Author: AdminBPSWatch

 

David Pilgrim posts….

When BPSWatch.com began we were like the dishevelled TV cop Columbo. An early mistake we made was to look to those responsible for the corruption and dysfunction in the BPS to clear up their own mess. Basically, we were too trusting of the personal integrity of the powers that be and the Society’s complaints policy. Quickly we discovered that those in charge ran a very well-oiled bullshit generator (Pilgrim, 2023a and https://bpswatch.com/2021/10/31/the-abuse-of-history-and-the-bps-bullshit-generator/). Letters were not answered, the complaints process was broken, critiques were censored, prompts about ignored emails were ignored further. Too many nudges from us led to claims of harassment followed by threats of disciplinary and legal action.  We moved to making sense of the public policy implications of a culture of deceit and mendacity, with a cabal running the show totally lacking transparency about governance. Soon two child protection matters came into particular focus. 

The first related to the distortions created by the policy of the BPS on memory and the law [see here, here and here], which has been captured by experimentalists concerned singularly with false positive risks and so-called false memories. This narrow consideration has wilfully excluded the wider research evidence about childhood sexual abuse and its underreporting (Cutajar et al 2010). It diverts us from the needed consideration of false negatives, the epidemiological iceberg and needed justice for the victims of both historical child abuse and more recent sexual crimes against adults. The clue about this bias was that those capturing the policy, who were hand in glove with the British False Memory Society (now defunct), such as the late Martin Conway, recipient of the BPS lifetime achievement award and eulogised here (https://www.bps.org.uk/psychologist/martin-conway-1952-2022) (Conway and Pilgrim, 2022).  

The second child protection scandal, we have examined is that of the complicit role of the BPS leadership in the psychology-led GIDS at the Tavistock Clinic (now closed).  The recent Cass Review has evoked raw feelings in backlash. Hilary Cass, a respectable and, until recently little known, academic paediatrician has, after publishing that Review, been advised by the police not to travel on public transport. Sadly, Cass now competes only with J.K. Rowling as the woman who transgender activists are most likely to disparage and threaten. The past and current stance of the BPS to this iatrogenic scandal, with psychologists at its centre, is thus of public interest.

The FtM (Female-to-Male) activist Professor Stephen Whittle haughtily described the Cass Review in The Guardian as having the ‘fingerprints of transphobia all over it’. This casual contempt (note from an alleged academic) for serious analysis has been common in highly educated circles from transgender activists and their allies. Because they have previously been riding high, with virtue-signalling organisational leaders obediently cheering them along, they have held a simple line: any criticism always comes from those who are merely reactionary and ‘transphobic’. ‘If you are not for us then you are against us’ is the hasty immature cognitive binary of most forms of identity politics and the sex/gender debate brings this point out graphically (Dutton, 2022). Except, of course, that a cornerstone of transgender activism is that there is to be ‘no debate’.

The term ‘transphobic’ is applied knee-jerk fashion to all gender critics now organised across a range of disparate feminist, religious and scientific groupings in Britain. By pre-empting debate, transgender activists have de-skilled themselves. Why bother with logic or evidence when the truth is already known about ‘gender identity’? Why bother with complex deliberations about competing human rights when there is only one ethical imperative of ‘trans liberation’?  Why bother appealing to the facts of life when arbitrary self-identification trumps everything? This de-skilling has left transgender activists floundering once their name calling runs out. ‘You are all transphobes!’ would make a very short journal submission or exam answer, as would the more threatening ‘Kill a TERF!’. It could, though, reference the cultish leader Judith Butler who has had a lot to say, even if it is largely unintelligible (Butler, 1999). 

For any naïve but honest person oblivious to newer expectations of language-policing, this is a confusing topic. Terms like ‘cis’, ‘deadnaming’ and ‘misgendering’ are bemusing to anyone not under the sway of the postmodern turn and, in its wake, the severing of the link between material reality and the indexical role of language. Noam Chomsky has returned repeatedly to refer to the ‘gibberish’ and wilful obscurantism of postmodernist texts (Chomsky, 2018). They are full of word salads and at their most mystifying in Queer Theory and in some versions of third wave feminism, with Butler leading the charge. Concurring with Chomsky, Martha Nussbaum confirmed that she (Butler) deliberately obfuscates (Nussbaum, 1999). Given that intellectual giants like Chomsky and Nussbaum cannot understand what Butler is getting at, sentence by sentence, then what chance for mere mortals?  

