Category: EDI

Pat Harvey reviews the incredible actions and inactions of an incompetent BPS in relation to debates in which it should have taken a strong and credible lead in a letter on behalf of BPSWatch to the Chair of the Practice Board

Dear Dr Lavender,

Sex and Gender and the British Psychological Society’s Ongoing Failures

We are writing to you in your capacity of Chair of the BPS Practice Board. We have concerns which we wish you to formally bring to the Practice Board for discussion as a matter of urgency. These concerns relate to the continuing dereliction of the BPS as a learned and professional body in relation to its duty to assist and, indeed, lead the continuing public debate on sex and gender. These are clearly matters falling directly – even centrally – within the purview of academic psychology and of psychologist practitioners and about which the BPS should have authoritative statements. They are impacted by an evolving context of government policy, service reviews and legal judgements towards which the BPS has latterly taken a decidedly “spectator” stance. This is embarrassing for members, and not what they pay their fees for.

Adult Gender Services

The Practice Board ratified a revision of the 2019 GSRD Guidelines in 2024, although we note from other minutes available to members, not without some concern about how the process was conducted, including the fact only the chair had seen the final draft. There had been a very evident changing context since 2019, signposting the subsequent and ongoing review of adult gender services  (https://www.england.nhs.uk/long-read/review-of-nhs-adult-gender-dysphoria-clinics/)  which noted:

• concerns put to the review team by current and former staff working in the adult gender clinics about clinical practice, particularly in regard to individuals with complex co-presentations and undiagnosed conditions
• lack of a robust evidence base; being mindful that the majority of referrals to the adult gender clinics are of natal females who are aged between 17 and 25 years, and that the historical evidence base that has informed clinical practice relates to an older cohort of natal males
• limited information on short and long-term outcomes, particularly for those individuals who transferred to adult services from paediatric services
• an increasing incidence of individuals seeking to ‘detransition’ following previous gender affirming interventions and the absence of a consistent, defined clinical approach for them.

Astonishingly, the BPS chose to replace the two members of the 2019 Task and Finish Group who had demanded their names be removed from that document with two individuals associated with strong trans ideological/activist connections. That ensured that the whole revision group came from one position in the debate and one provocatively at odds with changing knowledge and opinion. It was also unacceptable that the chair remained an individual about whom formal complaints have been made concerning the public statements that research on surgical treatments for transgender people indicate that “…that debate is shut, there is not a debate about this anymore…” (https://www.youtube.com/clip/UgkxRGiT6y5ouSa6T9Nes0om-J6HWo7otLDx). This statement had been patently false, irresponsible and unethical, and unacceptably the BPS had supported that position. It has had no excuse subsequently, however, not to have been fully aware of the incongruity of retaining that chair to lead the process of reviewing the BPS guidelines .

A wise and reflective British Psychological Society would have been following social and professional developments in the period since 2019 and decided that the original Guidelines were patently and wholly unfit for purpose, and scrapped them. It would have set up a new group, carefully considered the Society’s position, acknowledged controversies and social pressures and supported practitioners back in their clinical and educational environments/teams to be able to discuss the management of gender distress with balance backed by confidence in their professional body. As the Guidelines now stand, they are unhelpful, biased and ideological rather than research and practice based. They are discredited. As such they undermine the credibility of the Society. They are not only embarrassing, they fail the public. And, most importantly, they fail the very people who are asking for help.

Children’s Gender Services

At the point at which new services, with stated aims to provide holistic models of multidisciplinary care required by the Cass review, are being developed, the BPS has entirely abrogated its right to a seat round the table of discussions about the central role that Psychology – academic research and therapy – could and should be fulfilling. The last Practice Board minutes available to members (weren’t we going to get summaries of what was going on in the Board to bridge the gaps?) stated that there had been a first meeting of a group (recruitment criteria unknown, membership unknown, chair unknown) and “a discussion paper is in development” (March 3 2025) This is a stable door creaking on its hinges as the horse is running many furlongs in the distance. 

Further Questions

What of Women’s rights and a Society response to the recent Supreme Court ruling which clarifies that biological males, even those with a GRC, cannot be considered women under the Equality Act when it comes to single-sex spaces or services? No comments?

What of the difficulties researchers have experienced in carrying our basic research on sex and gender (see “Review of data, statistics and research on sex and gender Report 2: Barriers to research on sex and gender” (2025) https://www.sullivanreview.uk/barriers.pdf ) such as Professor Sallie Baxendale, clinical neuropsychologist, who experienced repeated rejection of her work by journals on the impact of suppressing puberty on neuropsychological function, saying: “It wasn’t the methods they objected to, it was the actual findings.” No comments?

