Academic freedom and censorship – psychology UNREDACTED

David Pilgrim and Ashley Conway post…

Recently we submitted an article to The Psychologist (appended below in full). Its title reflected a serious current political context in the wake of the release of the Epstein files. The argument we pursued was well referenced, reflecting the research we had completed for our book length critique of the false memory movement, about to appear this year and cited in the piece.

The decision to submit the article would have one of two outcomes. First, it might have been published, which we thought important given the contention of the false memory debate in psychology and its implications for the victims of crime, especially children. Second, and more likely it would be rejected, given that The Psychologist rarely allows articles which are critical of the BPS. In this case the existing policy position on memory and the law still reflects the cynical view about victim testimony, and jury decision making, in cases of contested claims of abuse from the past.

Not surprisingly then, the piece was rejected and so we pressed the editor Jon Sutton to tell us why, but he gave no detail except to say that he had had it reviewed and it would not ‘fit’ in The Psychologist. We pressed him for all the feedback offered by the reviewer or reviewers he had used (the norm in academic journals) but he refused saying this:

The Psychologist is a magazine. We [sic] state this clearly and repeatedly, and have done for many years. As editor, I make the final decisions on content, and I do so with consideration, consultation, and accountability (to a representative body of BPS members in the Psychologist and Digest Editorial Advisory Committee, and ultimately to the Trustees). We [sic] have publicly available policies and protocols.

I absolutely understand that rejection can hurt. I’m sorry if my handling of your submission did not adequately take into account your feelings. But I’m really keen to keep this professional. So I ask you, please, do not copy me into your own continued discussions and personal criticism of me. If you do so, I believe I would be justified, with my manager’s approval, in blocking your email addresses.

Best wishes

Jon

The allusion to criticism of him was to this from a message from DP to AC, which was copied deliberately to Sutton to be transparent about our disdain for his rejection. We were trying to model what the BPS and its apparatchiks clearly fail to do routinely: be open and complete about our thoughts about the decision. This is what DP said to AC about the editor and his decision, to his face rather than behind his back:

“First, he [Sutton] shows clear bias on this matter (we have the receipts about the lionisation of Loftus and his denial that the BPS was aligned with the British False Memory Society). Second, if that bias were not related to major public policy questions about child protection and our new post-Epstein context of reflection we could move on. However, we cannot move on because that external context embeds the views of both us and Sutton, and so we have a shared responsibility to engage in a serious discussion about, what we consider to be, the partisan faux-science of the false memory movement.

Sutton blocking that discussion unilaterally was not wise but he did it, because he could (a motif of power). It aligns with the adolescent ‘no debate’ position common now in immature identity politics, which in my view have infected the discourse now dominant in The Psychologist. Debates are never over they are only blocked or ignored for a while.”

The allusion from Sutton about our feelings was seemingly odd (we were not hurt but angry at Sutton fronting the inadequate policy on memory and the law in such a glib manner). However, he is an invidious position. He works for the BPS, so he has a conflict of interest, when and if submissions criticise the status quo in the Society, which implicitly our submission did. If he were to be replaced as editor, any newcomer would be in the same bind.

With regard to the current BPS position, the fact of the matter is that once the balanced stance on memory and the law from John Morton and others in the 1990s was superseded by a group led by Martin Conway, containing current or imminent members of the scientific advisory group of the British False Memory Society (BFMS), then everything changed. This was policy capture in the BPS, insinuating the campaigning position of the BFMS (no doubt to the glee of those in latter). All balancing arguments and evidence from clinicians working with trauma and in child protection work, as well as more wary experimentalist was now excluded in the BPS policy. As a result, it remains tunnel visioned and indifferent to wider questions about victims. We laid out our position about that alignment between the BFMS and the BPS in a previous publication (Conway, A. and Pilgrim,(2022). The policy alignment of the British False Memory Society and the British Psychological Society. Journal of Trauma & Dissociation. Mar-Apr;23(2):165-176.) In a prior email to us, which we can cite, Sutton flatly denied the truth of that alignment.

That is the political context of the tetchy exchange between us and Sutton. Readers of this blog are now given the rejected piece in full. They can make their own judgment about its academic worthiness and whether the readership of The Psychologist might have benefitted from its publication rather than its rejection:

THE EPSTEIN FILES: TIME TO RETHINK THE FALSE MEMORY DEFENCE?

David Pilgrim and Ashley Conway

False memories have been discussed previously in The Psychologist in a particular way, related to the plausibility of victimhood (Wright et al., 2006; French, 2018; Brewin and Andrews, 2017). In the recent context of the partially released ‘Epstein files’, a fresh controversy has arisen about the credibility of the recall of the rich and powerful, related to their past actions and inactions. The previous focus was promoted by a leading public intellectual, Elizabeth Loftus (Loftus and Ketcham, 1995; cf. Conway, A. and Pilgrim, 2026), who found loyal supporters within one part of British psychology (e.g. Blank et al., 2020; Conway, M. 2012). However, some other leading memory researchers, using a wider lens, were cautious about the narrow claims of this group (e.g. Baddley et al., 2025; Brewin, et al., 2020).

The loyal group, including Loftus herself, were longstanding members of the scientific advisory board of the British False Memory Society (BFMS) (Felstead and French, 2021). They and their equivalents in the US False Memory Syndrome Foundation (FMSF) advanced three interlocking claims:

1 False memories can be implanted in unsuspecting clients during forms of psychological therapy that are trauma-preoccupied and technically biased towards hypnosis and guided imagery. This leads to the reporting of unfounded recovered memories, involving alleged past abuse or crimes. Accordingly, both accusers and the accused are shared victims of wrong-headed psychotherapeutic norms.

2 Recovered repressed memories are an unscientific myth. Genuine cases of abuse are not forgotten by their victims. ‘Recovered memory therapy’ thus creates miscarriages of justice.

3 In ‘recovered memory therapy’ the concept of dissociation is a sleight of hand to re-vindicate the discredited unscientific psychoanalytical notion of repression.

By contrast, clinical and survivor researchers have responded to those points thus:

1 People report recovered memories before entering therapy or they may have never even been in therapy (Cheit 2014, 2023; Goodman-Delahunty et al, 2017; Smith et al.2000).

2 Directive efforts to implant memories are at odds with the norms of mainstream models of psychotherapy (cognitive-behavioural, psychodynamic, existential or person-centred). Exploring historical trauma is good practice in mental health work and is not a form of covert persuasion, because childhood adversity is a strong predictor of adult mental health problems, independent of diagnosis (Hillberg et al 2011). There is no evidence that there exists a practicum of ‘recovered memory therapy’, nor does it have a recognised training institute; it is thus a ‘straw man’. Academic doubts about what happens in therapy are based on surveyed therapists’ beliefs in relation to the possibility of recovered memories in the wake of real trauma, implying a link to widespread manipulative ‘recovered memory therapy’ in practice (Otgaar et al 2022). However, those sceptical experimentalists have no clinical knowledge of relating to victims of trauma and its complexities. They unwisely reject clinical research for its assumed inferiority, compared to experimental psychology (cf. Barker et al, 2023).

3 Dissociation is accepted by a wide range of clinicians who have no commitment to a psychoanalytical approach to their work. Disrupted and delayed recall are common in trauma victims. Dissociative phenomena are now well established and part of the routine focus of mental health practitioners, as well as being part of standard psychiatric nomenclatures, such as ICD and DSM, whereas the putative ‘false memory syndrome’ is notably missing from them (Lowenstein, 2018; Ross, 2022; cf. Otgaar et al 2019).

Tunnel vision and the four scenarios of false memories

A feature of the false memory movement has been its tunnel vision about one scenario: a person recalls something that in fact did not happen. However, logically if human recall is inefficient generally in life, which common sense tells us that it can be, but not always, then surely all scenarios are worth addressing in an open-minded way. The fact that in the original ‘lost in the mall’ study, most of the subjects were not duped, shows that memory frailty implies caution but not nihilism (Brewin et al, 2020). This point is reinforced if we take a wider lens on false memories, when comparing the four cells Table 1, which all in their own way provide examples of false memories.