A naïve but honest person is ‘transphobic’ if they describe a man in a dress as…. a man in a dress. A naïve but honest person is ‘transphobic’ if they simply want to ask, ‘what is a woman’ (i.e. there is to be ‘no debate’) (Andrews, 2021; cf.Stock, 2021). A naïve but honest person is ‘transphobic’ if they expect adult human females to have their own places to undress, go to the toilet or be protected from a predator revelling in being ‘a woman with a penis’. A naïve but honest person cannot grasp the notion of a ‘translesbian’ and most real lesbians are unimpressed by a con man in their midst. A naïve but honest person, on very good grounds, does not believe that a man can give birth to a baby. The list goes on.

For those offering a more knowing critique to defend common sense about sex, careers have been wounded, sometimes fatally. From Kathleen Stock to Graham Linehan, and from Maya Forstater to Rachel Meade, the consequences have been clear. ‘Better to agree with the transgender activist bullies than hold them to account’ or, even more modestly, ‘just do not disagree with them’. This seems to have been the stance taken by most managers and professional leaders across British culture in the past decade. Cass, however, in her report, has set many hares running about the justice and sanity of this collusion with transgender activism. 

The recent cheerleaders (i.e., opportunistic trans-captured managers and the ‘be kind’ politicians of all hues) are reflecting on their crowd-pleasing errors and some are deleting their old tweets. U-turns have been forced, such as that from Wes Streeting MP, on the Parliamentary Labour Party. Some NHS CEOs are now eating humble pie. Those denying Cass information about follow up data on biomedically transitioned young people have been forced to release the information, raising the question about what they were covering up in the first place.  

In recent weeks, puberty blockers have been decommissioned in the NHS first in England, but with Scotland and Wales quickly following suit. The government have announced that the distortions of language in NHS policy documents (‘cervix havers’, ‘chest feeders’, ‘peri-natal care’ etc.) will cease, not only because they have denied the biological reality of being a woman (or a man), but because it makes no clear functional sense in medical records, risk assessment, data collection or research. How many MtF (Male-to-Female) transsexuals do any of us know who have died from ovarian cancer or FtM transsexuals from prostate cancer?  (Send your answer on a blank postcard.)  

Women, not men, have babies and FtM transsexuals special pleading for ‘perinatal care’ are still women, even if they resent their natal bodies. However, now they make demands for sensitive and immediately available medical interventions to protect them from the iatrogenic risks created from the hormonal regimes that, note, they had previously demanded and received. These points about biological reality return recurrently because that reality cannot be talked out of existence using a postmodern fog of words (Dahlen, 2021; cf. Pfeffer et al, 2023). Sex is immutable, can be detected in utero and is then recorded at birth. It is not ‘assigned’. That fact of life about our conception is as certain as our death. Sometimes variations of sexual development are invoked in the justificatory rhetoric of transgender trans-gender activism, but this is a red herring. Sexual dimorphism is a mammalian feature in 99.99% of offspring and even in the rest, genetic determinism still obtains.

For those of us who have never voted Conservative, we are relieved that the current health minister, Victoria Atkins can ‘state the bloody obvious’, in sympathy with any other sensible people in society who has not been captured by this ideology. They know in good faith that a woman is an adult human female, a man is an adult human male and public, private and third sector organisations have all been in the thrall of a sort of collective madness for too long. So, amid this political disruption triggered by Cass, where does this leave the BPS and its leadership? Back to Columbo.

Lessons from Crime and Punishment

The writers of Columbo took their inspiration from Dostoevsky and his tale of ‘ideological madness’, which triggered and justified homicidal violence. In Crime and Punishment at first the detective Porfiry Petrovich feels his way into the circumstances of the murder committed by Rodion Raskolnikov. Soon Porfiry knows exactly who the culprit is, but he bides his time. A central theme at this point in the book is not ‘who dunnit?’ but ‘when will they confess?’