Beyond that series of instances of barriers, there is a question that perhaps a healthier BPS might be able to address, what are the social psychological implications of gender “exceptionalism” that have led to an extraordinary breakdown of norms in academia and in clinical practice? Might not the BPS be directly implicated in that breakdown?

The Future of Psychology and the BPS in relation to Gender

Clearly there has been an inherent breakdown in how the BPS has and is still responding to the wider controversies on Sex and Gender. The Practice Board has clearly failed in its remit. To undo actual damage to credibility and reputation, It should start by withdrawing the GSRD Guidelines and scrupulously review the energy and activity of the current Children and Young People Gender Group. The BPS as a whole needs to acknowledge its shortcomings and seek a widespread and vigorous consultation with members.

The hitherto biased and resistant editorial policy in respect  of The Psychologist should be urgently reviewed.

Given this unfortunate history and the suppression of debate within the BPS and in the pages of The Psychologist, BPSWatch.com intend to continue a challenging series of articles under the title psychology UNREDACTED. The first two and a response of these should be read by interested parties:

EDI – where did it all go wrong?

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

How is Gender Different? Let me Count the Ways

The next article in BPSWatch.com will be this open letter to you. 

We demand action.

Yours sincerely,

Pat Harvey

Peter Harvey

David Pilgrim

BPS members and BPSWatch.com

cc. 

President of the BPS

Chair of BPS Board of Trustees

CEO

Director of Knowledge and Insight (as currently still designated on website)

Work with gender discomfort often seems to lead to very different approaches to those used in any other area of distress. John Proctor considers just how strange this is.

It happened at the end. At an event to discuss whether mental health initiatives in schools might sometimes be unhelpful. Short answer: yes – but it was the discussion that was illuminating. For two hours we considered Mental Health First-Aid, self-diagnosis via TikTok, and how ordinary feelings can be pathologised. Above all we debated how to work with teenagers who adopt diagnostic labels as identities. Then, just as we finished, one young audience member made a final point: “As someone who works with LGBTQ+ youth, their problem is external oppression. It’s about not being accepted for who they are.” [My emphasis]. No chance to reply. While initially frustrated at the lack of space for a response, I’ve thought about that statement many times since. More recently, I appreciate such a clear pronouncement on how we should work with gender discomfort, and such an explicit signal as to what our responses, including those of psychological practitioners, should be. Apparently these need to be different to those provided for any other kind of distress. And this is indeed what we have done over the last few years. Here I’d like to think about the ways we have treated gender as exceptional, and some of the resulting problems.

The first area of difference is the conflation of one issue with another: in this case of sexual orientation with gender. We frequently hear the letter combination LGBT, and the old rainbow flag has been replaced by the ‘Progress’ version. I do often wonder though if these labels actually belong together. It’s worth remembering that this teaming is a recent thing. Adopted for campaigning purposes, it steps adroitly over the fact that the issues raised by same sex attraction may be very different from those raised by gender identification in a way different to your sexed body. For example, being gay does not lead to either arguments about competing rights or to a proposed medical pathway. Indeed, far from a happy coexistence, some ideas about trans rights may be antithetical to the LGB part of the rainbow, as same-sex attraction may be replaced with the idea of same-gender (thus mixed-sex). This was a significant issue in the recent Supreme Court case brought by For Women Scotland in the United Kingdom.

While the commenter in my session only made a single remark, I think the reason it has stayed with me is that ideas of acceptance as primary have become very familiar in my professional circles as a psychologist. In particular, I often hear an emphasis on the validation of gender identity placed ahead of any attempt at investigation and of developing a detailed picture of why someone may feel the way they do. It’s been well documented how, in the UK’s primary specialist service for children with gender issues (the Gender Identity Development Service at the Tavistock Clinic), many clinicians turned away from a more exploratory approach to gender discomfort. Instead a more affirmative stance became favoured. Though some staff clearly held to a more traditional model of working (understanding and formulating), others wouldn’t, or couldn’t, do so. More worryingly this also led, for many, to referral for endocrinology treatment. The evidence for the effectiveness and safety of those treatments has been seriously questioned. 