Table 1. Four scenarios of false memories

	Accuser	Accused
False Positive	“I was abused” but this is not true False memory	“I committed a crime” but this is not true (false confession) False memory
False Negative	“I was not abused” but this is not true False memory	“I did not commit a crime” but this is not true False memory

Those supporting the false memory movement were overwhelmingly preoccupied with the top left cell in Table 1. The top right cell is intriguing but not connected to claims about therapeutic manipulation (Gudjonsson, 2018). Moreover, in the spirit of scientific equipoise, interest should have been expressed for completeness in the bottom two cells. Indeed, prospective studies of medically recorded abuse in childhood have demonstrated that victims may have no later memory at all of what happened to them (Williams, 1994). We return later to the importance of the bottom right cell in a post-Epstein context.

Legitimation and de-legitimation of the false memory movement

Pope (1997) was an early critic of the rhetorical over-claiming from the false memory movement. Such doubts about the empirical credibility of the false memory defence were also rehearsed by Blizzard and Shaw (2019). Despite such appeals for critical self-reflection and restraint, from the 1990s onwards Elizabeth Loftus persisted in her public role in several high-profile cases, including her work for the defence teams of, amongst others, Ted Bundy, Bill Cosby, Michael Jackson, Robert Durst, O.J. Simpson, Harvey Weinstein and Ghislaine Maxwell (see later).

Three other factors are relevant in relation to that pattern of the ‘punching down’ role of the false memory defence (with the rich and powerful looking to it as a potential source of judicial exoneration). The first is that its success rate has been lacklustre; most of the accused were then found guilty of serious crimes entailing sexual or non-sexual violence or lost appeals when already convicted.

The second is that much of the work using the defence was not related to celebrities or notorious clergy (such as the paedophile priest Paul Shanley) but disputes about firms using asbestos. The defence was used to cast doubt on the temporal link between a person with industrial disease and those who employed them (Hoult, 2023).

The third is that the use of findings from the psychological laboratory to query any human testimony, based on historical recall in court, is not analogous to the use of say DNA laboratory testing, which is of shared interest to both defence and prosecution teams in a court context. A technique is applied to the circumstances and specifics of a case in focus. With the false memory test there is a different logic and role for an expert witness. All that is offered is a generic doubt, based upon distal closed systems findings, provided selectively in the interests of the defence case. This doubt-casting is dubious because it entails the ecological fallacy, creating a spurious scientific confidence and biased reasoning (Uher, 2021; Smedslund, 2016; Adolph, 2019). Accordingly, judges in both the UK and the USA have at times ruled out the views of false memory expert witnesses because of that diffuse and generic doubt-casting and its consequent lack of case-specific situated relevance.

Evidence of biased personal interest

The bias in the false memory movement, and the punching down effect it has created, mainly undermined its legitimacy. But there was more; in addition, the bias against those complaining of their victimisation came at times from some on the scientific advisory boards of the FMSF and BFMS, who were clearly self-interested. Four stand out cases exemplify this point. These are relevant, because when bias in scientific research is evident (as in this case) our routine caution about ad hominem reasoning can be bracketed quite legitimately (Walton, 1998).

The first was Ralph Underwager a developmental psychologist who defended ‘intergenerational sex’ as harmless and God given in an interview in the Dutch paedophile magazine Paidika (Geraci, 1993). He was an early authoritative member of the FMSF scientific advisory board. During the 1980s he had led the campaign group VOCAL (Victims of Child Abuse Legislation), which argued that left wing social workers routinely removed children from good Christian families. This anticipated the campaigning stance of the FMSF during 1990s and after that respectable parents claiming their innocence were self-evidently innocent.

The second was a cognitive psychologist Dan B. Wright, who sexually harassed junior female colleagues. He has been a central figure in researching dubious recovered memories (Wright et al., 2018) and was on the advisory board of the BFMS. He claimed no memory of the accusations against him from the testimonies of ten separate complainants, which was then reported by journalists in Florida and then Nevada when he moved employment (Hargrave, 2022; Longhi, 2022).

The third was Mike Pendergrast, a popular science writer whose daughters were to complain about his sexualised conduct towards them, and he blamed their absurd claims on ‘hysterical’ therapists. He was a regular contributor to the FMSF newsletter and though not a psychologist sat on its scientific advisory board.

The fourth was a public intellectual and psychology graduate, Karl Sabbagh, a BFMS advisory board member, who groomed a 14-year-old girl online. In 2019, the police intervened to prevent intended sexual contact. The married 77-year-old was prosecuted, imprisoned and placed on the sex offenders register for life (see ‘Paedophile Karl Sabbagh, author and film maker, jailed for grooming child’ Oxford Mail September 22^nd, 2019). Ten years prior to his fall from grace Sabbagh produced a book promoting the false memory argument (Sabbagh, 2009). With resonances of the Underwager position, Sabbagh argued that paedophilia was a moral panic, with evidence being lacking about its harm (see Pilgrim, 2018).

Sabbagh and Wright were removed from the advisory board of the BFMS by its Director, Kevin Felstead, after journalists informed him of their crimes or misdemeanours (Delahunty, 2023). Sabbagh was thus still on the board while in prison. Felstead denied any contact with Wright over his ten-year presence in the organisation, indicating its lack of meaningful functioning.

Past and recent uses of the false memory defence

The false memory movement began to accrue criticisms from its inception, (e.g. van der Kolk et al., 2001; Freyd, 1998, 1996; Cheit, 2023, 2014; Crook,2022; Hoult 2023, 1998). By the time Epstein’s rich and powerful network came into view (including politicians, rock stars, stellar academics and royalty), the false memory movement was in decline; hence the closure of the FMSF in 2019 and the BFMS in 2022, though the latter had been barely functioning for a decade.

Nonetheless, the high-profile defence role of Elizabeth Loftus persisted, now in relation to Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s partner in crime. This trial in 2021/22 was par for the course, the false memory defence cut no ice, and Maxwell is now serving a 20-year prison sentence for her role in the trafficking of female minors and their sexual victimisation by Epstein and his friends and contacts. At times she participated directly in the abuse of the girls, who were as young as 14 years.

A close friend of Epstein and Maxwell (the then Prince Andrew, Duke of York) was involved in a relevant negotiation. After his interview on Newsnight in 2019 (September 19^th), he reached an out of court settlement with Virginia Giuffre, one of many victims of Epstein’s and Maxwell’s sexual exploitation. He paid her a reported figure of £12 million in 2022. He said on camera, “I have no recollection of ever meeting this lady, none whatsoever.” Shown a photograph of him with her, when she was 17 years of age, accompanied by Ghislaine Maxwell, he denied any recollection still and lamented that his team of investigators had not been able to establish that it was a fake (his only explanation for his innocence).

However, despite his seeming perplexity about a non-event in his life, in February 2022 he paid ‘the lady’, Virginia Giuffre, millions of pounds, while continuing to claim innocence of any wrongdoing. Prior to his out of court settlement, his defence team were exploring the use of the false memory defence to undermine the credibility of Giuffre’s claims (Oppenheim, 2022). Giuffre went on to commit suicide in 2025.

This scenario was given more context when the Epstein files included photographs showing him on the floor crouched over an impassive young female. For legal reasons, news outlets continued to report his strenuous denial of any wrongdoing, but the mainstream mass media, the public, the King and parliamentarians were all to adopt their own criticisms and sanctions against him in advance of any police action or court prosecution. (His subsequent arrest was not in relation to alleged sexual misconduct but about exploring evidence of financial misconduct in a public office.)

The Mountbatten-Windsor case is an example to be placed in the bottom right cell of Table 1. The same is true in relation to the disgraced UK ambassador to the US, Peter Mandelson, another associate of Epstein, who found himself unable to recall frequent email contact with him, after his conviction for sexual offences. He also could not remember Epstein giving him the large sum of $75,000 in 2003/4. Mandelson was arrested in relation to financial misconduct in a public office within a week of his old friend and business colleague.