The analogy between Porfiry and BPSWatch.com works so far but the two scenarios are different for the following reasons. First, BPSWatch has not been preoccupied with a murder, but with organisational misdeeds and policy advice, which have put children at risk. Second, we are concerned to bring many more than one perpetrator to book. Third, we can only speculate about their inner worlds. Raskolnikov struggles throughout the plot with angst and guilt about his crime. To date there has been little evidence of contrition from the BPS leaders in relation to their responsibility for the corruption and dysfunction we have elaborated on this blog. Ipso facto the BPS bullshit machine does not have a ‘confession’ button on its control panel. What we see at the top is not guilt, shame or contrition but apparently la belle indifference.

Applying the analogy and its caveats to the post-Cass scenario, who would we place in the dock? There has been a spectrum of intent, culpability and complicity. In the vanguard have been nameable transgender ideology activists who have captured the policy apparatus. This is evidenced by the public statements of the two most recent chairs of the BPS Sexualities Section, newly renamed the Section of Gender Sexuality and Relationship Diversity (GSRD). The rights of lesbian women like those of all women are pushed aside in the pursuit of (MtF) trans rights. Just as with Stonewall this BPS Section has virtually abandoned a focus on same sex attraction. Now the obsession is with ‘gender identity’ not sexuality.

Adam Jowett, former chair of the erstwhile Sexualities Section of the BPS moved on and up in the cabal by becoming a member of the ill-constituted Board of Trustees. BPSWatch has long noted the lack of independence and blatant conflict of interest inherent in the structure of the BPS’s governing body (https://bpswatch.com/2023/12/03/evil-secrets-and-good-intentions-in-the-bps/). Jowett moved to attend to the history of British psychology, now viewed through the anachronistic lens of current LGBTQ+ campaigning. With colleagues he has been influential offering research to the British government about ‘conversion therapy’. The outcome though has been lacklustre. For example, we find this statement from the Jowett et al research in 2021:

“The UK government has committed to exploring legislative and non-legislative options for ending so-called “conversion therapy”. In this report the term “conversion therapy” is used to refer to any efforts to change, modify or suppress a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity regardless of whether it takes place in a healthcare, religious or other setting.”.

However, the problem for the report writers was the lack of evidence to support their search for transphobic therapists or conversion practices, as they acknowledge here:

“ There is no representative data on the number of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people who have undergone conversion therapy in the UK. However, some evidence appears to suggest that transgender people may be more likely to be offered or receive conversion therapy than cisgender lesbian, gay or bisexual people. There is consistent evidence that exposure to conversion therapy is associated with having certain conservative religious beliefs.” (See https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/conversion-therapy-an-evidence-assessment-and-qualitative-study)

The research then could find no solid evidence that conversion therapy was prevalent in mainstream mental health practice and a weak speculation is left (mainly from a US not British cultural context) that ‘reparative therapy’ in religious therapy exists. Jowett et al are fighting a battle about aversion therapy in the 1970s (won by gay activists) and eliding it with the threat of exploratory psychological therapy with children today, which is a recurring tactic of transgender activists (Pilgrim, 2023b). 

That tactic has been replayed in the BPS by Jowett’s successor Rob Agnew, who describes him as:  “lead author of one of the most important pieces of LGBTQ+ research in the last 50 years” https://www.linkedin.com/posts/drrobagnew_british-psychologists-at-pride-2023-joining-activity-7056511344367296512-Cmyg/). Agnew is openly and stridently a transgender activist on social media and in pieces published in The Psychologist. A favourite pastime is his calling his colleagues “bigots” and attacking psychoanalysis. The links to individual statements below are easily found on his LinkedIn profile where he is “Chair of Section of Psychology of Gender, Sexuality and Relationship Diversity, British Psychological Society”. Although there is the disclaimer “(opinions my own unless otherwise stated)“, his legitimacy as a BPS leader is foregrounded. This specially conferred legitimacy is obvious, and reflected in the confidence and certainty with which he speaks. Here are some samples of his reaction to the Cass Report on social media: 

“Bad news for our trans youth this morning, but let’s be honest, we knew it was coming.” 

“Why was Cass unable to find the research needed to provide trans youth with vital medical approaches that other countries found?” 

