the regret of a detransitioner at the end of such ‘treatment’ might be crucial to arrive at the realisation that transitioning was the wrong decision. Presumably that is how she has squared with herself her previous fear she acknowledges about detransitioners. Other ideologues have rationalised detransition as not as a ‘mistake’ but as a potential and acceptable stage of a person’s gender exploration. Such framing encourages a surgically mutilated person to banish regret and a psychologist to continue to frame their affirmation as facilitatory. With regard to the psychologist’s responsibility, Upton Sinclair is purported to have said: “…It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it...”. There could be a similar quote for financial transactions causing such failures of cautious reflection in some psychologists. Likewise, an avoidance of basic curiosity, let alone seeking to formulate a client’s problem, may lead to Laura’s pearls of Queer Wisdom: 

the only way to make that right is by changing things on the outside. By making their appearance more like their mental image… there are things we cannot comprehend….. What if normal doesn’t exist?

Is this morally, ethically and intellectually acceptable from a ‘specialist psychologist’?

An end to the editor’s agenda or an end to The Psychologist?

The editor has responded to numerous efforts by senior and widely experienced clinicians, academic and applied psychologists, to redress the balance and foster debate around matters of gender. In the course of discouraging or refusing to publish, he has placed in writing to some, including to myself, an editorial position about which he is proudly intransigent. He states that he privileges and prioritises the voices of trans people and those who work directly with them. This is hugely problematic for a publication of a learned and professional body centrally implicated in education, health and social policy and is a position currently subject to active criticism by those such as Darren McGarvey [see here] . He cautions against the risk of building services around stories, rather than evidence.  Anecdotal views of individual trans-identified people may be dangerously unrepresentative. The label ‘trans’ covers diverse groups of both sexes and all ages with a possibility of a range of co-morbid mental health conditions and a wide range of social and developmental experiences. In the context of “…those who work directly with them…“, recent history of Gender Identity Services has recorded a huge rate of exodus of disaffected professionals from the limited and limiting models of service provision which are now being dismantled. Furthermore, gender should not be a corralled highly specialised topic about which only a few that the editor deems worthy of priority can comment. Many psychologists, practitioners and therapists encounter trans-identifying individuals and issues within the clinics, schools and other networks within which they work. The editor clearly owns an unacceptable bias.

This article will form the basis of further attempts to pursue formal complaint. Other instances of editorial failure will be cited. It will be argued that this publication is failing the membership, risks bringing the discipline and the practice of psychology into disrepute and fails the public. The BPS must bring the editorial policy under scrutiny and review and account to the membership and to the Charity Commission should it fail to do so.