Another example to be considered in the bottom right cell of Table 1 is the sole suspect in the rape and murder of Martine Vik Magnussen in 2008. The Yemeni prince Farouk Abdulhak fled to his home country and awaits extradition to the UK. At first claiming his innocence, in 2023 he subsequently, admitted responsibility for the crime note as a recovered memory, emerging from the haze of a past affected by sexual and emotional arousal, drink and drugs (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-65033048).

These cases raise important ethical and psychological questions about the relationship, from context to context in open systems, between recall, self-deceit, motivated self-interest and interpersonal dissimulation. That complexity cannot be clarified by studying decontextualised trivial events, with duped subjects in the psychological laboratory. Such reductionism offers us no understanding of the complexities of what has come to light about the toxic mix of patriarchy, financial corruption and probable manipulations by the security services of more than one nation. At this point psychology has reached the limits of its disciplinary ‘skill set’ and might well need to look elsewhere for help to make sense of distorted recall. The discredited elite actors in Epstein’s network, two of whom created a political crisis in the UK in early 2026, highlight why an open-minded memory researcher should not limit their interest to the top left-hand cell of Table 1.

If psychologists are to regain any credibility for their contribution to memory science in judicial settings, then all four cells should surely be of interest. Journalistic and political interest now is less about accusers claiming that something happened when it did not (e.g. Abramsky 2004). Instead, the media storm and political fallout of the Epstein files have shifted the focus to how powerful figures can seemingly forget their central role in scurrilous events in the past. That shift from the plausibility of the victim to the plausibility of perpetrator began with the emergence of the #MeToo movement and was then amplified with the partial release of the Epstein files, with more implications in the offing at the time of writing.

Conclusion

The political ambiguity about the impact of the false memory movement on mainstream academic opinion invites our historical interest, to prompt proper research in a post-Epstein context. Science and justice are not only served within the domain of individual cases, with contested accounts of accused and accusers. They are also served by a serious examination of a partisan social movement, which has claimed an unwarranted pre-eminent scientific authority and queried, and even belittled, the judgments of ordinary people.

We have argued above that the false memory movement invites that critical attention. It may be best approached by an interdisciplinary investigation involving serious academic historians, philosophers, lawyers and sociologists. To date psychology, as a single siloed discipline, has failed to establish its own a consensus appraisal and has thus not resolved ‘the memory wars’, in its midst.

References

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Barker, C., Taggart, D., Gonzalez, M., Quail, S., Eglinton, R., Ford, S. and Tantam, W. (2023). The truth project- paper two- using staff training and consultation to inculcate a testimonial sensibility in non-specialist staff teams working with survivors of child sexual abuse. Frontiers in Psychiatry, 14, 1177622-5.

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Blizard, R. and Shaw, M (2019). Lost-in-the-mall: False memory or false defense? Journal of Child Custody, 16:1, 20-41.

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Brewin, C.R. and Andrews, B. (2017). False memories of childhood abuse. The Psychologist June 7^th.

Cheit, R. (2023). https://www.recoveredmemory.org/case-archive

Cheit, R. (2014). The Witch-Hunt Narrative: Politics, Psychology and the Sexual Abuse of Children. Oxford: Oxford University Press

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Crook, L. (2022). False Memories: The Deception that Silenced Millions New York: TM Publishing: LLC.

Delahunty, S. (2021). Charity reports itself after Third Sector alerts it to sex-offender advisory panel member. Third SectorFebruary 3rd.

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French, C. (2018). Reaching ‘Brenda from the chip shop’: scientific literacy. The Psychologist March, 45.

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"The Psychologist", 'False Memory Syndrome', Academic freedom and censorship, Gender, Identity Politics, Memory and the Law Group

TWO TYPES OF IDEOLOGICAL CAPTURE IN THE BPS

11th Feb 2026 AdminBPSWatch

David Pilgrim posts…..

Recently, the social justice obsession of the BPS (especially promoted by the editor of The Psychologist) has been the focus of a piece in the conservative newspaper the Daily Telegraph. Several disaffected psychologists were quoted, including one from a co-founder of this blog, Pat Harvey. She made a point of noting her left leaning values, which the piece (February 4^th 2026) dutifully reported (https://archive.ph/owqF1) [Note: this link may not work if you are using a VPN].

As a case study in the mess that many organisations now encounter, the piece does a good job; the BPS is by no means unique. This mess deserves proper analysis. There is no point in replicating the infantile binary reasoning of identity politics (IP) (‘you are either for or against us’), when making sense of them (Dutton, 2020). Calling it all left wing ‘wokery’ (which you subscribe to or resist) is understandable but a simplification.

This is a complex scenario for two reasons. First, at the turn of this century, the Western left had to face its major strategic failures. The Soviet Union collapsed, demonstrating that authoritarian vanguardism did not deliver either political equality or personal freedom. Moreover, its alternative, social democracy, by and large was incorporated into neoliberalism (with some push back in Scandinavia and Scotland). For example, Blairism in the UK went further in its public policies than Margaret Thatcher ever dreamed of. IP and neoliberalism then ensured that radical individualism was valorised and fetishised.

The second point follows. Given the new individualism and strategic failure of political progressiveness, the left adopted an alternative tactic by focusing on the politics of recognition, as structuralist accounts were displaced by poststructuralism (Honneth, 1995; Butler, 1999). Some on the left spotted a weakness immediately. This shift to poststructuralist accounts would (a) focus on individual rather than collective grievances and (b) partisan identities would be divisive, setting sub-groups in society against one another. In my book Identity Politics: Where Did It All Go Wrong?, I draw attention to such wise warnings from old lefties like Eric Hobsbawn in Britain and Nancy Fraser in the USA (Fraser, 1999). IP has become a lazy strategic shortcut for the left and for the reasons these two writers predicted, they have failed. The right spotted an open goal, and IP has become a large target, difficult to miss for, say, the columnists and reporters of the Daily Telegraph or Daily Mail.

Decolonisation as a restricted form of historiography?

IP has not been just about this lazy short cut on the left. It has also played into the hands of authoritarian traditionalism on the right. For example, religious conservatism dwells on arrogant identitarianism (Fekete, 2016; François and Godwin, 2008) (the latter term as a synonym for identity politics is used by some academic analysts). The religious right in the USA is a clear example, as are the feudal norms of radical Islam (Hochschild, 2016; Diamond, 1998; Allen, 1996). The Brexit debacle reflected the rise of right-wing identity-focused concerns (culminating quite probably in Reform becoming our next government) (Sobolewska and Ford, 2020).

Right- and left-wing forms of IP have shared the tactic of the self-righteous suppression of free speech. Critics of organised religion are met with death threats or accusations of ‘Islamophobia’ leading to deplatforming at academic events. Ditto for those of us who are gender critical, with the heckler’s veto shutting down who can say what in conferences or teaching. Once unpopular speech is conflated with actual violence, then the Enlightenment has been betrayed – and the BPS has played its part.

This scenario of a violation of a key Enlightenment value (freedom of expression for all) has favoured the professional classes (Nossel, 2020). The latter rely for their legitimacy on their graduate status and special claims of epistemological authority derived from unfettered academic research. In the case of psychology, this has led hypocritically to an approach to knowledge which is both restrictive and prescriptive. That is, only this sort of exploration in the academy or the clinic is permitted and psychologists cannot reflect on complexity but must become political activists, where one value position only is prescribed. The piece in the Daily Telegraph, quite understandably, dwelt on these restrictive and prescriptive aspects of the BPS discourse.

If social justice activism was a lazy short cut for the left in wider politicking, then decolonising the curriculum was its glib virtue signalling rallying cry and partner in the academy. Again, this is a half-baked approach to history because it too is restrictive and prescriptive. A great irony here in the British cultural context is that while psychology has relied on its eugenic history, this was not much about race but a lot about class (Pearson, 1905; Pilgrim, 2022a and b; Pilgrim, 2008, Benn Michaels, 2006). Karl Pearson was certainly a racist but subsequently the main concerns in British social policy were about the fecundity of the poor and their inherited inadequacies, discussed by Cyril Burt in his advice about educational policy (Mazumdar, 2004). Today’s racial focus misses the point, not because it is irrelevant but because the history of class in the UK, at home not abroad, is more relevant. Locale, ethnicity and poverty are a better intersecting account of predicted disadvantage than skin colour (Wacquant, 2022).