“Here are some facts for you: Puberty blockers are not experiemental (sic), we have decades of research on their effects. They are safe. They are reversible. There is some evidence of minor enduring differences after cessation however these costs are vastly outweighed by the immediate benefits to the child/young person.”

Agnew reifies the existence of “trans kids” as a self-evident fact (cf. Brunskell-Evans and Moore, 2018). His “affirmation only” approach precludes psychological exploration (note he is a psychologist). Why does he separate this group out from other troubled youngsters?  Cass (who is not a psychologist) is wiser in acknowledging that children can at times be ‘gender questioning’ during the existential turbulence common in adolescence. The abrogation of safeguarding advocated by Agnew, (i.e., claiming that puberty blockers are safe) is the very opposite of a cautious protective approach. Contrast that with Cass who has emphasised that, “Therapists must be allowed to question children who believe they are trans….. exploration of these issues is essential” (https://archive.ph/c4Vlr).

In October 2023 Agnew rejected the idea that women should have the right to have single-sex wards. He stated wrongly that there had never been a demand for it and that there had been no complaints. He clearly had avoided any disconfirming evidence that MtF transgender patients might harm women in healthcare settings (see https://www.medicalbrief.co.za/uk-hospital-tells-police-patient-could-not-have-been-raped-since-attacker-was-transgender/).  For Agnew, the finer feelings of MtF transgender patients revealed who he prioritised in relation to dignity, ignoring women’s privacy and safety. When Cass reported, Agnew toed the line of all the other transgender activist organisations that she was wrong for excluding studies that might undermine her conclusions and advice. That view about a purported 100 excluded studies was repeated and then quickly retracted by the Labour MP Dawn Butler in parliament. 

Cass made very clear her criteria for inclusion and the standard of evidence required to warrant biomedical interventions with physically health children. Agnew and Butler were both wrong but only the latter has admitted it. Defiantly Agnew claims to be working with others on a scientifically more valid alternative to the Cass Review; meanwhile he relies on, contributes to and repeats the authority of the WPATH (World Professional Association for Transgender Health) guidelines. These are not analogous to the cautious equipoise from NICE guidelines about clinical risk and efficacy. In the past twenty years, the activists driving WPATH have been part of a sinister turn: there has been a deliberate mission creep from adult transsexuals to children. As the Canadian feminist Meghan Murphy has recently noted, transgender activists made a major tactical mistake when they ‘went for the kids’. 

Agnew has complained that ‘cis het’ people like Cass should not pronounce on matters trans. Despite his ad hominemdismissal of this respected female paediatrician, her views are shaping an incipient NHS orthodoxy (Abassi, 2024).  Agnew has failed to grasp the range of forces against him. To be gender critical in Britain is not merely the preserve of religious conservatives but extends to all philosophical realists and a swathe of liberal and left-wing feminists. That broad and expanding alliance reveals that ‘trans liberation’ today really is not the same as gay liberation in the 1970s. Agnew like Billy Bragg, preaching from his secular pulpit, makes that false comparison. Political opportunists like Eddie Izzard have become a laughing stock, as desperate to get into women’s toilets as to find a local Labour Party prepared to adopt him as a candidate. Meanwhile, at the time of writing, the organisation Agnew represents, the BPS, is like a paralysed headless chicken. It seems unable to find a convincing response to the Cass Review, which is evidence-based and prioritises child safety. 

Other key activists have played a leading role in capturing the BPS position on sex and gender. Christina Richards led the charge for inclusivity and affirmation, including for ‘trans kids’, when chairing and pushing through the 2019 gender guidelines from the BPS (https://www.bps.org.uk/guideline/guidelines-psychologists-working-gender-sexuality-and-relationship-diversity). The guidelines resemble no other professional practice documents. Of six members who produced these under Richard’s control, two have forced the BPS to remove their names in professional embarrassment. Patients were to be called ‘sluts’ if they so wanted it and BDSM and other variants of ‘kink’ were a part of a de-repressive future to be celebrated by psychologists as being essentially non-pathological. Richards declared publicly that the debate about the effectiveness and safety about puberty blockers was now ‘shut’ (cf. Biggs, 2023). This is said in a YouTube video in which Dr Richards appears; the relevant segment occurs at about the 40 minute mark. This statement was made pre-Cass, but then or now it was a ridiculous claim, not worthy of a leader in an allegedly learned organisation.  No academic debate should ever be ‘shut’. Moreover, when a topic is fraught with conceptual and empirical uncertainty it deserves more discussion not less. 