Professional bodies have also taken steps towards encouraging more affirmative, identity-based, working with adults. For example, The British Psychological Society’s Guidelines for Psychologists Working with Gender, Sexuality and Relationship Diversity, as well as conflating sexual orientation with gender self-identification, place an emphasis on rights and on de-pathologising any aspect of sexuality or gender. There are cautions not to engage in “conversion therapy” and to make sure you make no judgement on someone’s choices. This makes sense to a point. Of course psychological practitioners wish to respect the people they see. But there is, perhaps, some balance needed.  The primary message is that the experience of being uncomfortable with your sexed body in particular is, in these guidelines, not something we aim to understand, but rather an identity that needs to be validated. Any idea that a therapist might think about the function of trans identification in managing painful emotions, or identification away from your bodily reality as a response to experience, is nowhere to be found.

At organisational levels too this idea of validation takes us along a different path from the one we might take for other issues. We fly flags in our departments, display posters, and put pronouns in our email signatures. All in the name of inclusion and allyship. Some colleagues even offer the idea that clients will know they are “safe” if they display these concrete signs. Presumably not offering such signs is therefore unsafe? And, uniquely, we decide that this issue, out of the many available, is the one we’ll announce a position on. However, for psychological therapists, neutrality is quite central to our ordinary stance. People come through the door and we think with them about their experience. It is not normally our job to pre-empt our conclusions or to take sides in painful and divisive areas. And yet our organisations decide for us that the task is to affirm the identity beliefs of clients. Good outcomes are already being framed according to our ability to agree with someone rather than to explore.

So why this need for validation: individual, organisational, and even societal? Again, I think the speaker at my meeting caught the essence of why this should be so. It’s because of “external oppression”. Over the last few years we’ve heard a narrative of marginalisation and powerlessness in answer to any questioning of how we respond to gender-related matters. Whether the conversation has been about women’s rights and protections, or about questions over puberty blockers, the response is so often that a marginal group is being attacked. The protection of a group we judge vulnerable is an imperative so strong it seems to stop thought about whether there is a different way to approach things. Additionally, we have tools to codify where privilege and powerlessness reside, and certain groups are always deemed to be at the margins. The listening and thinking, which are the work of therapy, are apparently no longer necessary. I sometimes wonder if such a prescriptive approach is to ordinary therapy as colour-by-numbers is to actual painting.

Such responses always raise my curiosity. Are we really talking about the most marginal and powerless group here? Some dispute it, and the prevalence of “trans rights” promotion (from road crossings to HR policies, to arguments made at public expense) in UK public life leaves the powerless narrative looking rather less than convincing. I see nothing comparable for marginal groups such as people with disabilities, or dementia, or who are homeless. In the area of sex and gender the powerlessness seems to me to be far more plausibly located in the people who have had to fight, through the courts, to express beliefs which go against our most recent orthodoxies. For some organisations taking a strong position has not been enough. Legitimate alternative views have also not been tolerated in the face of an axiomatic presumption that there is only one right perspective. This has not only been a divergence from our way of looking at other areas, but also more than a little alarming. 

It’s perhaps only when we consider how different all this is from the way we approach other forms of distress that it becomes apparent just how strange it all is. Let’s think for a moment how it would look to treat eating issues in a similar fashion. The similarities between eating disorders and gender discomfort are evident. Both may be characterised by unease with one’s body, by steps to respond to that distress with quite extreme physical changes, and an underlying context of trauma. After the initial similarities however, gender issues and eating issues part ways. Generally the response to eating disorders is grounded, very firmly, in attempts to understand and work with the experiences and the feelings we encounter. Psychotherapeutic approaches are to the fore and, in cases where greater physical harm is a risk, compulsory hospitalisation and even force feeding come into play. While I, and many, have reservations about the compulsory aspects of treatment, it’s understandable how we get there. Sufferers are at risk of permanent physical harm, or even death. We struggle to let that go unaddressed and tend to use any means we have available to stop it. No surprise therefore that, societally, our response to “pro-ana” advocacy (the idea that starving yourself and extreme thinness is a human right or lifestyle choice) has largely been one of horror. The contrast with gender is striking. At no stage do health professionals working with eating disorders wear “pro-thinness” lanyards, promote bariatric surgery as a human right, and include celebrations of our true body shape in our messages to colleagues and service users.

You could make a similar case related to self-harm, body dysmorphia or a belief one is Jesus. In each case therapists balance empathy with careful exploration of underlying causes. They don’t typically affirm harmful behaviours, quickly move to physical interventions, or suggest that the primary source of distress is others’ failure to understand that someone really is the Son of God. Yet, in gender therapy, chest-binding and surgical alteration can become marks of autonomy, and those who are cautious about someone else’s metaphysical beliefs may be branded bigots.