Another irony is that while the most recent social justice preoccupation (such as race or transgender) might drive some historical interest, the BPS has failed palpably to ensure that the history of psychology is taught more generally and with rigour in higher education. Many in the History and Philosophy Section tried and failed to reverse that failure. British empiricism and its self-deception about disinterestedness and objectivity are still the tactical lever for worthies in the BPS to promote this narrative, on programmes like All In The Mind on Radio 4. An understanding of the history of British psychology is needed to understand that current self-satisfied norm in the discipline.

This leaves the Society having its cake and eating it – i.e. psychologists claiming to be impartial scientific incrementalists on the one hand but picking up the latest opportunity for value-led virtue signalling within modish IP, on the other. Look no further than the content of The Psychologist every month to prove this point. British psychology suffers twice over from the error of presentism. It both fetishises the most recent empirical research and the most recent social justice campaign to promote. History, properly applied, exposes that error of presentism, and its agenda should not be set pre-emptively as being only about ‘decolonising the curriculum’.

And there is more….

Critiques of IP and its corrosive impact on academic freedom are now relevant to the rhetorical weakness of the BPS as a charity and an allegedly learned body. The notion of ideological capture is part of that discourse about the degradation more generally of academic culture. IP has quite correctly drawn such critical interest across the political spectrum.

In the case of the BPS the naïve realism spawned by British empiricism has enabled a different sort of policy capture. That is evident in my previous posting on memory and the law. When John Morton chaired the memory and law group in the 1990s, a sensible balance was rehearsed about the frailties of human memory. More recently that sensible balance has had to be retained outside of the BPS, as Adrian Skinner helpfully clarified (see Comment at the end of this post). The report produced for the British Academy (Baddeley et al, 2023) eschewed the tunnel vision of Martin Conway and his acolytes. The wide lens and balanced approach, started by Morton and continued by Baddeley et al., has gone absent without leave from BPS officialdom.

In the case of the sub-culture of false memory fundamentalism, mainly situated across the psychology departments of Leeds, City University and Portsmouth, the displacement of Morton by Martin Conway ensured a blocked dialectic. Those psychologists concerned with child protection and working with traumatised clients were denied a voice to challenge that sub-cultural obsession with defending those accused. (See my previous post.)

My point of emphasis here is that current IP compliant messages in The Psychologist, ensured by its editor Jon Sutton, live cheek by jowl with a slavish adherence to the positivist legacy exemplified by Elizabeth Loftus in the 1990s. The academic champions of the false memory movement inside the BPS gave legitimacy to the now defunct British False Memory Society, just as Sutton’s editorial policy on defending a pre-Cass position about gender-confused children has ensured the exclusion of legitimate concerns from gender critics. When the latter speak out they are either ignored or slapped down.

Returning to doing proper history, before an allegedly learned body like the BPS nails its colours to an ideological line about gender, race or memory and the law, then a calm and rigorous look back at the contradictions set in train at the turn of the 20^thcentury, when the BPS was set up, should be reflected on. That look back would reveal that policy capture has come in two guises. The first is about cultural compliance with current virtue signalling norms since the turn of this century. Accordingly, The Psychologist has acted as a barely veiled front for transgender activists. The second is about aggrandising one version of experimental psychology by pushing the narrow line of reasoning that casts doubt upon all testimony in courts, leaving the accused protected and the accuser disbelieved. This seemingly demonstrates how clever psychologists are and how ordinary people are scientifically illiterate.

What these two forms of policy capture have in common is that they have both betrayed children. In the case of paediatric transition, we are just waking up to a major medical scandal of iatrogenesis led, note, by psychologists (the case of GIDS at the Tavistock Clinic) (Abassi, 2024). In the case of memory and the law, a handful of accused parents of children, now grown up, have insinuated their campaigning aims into the BPS, via a sub-culture of academic allies. By contrast, John Morton, in the 1990s using a wider lens, emphasised that victims of child abuse needed more consideration because they outnumbered those campaigning parents many-fold.

This is the sort of mess we get into when leaders in the BPS try to mix virtue signalling IP with aloof and philosophically implausible claims of scientific disinterestedness. The special pleading of the first goes on and on because ‘the battle can never be won’ (Reed, 2018) as one after another splintered partisan interest group encourages reports of individual victimhood from within their midst.

The second, which is a more circumscribed version of policy capture, might be rectified. However, that would require that the outsourcing of proper academic consideration (the Baddeley report noted above) is now abandoned. This implies pressing the reset button for the memory and law group, which would have to include the very people previously excluded. This refers to clinical researchers, memory researchers and child protection experts who have a wider interest in their topic than just the false positive reasoning favouring the rich and famous. In the meantime, the BPS will continue to betray children twice over.

References

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

Allen, E. (1996). Religious heterodoxy and nationalist tradition: the continuing evolution of the Nation of Islam. The BlackScholar, 26 , 2–34.

Baddeley, A., Brewin, C. et al. (2023). Legal aspects of memory: A report issued by the Psychology and Law Sections of the British Academy. Journal of the British Academy, 11, 95-97 with annex).

Benn Michaels, W. (2006). The trouble with diversity: How we learned to love identity and ignore inequality Holt.

Butler, J. (1999). Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. Routledge

Diamond, S. (1998). Not by politics alone: The enduring influence of the Christian right. Guilford Press.

Dutton, K. (2020). Black and white thinking: The burden of a binary brain in a complex world Bantam.

Fekete, L. (2016). Hungary: Power, punishment and the ‘Christian-national ideal’. Race & Class, 57(4), 39–53.

François, S., & Godwin, A. (2008). The Euro-Pagan scene: Between paganism and radical right. Journal for the Study of Radicalism, 1(2), 35–54.

Fraser, N. (1999). Social justice in an age of identity politics: Redistribution, recognition and participation. In Ray, L. & Sayer, A. (eds) Culture and economy after the cultural turn (pp25-52) Sage.

Hochschild, A. R. (2016). Strangers in their own land: Anger and mourning on the American right. New Press.

Honneth, A. (1995). The struggle for recognition: The moral grammar of social conflicts Polity Press.

Mazumdar, P.M.H. (2004). ‘Burt, Cyril Lodowic’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Nossel, S. (2020). Dare to speak: Defending free speech for all. HarperCollins.

Pearson, K. (1905). National life from the standpoint of science. A&C Publications.

Pilgrim, D. (2022a) Race, ethnicity and the limitations of identity politics. Journal of Critical Realism. 22. 1-16.

Pilgrim, D. (2022b). Identity politics: Where did it all go wrong? Phoenix Books.

Pilgrim, D. (2008) The eugenic legacy in psychology and psychiatry. International Journal of Social Psychiatry 54, 3, 272-284.

Reed, A. (2018). Antiracism: A neoliberal alternative to a left. Dialectical Anthropology, 42, 105-115.

Sobolewska, M., & Ford, R. (2020). Brexitland. Cambridge University Press.

Wacquant, L. (2022). Resolving the trouble with ‘race’. New Left Review, 133/4.

Academic freedom and censorship, EDI, Identity Politics

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

4th Jul 20254th Jul 2025 AdminBPSWatch

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.