Richards, like Jowett paving the way for Agnew’s stridency, also warned against unwelcomed ‘bigots’ applying for psychology posts in gender services, encouraged by the special feature interview with the editor of The Psychologist (https://www.bps.org.uk/psychologist/featured-job-highly-specialist-clinical-or-counselling-psychologist).  Complaints from one of us (Pat Harvey) about these unprofessional interventions from Richards were, true to form, rejected by the powers that be in the BPS (Harvey, 2023). Cass has thrown a spanner in these works and the BPS is now, advertising for psychologists interested in a new review focusing on children alone, having stalwartly refused to initiate this until it became inevitable, but too late.

Igi Moon is the other highly influential activist at the BPS and has led the MOU campaign against conversion therapy. For a while the administrative costs for this campaign were borne by the Society. Between 2015 and 2017 the MOU switched from only focusing on sexuality to include ‘gender identity’. This change was politically significant pre-Cass (Pilgrim, 2023b). Moon has depicted exploratory psychological therapy and formulation-based case work as being a form of conversion therapy. Cass disagrees. 

For now, Cass, not the likes of Agnew, Moon or Richards, is shaping public policy. The days of the latter being driven by Stonewall are seemingly over and its dissenting splinter of the LGB Alliance is pleased to be in the ascendency. As for Mermaids, their shroud waving of the oft regurgitated ‘better a live trans daughter than a dead cis son’ cuts no ice empirically (cf. Wiepjes et al 2020). Moreover, their failed legal action against the LGB Alliance has left them both poorer and looking decidedly foolish, especially in lesbian and gay circles. They are currently still being investigated by the Charity Commission; their in-schools campaigning, and breast binding merchandising, are declining in popularity but reflect a continuing defiance of a post-Cass policy trend.

Probably we will be waiting for a very long time for activists to recant and confess to the errors of their ways. ‘Ideological madness’ (pace Dostoevsky) can be refractory, so there is little point in holding our breath. However, when we turn to the administrative apparatus that has given these transgender activists succour, and provided a public space of legitimacy, others should go in the dock. 

Sarb Bajwa, the Society’s £130 000 plus per annum CEO has repeatedly ignored multi-signed letters of concern about the problematic sex and gender policy line; his contempt for ordinary members and their complaints seems boundless. Having survived the 18 month £70k fraud spree of his executive assistant, using his BPS credit card, enjoying almost a year on the salaried leisure of his suspension, he has come back to “work”. He has watched the resignation and departure of the recently appointed independent chair of the board to whom he was (notionally) accountable. 

Rachel Dufton, Director of Communications, runs the propaganda wing of the BPS, loyally supports the CEO and keeps a watchful eye over all BPS publications, including The Psychologist and Clinical Psychology Forum. She assured, pre-Cass, a uniformly pro-affirmation position. For example, her team censored a piece I wrote for Forum, raising concerns about GIDS and freedom of expression (even though it had been agreed for publication by the editor). When I complained about this censorship, it was investigated and the ‘comms team’ decision was upheld on grounds of the poor quality of my piece. After a year of repeated inquiries, I was eventually told that the investigating officer who was considering the complaint was the CEO. 

Neither Bajwa nor Dufton are experts in either healthcare ethics or the history of British clinical psychology, but the agenda was power not academic norms. The New Public Management model requires that authority does not come from true wisdom borne of relevant research but only from ‘the right to manage’.  The latter includes ‘controlling the narrative’ of the organisation; the managerial mandate always overrides democratic accountability, and transparency is an option but not an obligation. The ‘comms team’ has a role here that subordinates all other interests, such as those members pressing in good faith for the BPS to regain its role as a credible scholarly organisation. For now, that credibility is in tatters.