Academic freedom and censorship

Introducing psychology UNREDACTED@bpswatch

3rd Jul 20253rd Jul 2025 AdminBPSWatch

Pat Harvey (on behalf of Peter Harvey and Dave Pilgrim) posts…

At this stage in the life of the BPSWatch blog it has more than 80 posts with a primary focus on the governance, policy and ideological bias of the regime which runs the British Psychological Society. It remains our view, as three members with more than 150 years of shared membership of the society and lifelong careers in psychology, that the abject failings of the BPS as a professional body and learned society remain. The BPS remains a captured poor resource for psychologists

All that we can have claimed to do via this blog is to have raised the awareness of some members. Beyond that, we have extended our own networks in different directions and come into contact with ardently engaged people we did not know before. One of us is now lead for psychological support and research in Whistleblowers UK which is a political campaign for the Office of the Whistleblower. Another has engaged with people and issues of concern around gender services, complaints procedures, Family Courts and the effects of questionable expert witness testimony. The third has edited yet another of his many published books and is in the process of authoring a further critical examination of a subject on which the BPS has a parlous record.

This blog contains much information for the record and we want it to continue in an effective way. One of our concerns has been that the many discussions we now have with our extended networks about psychologically relevant issues produces ideas that need to be “out there”. They are currently suppressed due to what I have called “stifling and censorious latter-day orthodoxy of public and professional bodies on issues such as gender, EDI and diagnostic self-ID”. These are issues to which psychology is central, but where research and debate has become vigorously curtailed, policed and censored. That this problem is insidious and pervasive in organisations way beyond the BPS is evident from the UCL report (published 2 July 2025) Review of data, statistics and research on sex and gender Report 2: Barriers to research on sex and gender https://www.sullivanreview.uk/barriers.pdf

We hope you will not only read the forthcoming psychology UNREDACTED series, but that you will also quote, repost and even write your own contributions.

Get in touch at bpswatch@btinternet.com

"The Psychologist", 'False Memory Syndrome', Academic freedom and censorship, Identity Politics

More hubris in the BPS: on being the ‘Head of Science Communication’

12th May 2025 AdminBPSWatch

David Pilgrim posts:

Recently BPS members may have noticed that the role of editor of The Psychologist has been extended to that of being ‘Head of Science Communication’. This announcement sets many hares running. I have been a psychologist for forty years and have two higher degrees in the subject. I still could not give a coherent account of what the discipline is, which does not reflect my stupidity but my warranted caution. If psychology is a science, then how is it to be defined by those running the BPS? Occasionally it is confessed that the Society is a ‘broad church’. That is a fair starting point, but I think its flock, whether they are BPS members or outsiders, may reasonably want to hear more. What they actually get (if the content of The Psychologist is anything to go by) is a strange brew of scientism and virtue signalling.

For example, this month (May 2025) the cover’s headline is Educate your sons (as a small blessing, we were spared today’s breathless exclamation mark). The sub-heading tells us that Jayne Meyrick will be discussing ‘gender-based stereotypes, attitudes, violence and more’. Fair enough, but why the prescriptive headline instead of the valid sub-heading not sufficing more modestly? Should any branch of human science (spoiler alert here, Psychology is not the only game in town) be so crassly preachy? Surely the values involved in parenting are not the possession of Psychology, or any other discipline. For those of us old enough to remember, we know that it is inconceivable that the predecessor of The Psychologist (the Bulletin of the British Psychological Society) would have presented such a moralistic prescription. Its possibility today emerged from a cultural context in which EDI priorities overlay most professional discourse, with identity politics, for now at least, shaping the academic agenda (Pilgrim, 2022). Psychology with a capital P reflects its fluxing historical context (Richards, 2009) and the context we are in today is authoritarian and sanctimonious. A contempt for academic freedom, virtue signalling and Salem-style speech policing are de rigueur.

If Psychology is a moral science, which arguably it is, then its authority needs to be defended in principle, and in convincing detail, before any of us is subjected to its definitive strictures (more on this below). This would require a metaphysical exercise to clarify basic assumptions about ontology, epistemology and ethics and how they articulate – see Brinkmann (2011). In The Psychologist, that required exercise is ignored in favour of moral grandstanding to favour the discipline’s preferred worthy squeaky-clean image.

Heavy is the head that bears the crown

In the midst of all of this unexplained froth about the BPS being a ‘broad church’ the task of being a communicator of science is unenviable and inevitably challenging. However, leaders in the discipline seem unfazed by the prospect and Jon Sutton now looks forward to his authoritative role. He can join forces with his colleague with the formerly designated Orwellian title of ‘Director of Knowledge and Insight’, now rebranded with the equally grandiose title, ‘Director of Research, Education and Practice’. The challenge for these BPS leaders is to find ways of communicating about ‘psychological science’. In the generous tradition of George Miller (1969), they might still opt to ‘give psychology away’, as if the Society is sitting on a scarce and rich body of accumulated knowledge to be shared noblesse oblige.

Miller is a key figure within the liberal wing of Anglo-American psychology and is credited with being a founder of cognitive psychology. At once this was an epistemological game changer as it displaced behaviourism, which in its salad days had allegedly dispatched psychoanalysis forever though it, of course, failed. And, as Miller’s collaborations with others was to prove, maybe philosophy, the scourge of the discipline of Psychology at the turn of the 20^th century, still could pack a punch about matters psychological, as his colleague Noam Chomsky was to prove.

So, what exactly is the big deal about the confused and confusing discipline of Psychology? After all and without looking too far we find a few other contenders offering serious insights into the human condition. Apart from philosophers, we might add topflight historians, economists, anthropologists, neurologists, psychiatrists and last, but not least, novelists. The last one is counter intuitive. However, a skilled fiction writer can explore our interiority and the subtleties of our interpersonal relationships, within a cultural and economic context of a particular time and place. That complexity rarely (if ever) appears in psychology textbooks read by undergraduates. I certainly have learnt more from good novelists than the bank of psychology books on my groaning shelves.

Then beyond behaviourism and the ‘cognitive revolution’ during the 1980s and 90s we endured radical social constructivism and the postmodernist’s Nietzschean disdain for facts. This upended positivism, and its adoration of the psychological laboratory inherited from the 19^th century, alongside a eugenic actuarial approach to personality and intelligence. Followers of the competing trends probably sat together in the corridors of academic psychology departments in a state of mutual bemusement. This ‘psychological science’ stuff was becoming a complex mixture of historically layered bids for epistemological legitimacy.

In that context, what exactly will Jon Sutton be communicating about? Will it be all these epistemological layers, or just this year’s model of disparate pieces being promoted by The Psychologist? To be fair that dilemma must also face the producers of All In The Mind, which seems to have a hotline to the BPS for advice, occasionally hosting guests to demonstrate the most recent breakthrough in psychological knowledge. Apparently, all is well then in the state of Leicester (unless, like the one in London, the office might be about to close). Until then the BPS might be thought of as the repository of the wisdom previously enjoyed by psychiatry and applied philosophy. The competitors have been seen off and ‘communicating science’ thus reinforces and celebrates that triumph. But behind the rosy picture, confusion and uncertainty reign.

Back to the strange brew

To make sense of this considerable challenge for Jon Sutton, we can return to the ‘giving psychology away’ trope of Miller. Given the sub-title of his seminal text Psychology: The Science of Mental Life (Miller, 19991), what exactly is that science being given away, and might many outside of Psychology reasonably claim some legitimate authority about ‘mental life’?

In 2015 the Division of Academics, Researchers and Teachers in Psychology (DART-P), hosted a symposium at the BPS Annual Conference. The aim was:

…to explore current thinking, developments and practice within contemporary psychology education, with a view to stimulating critical discussion and reflection on psychological literacy and its delivery within both pre-tertiary and higher education contexts. Ultimately, the symposium, and this article are intended to facilitate exploration of the opportunities provided by psychology education, at all levels, to develop students as psychologically literate citizens. (Hulme et al., (2015) emphasis added).

The paper by Hulme et al. drew upon Miller but also the work of McGovern et al. (2010), who offered a definition of ‘psychological literacy’. It listed the skills expected of a psychology graduate:

• vocabulary and knowledge of the critical subject matter of psychology;

• scientific thinking, disciplined analysis of information to evaluate alternative courses of action;

• creative and ‘amiable sceptic’ approach to problem solving;

• applying psychological principles to personal, social and organisational issues in work, relationships and the broader community;

• acting ethically

• competent in using and evaluating information and technology;

• communicating effectively in different modes and with many different audiences;

• recognising, understanding and fostering respect for diversity;

• insightful and reflective about one’s own and others’ behaviour and mental processes

Hulme et al. proceed though with a key insight relevant to Jon Sutton’s challenge today:

‘…the specific subject content that is to be learned by psychology students becoming psychologically literate is not defined in McGovern’s account. Instead, the emphasis is on learning enough psychology to be able to think critically, solve problems, and apply knowledge of psychology to become an effective scientist and citizen. To a large extent, McGovern here encapsulates the way in which psychology education facilitates students’ enculturation into the discipline….., and supports them in learning to ‘think like’ a psychologist….Psychological literacy is also perceived in McGovern’s account as facilitating self-awareness and understanding in a social context. The underpinning knowledge and skills that constitute psychology are thus much wider than its academic ‘ingredients’ might suggest. Trapp et al. (2011) designated psychology as a STEM + subject, arguing that it fosters all of the skills that might be expected of a typical science graduate, alongside communication and interpersonal skills more typical of social sciences or humanities…’ [emphasis added].

The first sentence points up the challenge of content I raised earlier – what precisely is the psychological science that is to be communicated? The laudable cognitive skills emphasised by the authors would, as they say, be important for any critically competent graduate in science but also, as they note by the end, of any graduate in the social sciences and humanities. Maybe Psychology has no mandate to claim a particular legitimacy to understand human experience and conduct. Understanding human activity and experience in its social context has been examined with some success by anthropology and sociology (the clue is in their names). When it comes to content (the elephant in the room avoided by McGovern et al.) the list of cognate disciplines I made earlier would supply the very same material.

Maybe this coyness on the part of psychologists to define their authority over the content of their work, substituting instead a generic scientific skill set, is because they know that in truth their discipline is so hopelessly contested in terms of its theory and practice. Moreover, by focusing on the study of individual human functioning, in relation to conduct, interiority and small group interactions, they simply cannot compete with those disciplines in the social sciences and humanities offering a wider lens and a longer view.

Surely the inherent individualism of psychology operates against a desirable outcome of comprehensive context-dependent understandings of human life. This is at its most obvious in the hubris of experimental psychologists, who privilege ‘psychological literacy’ of their own preferred type. They lament the incompetence of ordinary people to reason psychologically in their daily lives.

A good example here is the role of experimentalists supporting the false memory movement, who disparage the reasoning of judges and juries and offer them condescending advice (French, 2018; Conway, 2011). By contrast, those recognising the implications of experiments producing closed system findings, which have poor ecological validity, have warned us quite rightly that Psychology struggles constantly to justify itself as an empirical science (Uher, 2021; Smedslund, 2016; Adolph, 2019). A symptom of the undeclared pre-Popperian legacy of naïve realism is that the BPS has been proud and unreflective about aligning its policy on memory and law with the false memory movement and its supportive experimentalists (Conway and Pilgrim, 2023). They have a narrow focus on one form of false positive, when human memory is frail across all social contexts in open systems. For example, when validly accused men who rape women and children deny their guilt, do they have a false memory? Have the experimentalists in the false memory movement ever written a book called ‘Witness for the Prosecution’ (cf. Loftus and Ketcham, 1991)?

Trying to define psychological science is like trying to grasp fog or catch the wind. What the content is about in practice reflects layers of knowledge present since the end of the 19^th century and contemporary normativity. However, reflecting a residual confidence in empiricism and positivism Hulme et al. (ibid) let slip the fetish of ‘presentism’ common in academic Psychology. That is, what has become known recently is good but what is old is inferior. They complain that A level students still learn too much about historical figures in the discipline and not enough is taught to them of findings and theories from recent decades.

That lament reflects an unexamined assumption (or ‘doxa’) which is that ‘psychological science’ proceeds through time in an aggregating and constantly improving manner. This presumption about scientific incrementalism is pre-Popperian in its outlook. It might also explain why the history and philosophy of psychology is still taught so poorly in higher education, reflected in the very precarious survival of the History and Philosophy Section of the BPS. If A level psychology students are indeed still being fed too much information about history, then ironically that might be their only chance to see the light about a contested discipline. For example, the fetish of behavioural statistics is rooted in the empiricist Humean assumption about the causal relevance of ‘constant conjunctions’ (the correlation between two variables with the rest of reality controlled out). The limitations of that closed system thinking still haunt Psychology.

Insights after the Popperian watershed

Before Popper’s critical rationalism displaced positivism in the philosophy of science, there was the assumption that covering laws would be discovered, which would be applicable to all times and places. The chances of this being true were high in closed systems. For example, in physics or chemistry and even in some branches of neuroscience today, context-independent findings might align with this expectation (cf. Tortorello, 2015). Also, where psychological knowledge is being applied in closed systems it might have legitimate utility. Ergonomics and attention span in pilots could be examples. However, what all applied psychologists who work with clients from a range of biographical contexts know, is that complexity and unique circumstances require careful exploration. The imposition of forms of prepared knowledge to allcomers is unwise.

In open systems, laboratory findings are of dubious utility leaving us at best with trends or demi-regularities and at worst with evident unpredictability in human conduct. All human activity is part of an open, not closed, system. Thus, as well as Popper’s focus on science as a social activity and his replacement of verification with falsifiability, the appearance of general systems theory in the mid-20^th century advised us about the central importance of context-dependent reasoning (Bateson, 1972).

To reinforce this point, critical realists have noted that any comprehensive human science should be sensitive to complexity and layers of reality (Pilgrim, 2020). Bhaskar (2016) offered us his four planar social being framework to this end. The first plane is our material rootedness in nature (which we emerged from and return to). The second plane of reality is that we exist within our relationships to others from conception to grave (we are an interdependent and hierarchical species). The third plane of reality is the supra-personal socio-economic context we are thrown into at birth, which then fluxes during our lifetime. It matters whether we are thrown into a war zone or a tent of plenty, whether we are poor or rich, whether we are born male or female etc. The fourth plane is our uniquely structured personality arising from the other planes (we have a ‘concrete singularity’).

My view is that this critical realist framework requires human conduct and experience to be studied with a variety of methodologies and by a range of disciplines, which I listed earlier. Psychology will not only fail if it tries to colonise that inter-disciplinary challenge because it is not competent to deliver a full understanding of our four planar laminated existence but it will also lack insight into its own incompetence.

Take the example of my complaint that The Psychologist mixes virtue signalling and scientism. That contradiction has arisen in the social context of the growth of identity politics and the self-righteous policing of speech. Being ‘psychologically literate’ might offer some contribution to understanding it, for example, in relation to binary cognitions and thinking too quickly rather than reflectively about complexity. However, those frailties also arose from the growth of a new form of authoritarianism, which encourages a form of witch-finding both on the right and left of politics. Neoliberalism and the failure of Marxist-Leninism have afforded that context of emergence for identity politics. They have fed the EDI industry at the turn of this century, leaving structural power discrepancies unscathed.

A proper reflective exploration of this complexity is not the particular forte of Psychology but requires epistemic humility, when conversing with those from other disciplines. Without that conversation, leaders in the BPS and the content of The Psychologist will probably keep producing its strange brew of scientism and virtue signalling. Accordingly, they will lack an understanding of their own context of theory and practice, bearing in mind that hubris often precedes nemesis. What chance a sophisticated ‘communication of science’ in this blinkered world? Moreover, Jon Sutton has his work cut out for a pressing contextual reason: his paymasters are skating on thinning ice, as we have demonstrated repeatedly on this blog.

References

Bateson, G. (1972). Steps to an ecology of mind. Chandler.

Bhaskar, R. (2016). Enlightened common sense: The philosophy of critical realism Routledge.

Brinkmann, S. (2011). Psychology as a moral science: perspectives on normativity Springer.