Pre-Cass, when the censorship of my piece was blatant, the editor of Forum was instructed by the ‘comms team’ to print an apologia for GIDS from its past leader Bernadete Wren. She informed the world that a ‘social revolution’ about sex and gender had now taken place and that GIDS was a progressive form of paediatric healthcare. An alternative view, now replacing that, is that clinical psychology was heading up one of the worst iatrogenic scandals of this century to date, with a generation of physically healthy children being disfigured and sterilised by an evidence-free biomedical experiment.

Jon Sutton must also be in the dock. He is the long serving editor of The Psychologist. He has published innumerable pieces defending the affirmative stance but refused to publish alternative accounts. One piece was published from a transgender activist, Reubs Walsh, who was not even a BPS member. It had been prepared over months with editorial coaching to maximise its credibility (https://www.bps.org.uk/psychologist/blow-rights-transgender-children).  Contrast that scenario of editorial favouritism with a considered critique from the educational psychologist Claire McGuiggan and her colleagues, who are gender critics. She has protested without success that a piece from them was offered to Sutton to be summarily rejected (see McGuiggan et al 2024). A number of complaints about Sutton’s biased decision-making to the editorial advisory board, chaired by Richard Stephens, have got nowhere. As with Bajwa supporting Dufton, the same seemingly unconditional confidence of Stephens for Sutton is evident.

If there is any doubt that The Psychologist remains captured by transgender advocacy, it has listed the Singapore based Gender GP as a go-to resource. This organisation is in the business of prescribing puberty blockers and cross sex hormones, in many cases to minors. At the time of writing in a high court ruling (https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Approved-Judgment-Re-J-1-May-2024.pdf) the judge has said the following: ” I would urge any other court faced with a case involving Gender GP to proceed with extreme caution before exercising any power to approve or endorse treatment that that clinic may prescribe”. In response to our complaints about the endorsement of this unethical organisation, Sutton and Stephens were dismissive. 

Finally, there are the faceless people inside the BPS, Trustees with conflicts of interest, and other senior managers who we might put in the dock. Were they all true believing transgender allies all along? Might they have kept quiet despite the problems that were obvious about this and other murky matters? The latter included the fraud and the kangaroo court expulsion of a whistleblowing president, which we have covered extensively on this blog. This unedifying scenario of mass silent complicity in the BPS recalls the view of the sociologist Stanley Cohen discussing ‘states of denial’ (such as ‘moral stupor’ about the scale of child sexual abuse in society):

Intellectuals who keep silent about what they know, who ignore the signs that matter by moral standards, are even more culpable when their society is free and open. They can speak freely but they choose not to. (Cohen, 2001: 286)

For now, we await a public confession from those at the top of the BPS about their policy position pre-Cass. What have they to say now about a psychology-led iatrogenic scandal involving child victims? Anything at all?

Conclusion

The Cass Review is likely to shape public policy on the sex/gender question for the foreseeable future. The transgender activists have lost their mandate on the bigger political stage. This leaves the BPS leadership in a tricky position. The previous virtue-signalling support they made for policies, such as the highly flawed gender document of 2019 or the MOU campaign on conversion therapy from 2017, with its mangled understanding of the concept, is now looking politically implausible and embarrassing. 

The discredited GIDS regime was led by British psychologists, and it is dishonest to conveniently ignore that fact. Consequently, it behoves those managing the BPS now to do their own look back exercise about that tragic piece of recent history. Even on instrumental grounds, it might be better to get on with that task of reflecting on lessons learned, in advance of a fuller public inquiry into transgender capture in British organisations, which is in the offing. The chance of this advice being heeded is slim. Given the lack of intellectual integrity (and quite frankly competence) of senior managers and their complicit Board of Trustees, the BPS leadership is now highly compromised and may opt to return to its comfortable ostrich-with-its-head-in-the-sand tradition. 

Playing the Columbo role here, we may be waiting for a long time for honest confessions from those at the top pre-Cass; many have bailed out and scattered in self-preservation. Managers (especially of the finance variety) have come and gone quickly. What might happen is that those remaining will adapt pragmatically to the new public policy landscape in healthcare and education, picking up the crumbs they can opportunistically. The recent emphasis on the need for more and more psychological therapies for children and young people provides such an opportunity. This might happen under the radar, with the inconvenient truth about GIDS then being quietly ignored, in a state of collective denial or dissociation. 

This returns us to the lesser considered matter in this piece, I began with. If sometimes some people have false memories, why do experimental psychologists focus overwhelmingly on the weak and the vulnerable within this claim (i.e., distressed children and adults reporting being abused in the past)? Why put so much forensic emphasis on the risks for those claiming to be falsely accused? After all, logically it is quite likely that perpetrators in positions of power might, for instrumental reasons, hysterically forget their own misdemeanours. They have a lot to lose if the truth comes out. 

Why don’t our experimentalist colleagues try to make sense of la belle indifference of those at the top of the BPS? We certainly need a formulation about why it is so obviously an organisation without a memory.  To compound the woes created by that collective amnesia, there is no independent Chair running its governing body and a CEO facing a petition for his removal. How much worse can this organisation get before it collapses or the Charity Commission eventually wakes from its slumber to take control? We have been asking a variant of that question on this blog for far too long, but we will keep asking it while ever children remain at risk. 

 References

Abassi, K. (2024) The Cass review: an opportunity to unite behind evidence informed care in gender medicine. BMJ 385:q837

Andrews, P. (2021) This is hate, not debate Index on Censorship 50, 2, 73-75

Biggs, M. (2023) The Dutch Protocol for juvenile transsexuals: origins and evidence, Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy, 49:4, 348-368.

British Psychological Society (2019). Guidelines for working with Gender, Sexuality and Relationship Diversity. Leicester: British Psychological Society.

Brunskell-Evans, H. and Moore, M. (Eds.) (2018) Transgender Children and Young People: Born in Your Own Body. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

Butler, J. (1999) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge

Chomsky, N. (2018) https://www.openculture.com/2018/02/noam-chomsky-explains-whats-wrong-with-postmodern-philosophy-french-intellectuals.html

Cohen, S. (2011) States of Denial London: Routledge 

Conway A and Pilgrim D. (2022) The policy alignment of the British False Memory Society and the British Psychological Society. Journal of Trauma & Dissociation. 23(2):165-176

Cutajar, M.C., Mullen, P.E., Ogloff, J.R.P., Thomas, S.D., Wells, D.L. & Spataro, J. (2010) Psychopathology in a large cohort of sexually abuse children followed up to 43 years. Child Abuse & Neglect 34, 11, 813-22  

Dahlen, S. (2021) Dual uncertainties: On equipoise, sex differences and chirality in clinical research New Bioethics. 27, 3, 219-229.

Dutton, K. (2022) Black and White Thinking London: Bantam

Harvey, P. (2023) Policy capture at the BPS (1): the Gender Guidelines In D.Pilgrim (ed) British Psychology in Crisis: A Case Study in Organisational Dysfunction Oxford: Phoenix.

McGuiggan, C., D’Lima, P. and Robertson, L. (2024) Where are the educational psychologists when children say they’re transgender? https://genspect.org/where-are-the-educational-psychologists-when-children-say-theyre-transgender/

Nussbaum, M. (1999> The professor of parody: the hip defeatism of Judith Butler. New Republic https//newrepublic.com/article/150687/professor-parody

Pilgrim, D. (2023a) BPS Bullshit In D.Pilgrim (ed) British Psychology in Crisis: A Case Study in Organisational Dysfunction Oxford: Phoenix.xNussbaum, M. (1999) The professor of parody: the hip defeatism of Judith Butler. New Republic  https://newrepublic.com/article/150687/professor-parody

Pilgrim D. (2023b) British mental healthcare responses to adult homosexuality and gender non-conforming children at the turn of the twenty-first century. History of Psychiatry. 34(4):434-450.

Pfeffer CA, Hines S, Pearce R, Riggs DW, Ruspini E & White FR (2023) Medical uncertainty and reproduction of the “normal”: Decision-making around testosterone therapy in transgender pregnancy. SSM – Qualitative Research in Health, 4, 100297

 Stock, K. (2021) What is a woman? Index on Censorship   50, 2, 70-72

Turner, J. (2024)   Cass was a skirmish: now prepare for a war https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/cass-was-a-skirmish-now-prepare-for-a-war-qgpvp9zz9

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