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Academic freedom and censorship, Gender, Identity Politics

On GIDS

20th May 202420th May 2024 AdminBPSWatch

Below is a letter from David Pilgrim, accepted by the Editor of Clinical Psychology Forum (the Journal of the BPS Division of Clinical Psychology), contributing to and continuing the important debate surrounding the transgender controversy. Earlier correspondence has not been published, as we reported on the blog previously [see here ]. We are hopeful that the same fate does not befall this letter.

"The Psychologist", 'False Memory Syndrome', Academic freedom and censorship, Board of Trustees, Gender, Identity Politics, Memory and the Law Group

CASS, COLUMBO AND THE BPS

3rd May 2024 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

Wipes, C.M., et al. (2020) Trends in suicide death risk in transgender people: realists form the the Amsterdam Cohort of Gender Dysphoria studiy (1972-2017). Acta Psychiatric Scandinavia 141, 6, 486-491.

"The Psychologist", Academic freedom and censorship, Gender, Identity Politics

Puberty blockers and Conversion Therapy – BPS in the dock

22nd Oct 2023 AdminBPSWatch

Pat Harvey posts….

Today’s (22 October 2023) Observer editoria l appears in timely fashion as the NHS England consultation on puberty blockers reaches its deadline and there has been government confusion regarding a ban on “conversion therapy” (see here) for people experiencing gender incongruence.

As the British Psychological Society puts together, behind its opaque glass door, its response to the puberty blockers consultation, this succinct yet astonishingly comprehensive Observer editorial must signal to the Society that its ideological/social justice approach to the psychological phenomenon of gender incongruence and its pharmacological and surgical medicalisation must now be radically revisited.

Until now, there has not even been a pretence of balance on the subject. Like many other professional bodies, the BPS has been totally trans-ideology captured. It has colluded with those social movements rushing to affirm to unhappy children, often dealing with their adolescence alongside other trauma and difficulties, that it is their “gender identity” that is the problem which can be fixed with affirmation, medications and surgery. The BPS’s track record on this is deplorable. This is demonstrated by:

The BPS’s confirmation that affirmation is the default approach to gender incongruence in its 2019 Guidelines, led by a trans activist, which are still extant. This has actively discouraged and undermined the confidence of psychologist practitioners to engage with children early and in local service settings. As the Observer notes “An independent review for the NHS highlighted many mental health professionals are already reluctant to treat children with gender distress because of pressure to adopt the affirmative approach”. This has had serious consequences for many children and families. There is little sign that any review of those guidelines will be addressing services to children, a cowardly avoidant strategy by the BPS.
The BPS house publication The Psychologist, by its own admission, commissioning and facilitating a highly contentious article by a trans activist ideologue and resisting or refusing to print a number of critical responses by members and removing comments below the article. The BPS has actively censored publication of other material which questioned the trans activist ideological stance (Singer, J., Pilgrim, D., Hakeem, A. et al. Constraints on Free Academic and Professional Debate in the UK About Sex and Gender. Arch Sex Behav 52, 2269–2279 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-023-02687-3).
The BPS offering a less than positive response to Cass, focussing on referral overwhelm rather than service model failures.
The BPS repeatedly resisting demands that it should recognise the huge pitfalls of an unsophisticated “virtue signalling” campaign to ban the ill-defined and therefore legislatively hazardous soi-disant Conversion Therapy. The Observer article notes that” “…a government-commissioned study found no evidence that trans conversion therapy happens in the UK beyond a methodologically flawed self-report survey...”. A key leader of that “methodologically flawed” research has been increasingly influential in the BPS, originally within the Sexualities Section and now Chair of its recent Equality Diversity and Inclusion Board.

The appearance of the Observer article now shows, in a carefully crafted, justifiable and easily understood argument, how crucial it is in terms of professional responsibility to remove the trans ideological social justice perspective from matters of clinical services for distressed children. It states: “The chilling effects of criminalising exploratory conversations between a therapist and a young person that could be perceived as denying their identity will only make the holistic therapy recognised as critical by the Cass review even harder to access. Campaigners will have no qualms about misrepresenting unclear law to tell clinicians, therapists and parents they may be committing a criminal offence and subject to “conversion therapy protection orders” unless they immediately affirm a child as trans.” Increased pressure to seek and to prescribe puberty blockers would be a likely result, alongside continuing reluctance of practitioners to work in this service context.

The British Psychological Society must now be made accountable for the serious shortcomings of its positioning on gender.

"The Psychologist", 'False Memory Syndrome', Academic freedom and censorship, Board of Trustees, Expulsion of President-Elect, Gender, Governance, Identity Politics, Memory and the Law Group, Prescribing Rights

Legal storm clouds over the BPS

16th Aug 2022 AdminBPSWatch

David Pilgrim posts….

For those new to the chaos in the BPS, its organisational vulnerability today is multi-layered. The Charity Commission has, until very recently, been ‘engaged’ with the Society about lack of compliance concerning governance arrangements. Slowly, maybe resentfully, the leadership in Leicester has tinkered around the edges.

The Society’s ‘Board of Trustees’ has been a phoney structure since the 1960s, but now a few public invites are to be issued, to appoint nominally independent members. All trustees in a charity should have no conflicts of interest, not just a couple of tokens. As with other matters, the BPS leadership seems to lack insight about even the most basic principles of organisational probity (see below).

But compliance with charity law is the least of the problems for the current BPS leadership or, note, past leaders with their ongoing legacy liability. We were told via YouTube, when Nigel MacLennan was expelled kangaroo-court-style, that this has been a ‘challenging year’. This of course was special pleading from those running the Society. The wider membership had been kept completely in the dark about the corruption and misgovernance, so they experienced the lock down, oblivious to any personal pain suffered by the leadership, with its ‘challenges’.

This glib ‘challenging year’ trope in BPS propaganda has persisted, both vague in its detail and directed at sympathy from anyone taking it seriously. Covid-19 had been a safe cover story of collective bad luck and victimhood. Whichever way the challenges in Leicester are spun to the outside world, the reality is that the BPS is in serious legal trouble.

Three imminent legal threats to the reputation of the BPS

Here are three points to consider seriously:

1 Nigel MacLennan’s Employment Tribunal will require that the BPS must now take the dirty washing it has stuffed in a bin bag and put in a cupboard somewhere, and empty it out on to the floor of the courtroom for all the world to see. The evasions and snail-pace adjustments, which might have worked in response to the Charity Commission, will not be tolerated in a court (which is the formal status of an Employment Tribunal). Much more could be said on this, but a sub judice caution comes into play here, so I am just reporting the material fact of what is about to happen in 2023.

2 Post-Cass Review and Post-GIDS closure, the BPS guidance on gender has now been withdrawn. The leadership are not responding, in a timely manner, to a dilemma shockingly new to them. In the autumn of 2019 criticisms I made of Tavistock Clinic GIDS were censored by the BPS. In the summer of 2020, representations from many BPS members about the serious inadequacies of the 2019 guidelines on gender were simply ignored. In the autumn of 2020, a detailed formal complaint concerning the form, content and context of 2019 revision of the gender guidelines was made but not upheld. Also in autumn 2020, further representations about the risks of extending prescribing rights to psychologists (which would have included hormones) were ignored by BPS leaders. In the spring of 2022, yet another multi-signed letter to BPS leaders about the risks posed to the public by the gender guidelines was simply ignored. This did not even receive an acknowledgment, let alone a considered response.

Only when the world outside was telling Leicester in stereo, and at full volume, that the game was up on the ‘affirmative model’, was action triggered. Over the recent years, its own members had been treated with total contempt, when lobbying for the withdrawal of the trans-captured gender document. The wise have kept a copy of the policy document now removed. It cannot be deleted from history, no matter how convenient that would be for all of those, from the Board of Trustees and the Practice Board to the ‘Comms Team’ and The Psychologist, who were complicit actors in a flawed policy.

The credibility of their group-think will now fracture in the full public glare of legal scrutiny. Recently The Times reported an incipient class action, involving up to a thousand ex-patients of the Tavistock Clinic (in truth that figure may be larger or smaller). Whatever their number, the legal bill will be picked up by the NHS Litigation Authority (NHSLA). Its work is supported by top-sliced money from constituent local Trusts, so it is supplied ultimately by the tax payer.

The Tavistock Clinic will survive, albeit embarrassed. It will be rid of a capricious historical deviation, which held the proven tradition of cautious exploratory psychological therapy in complete contempt, confusing a passing and modish social trend with a genuine ‘social revolution’. The medical sterilisation of healthy children is shaping up to be yet another ‘great and desperate cure’ in the murky biomedical history of psychiatry (and now, more importantly, psychology) (Valenstein, 1986). These children, who cannot vote, give consent to sex, buy alcohol or even have a piercing or tattoo at their own request, has been put forward by adult identity politics activists as a harbinger of social progress.

In the censored exchange in 2019 and noted above, between me and Dr Bernadette Wren, that assumption of political and ethical worthiness was debated. As a champion of the now discredited GIDS, Wren actually described the explosion in referrals as reflecting a ‘social revolution’ (sic). I am sure she believed that, but history will surely not vindicate her position, given that her claim is already unravelling and there is a service policy push back, here and in other countries, about the ‘affirmative model’. Social contagion, yes. Social revolution, very doubtful. A passing postmodern phase of anti-realist madness, most probable.

Many liberal and left leaning people (this is not just a Daily Mail editorial frothing at the mouth) simply never bought the GIDS progressive claims. Nor did they fail to spot the trans-capture in the BPS and elsewhere, including in the Royal medical colleges, which should have known better. For example, a group have just written to The Observernoting how the leadership of the Royal College of Psychiatrists had fended off representations, similar to our own in the BPS (see under heading Trans Concerns) https://www.theguardian.com/theobserver/commentisfree/2022/aug/14/why-surprise-when-wealthy-capitalist-makes-large-donation-to-oxford-college

This span of dissenting voices has now been vindicated. Complex existential challenges, each with their unique biographical context, cannot be cured by crass interference with the body, but it seems that mental health professionals are still slow learners. Their organisational leaders, fawning for popular support in an age of identity politics, have for now often lost their rational capacity to assess evidence or accept material realities that are immutable (Pilgrim, 2022).

Faced with this historical moment of reckoning, the BPS does not have the luxury of a legal fund, like the NHSLA, to fall back on. The grateful medical negligence lawyers, who are now welcoming ‘regretters and detransitioners’ through their shiny doors, will inevitably take an interest in the professional advice that supported the ‘affirmative model’, now defunct at the Tavistock. The cabal in Leicester would be wise to take their own legal advice about what is in the pipeline. It will of course be paid for by members’ fees. It may well entail very large amounts of money.

3 And then there is the contentious memory and law group, which has been the other main arena of policy capture, afforded by weak governance. The enmeshment of the BPS and the British False Memory Society is now clear (Conway and Pilgrim, 2022). However, in 2014, the editor of The Psychologist made this definitive and untenable statement: “Neither The Psychologist nor The British Psychological Society has links with the British False Memory Society.”

This denial was at odds with the fact that the Chair (now deceased) of the BPS Memory and the Law Group was on the Advisory Board of the British False Memory Society, during the time that Elizabeth Loftus was on the International Panel of Associate Editors of The Psychologist. She was also an advisor to the US and British False Memory Societies (The first was closed down after the Jeffrey Epstein case.) Loftus testified in defence of both Ghislaine Maxwell in 2021 and Harvey Weinstein in 2020. In the first case she asserted, with no evidence, that the prospect of financial gain could distort the memories of complainants. This line of speculation in legal settings is not peculiar to Loftus. It has been used by convicted individual abusers, as well as those claiming that child sexual abuse is a moral panic.

In this context of the serious legal considerations of sexual abuse, the biases in the BPS policy to date are very important, as is the supportive role of The Psychologist. In May 2014, its editor provided a short hagiographic account of his interview with Loftus (he met at a conference dinner), who had ‘been voted the most influential female psychologist of all time’. It goes on, ‘Her wit and creativity shone through as she rattled through real-life stories, wrongful convictions and ingenious research that all illuminate the faulty nature of memory…. One thing seems undeniable: whatever the future brings for memory research and practice, Professor Loftus will be at the forefront of it for many years to come.’

Because the BPS is an organisation without a memory, others have to recall the origins of its partisan policy focus. The BPS line, from their highly biased report, considering only the matter of false positive decision making, has fed defence teams hired by those accused of sexual abuse. It has offered absolutely no balancing advice about false negatives, in order to support prosecution teams. Those in the BPS, who have been concerned to expand the policy on memory, to include evidence of the social epidemiology of child sexual abuse and its proven mental health impacts (e.g. Cutajar et al. 2010) have been systematically excluded from a new working group looking at the topic.

This scandal of biased policy formation then is ongoing. It is not just a part of BPS history, now regretted. The group recently appointed to update the document remains shadowy and has only included (unnamed) so called ‘memory experts’, from the closed system world of experimental psychology. All attempts by those BPS members interested in the clinical and epidemiological evidence (an open system feature of the world outside of the laboratory) to join the group have been blocked repeatedly. Moreover, all attempts to ascertain who exactly is on this group have been met with refusals on grounds of data privacy. It seems that the older biases to consider false positive decision making may well remain. The implausible claim that the BPS is guided by the organisational principle of transparency is also obvious here.

Meanwhile, the BPS, as with now withdrawn gender document, seems to have no capacity to reflect on the child protection implications entailed in a lop-sided and partisan, form of policy formation. The only sop that excluded critics have been offered is to submit papers to a minor journal, which is under the editorial control of FMS supporters. As with the case of the gender document, the temporary capture of a weakly governed Society, by a particular interest group, has to await external scrutiny to expose its bias and the dangers this poses to the public. Once again, internal dissent has been quashed at the expense of both membership democracy and academic integrity.

As the evidence now accumulates from historical inquiries into child sexual abuse, both in the UK and Australia, the BPS policy is a new potential target for angry survivors, seeking personal justice. Their lawyers will have spotted that line of attack. The current BPS position, to date, has colluded with the idea that child sexual abuse has been a trivial moral panic. The truth of the matter is that its scale has been strongly under-estimated, as is now becoming clear, in both the statutory inquiries and clinical research (Pilgrim, 2018; Children’s Commissioner’s Report, 2016).

Conclusion

The BPS leaders are in for another ‘challenging year’. Hiding in the dark, under the security blanket of group-think, will not make the lawyers disappear by magic. They will still be there, rubbing their hands, when the blanket it whisked away. Critics of all the three forms of BPS failing, noted above, may have been easy to ignore by the cabal. The rule of law is a different matter. If those in Leicester are not worried by now about imminent legal threats to the reputation of the Society, then they clearly do not understand what is going on.

References

Children’s Commissioner’s Report (2016) Barnahus: Improving The Response to Child Sex Abuse in EnglandLondon: UK Children’s Commissioner’s Office

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., and Spataro, J. (2010). Psychopathology in a large cohort of sexually abused children followed up to 43 years. Child Abuse and Neglect 34(11), 813–22.

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

Pilgrim, D. (2018) Child Sexual Abuse: Moral Panic or State of Denial? London: Routledge.

Sutton, J. (2014). BPS – obsessed with the false memory syndrome? Editor’s reply. The Psychologist 27, 5, 303.

Valenstein, E. (1986) Great and Desperate Cures: The Rise and Decline of Psychosurgery and Other Radical Treatments for Mental Illness New York: Basic Books.

Administrator’s note

All of these topics have been subject to comments on the blog. By clicking on the category immediately above the title you will find the relevant posts.

Category: Academic freedom and censorship

More on the BPS and the post-Epstein context

Memory and the law – more suppression of debate at the BPS.

TWO TYPES OF IDEOLOGICAL CAPTURE IN THE BPS

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

Introducing psychology UNREDACTED@bpswatch

More hubris in the BPS: on being the ‘Head of Science Communication’

On GIDS

CASS, COLUMBO AND THE BPS

Puberty blockers and Conversion Therapy – BPS in the dock

Legal storm clouds over the BPS