It is clear that at least some things are changing. The fate of the child GIDS service is, by this point, well known. The Cass Review strongly criticised existing practices in gender healthcare, particularly highlighting weak evidence for puberty blockers, and GIDS closed its doors in 2024. Cass made recommendations for a more holistic, and psychological, approach to gender distress. In the UK children’s access to puberty blocker medication and cross sex hormones has either been restricted or is under review. Adult gender services in the UK are also under scrutiny. Similar developments can be seen elsewhere. Not only have several European countries executed a volte-face in policy, but significant segments of the USA seem to be waking up to widespread public concern about “gender-affirming” medical interventions for children in particular.

Despite these increasing doubts about where we’ve been, this picture of change is, at best, partial. Though many organisations have welcomed the Cass Review, a number of others have either publicly opposed its recommendations or have experienced significant internal conflict about how to respond. There are private providers who, while they may offer assessment, still seem rooted in a belief that they can somehow divine who will benefit from irreversible medications during puberty. To use such drugs we’d surely have to be pretty certain about the predictability of a settled trans identification, something which, as Cass made very clear, we aren’t. This issue of predictability is also a serious concern given that, The UK is, at time of writing, set to press ahead with a clinical trial of puberty blockers for children. Such a step carries risks related to the effects of such drugs on brain development and bone health, as well as the established limiting of male genital development. This seems a very obvious case where a proper follow up of the cohorts who have already been given this medication is the logical initial step in developing the evidence base. Though, as some readers may know, follow up data from adult gender clinics was more  difficult to obtain than one might imagine.

Also significant is the proposed “trans inclusive” ban on conversion therapies in the UK. It looks likely that forthcoming legislation will restrict any steps to challenge someone’s sexual orientation or gender identity. A number of prominent bodies representing psychological therapy practitioners in the UK (including the British Association for Counselling & Psychotherapy and the British Psychological Society) have signed something called the Memorandum of Understanding on Conversion Therapy promoting this aim. Other organisations, such as the UK Council for Psychotherapy, have signed and then, following the concerns raised by Cass, withdrawn support. In forthcoming legislation there will apparently be protections for legitimate therapeutic exploration. However, it’s unclear just how the experience of feeling misaligned with your body will be distinguished from what is deemed the existence of a gender identity. If understanding the former is legitimate ground for therapy but thinking about the latter is not, this is not a matter of trivial concern. Therapists could face prosecution if exploring underlying psychological distress around gender identity is misconstrued as conversion therapy. Similar legislation proposed in Scotland in 2024 (and ultimately withdrawn) did not succeed in making such a distinction related to legitimate therapeutic exploration, and it remains to be seen if the UK Government can do any better. Indeed Hillary Cass herself has said that such a law is likely to put pressure on therapists to inhibit exploration.

It seems the commenter in my meeting managed to summarise, in 15 seconds, several of the principles currently in operation in gender healthcare and in psychological therapies. However, such principles (conflation with other issues, an emphasis on validation of identity labels, a very fixed interpretation of powerlessness, and either disregard of or hostility to alternatives) seem to take us away from a path we are committed to in all other domains. The unique approach to gender discomfort also contrasts sharply with evidence-based practices used in other psychological treatments. Though there was no chance to answer, the questioner did, I now think, do me a favour by saying the quiet part out loud. By saying that this area is different and special. Being clear about that offers us an opportunity to think about how we have, in so many areas, embraced that difference. More than that though it offers us a chance to think about whether we want to change our approach in future. Those we are there to help deserve care that genuinely addresses their distress, not care only shaped by ideology. Young people, actually all people, of course deserve to be accepted for “who they are”. Let’s also help them try and understand what’s painful rather than jumping to tell them they’re something they are not.

The author is a clinical psychologist specialising in severe and enduring mental health problems.

We are pleased to present ideas that “need to be out there”.

This is the first of a continuing series.

John Higgon, a retired clinical neuropsychologist, posts….

 We live in a diverse world.  Each of us is advantaged, or disadvantaged, by circumstances beyond our control.  In recent decades, we have come to realize that it is wrong to disadvantage a person on the basis of an irrelevant aspect of themselves over which they have no control.  This is discrimination, and, whilst there is a proper place for some kinds of discrimination (for example, in selecting the best candidate for a job based on the candidates’ skills, knowledge and experience), there is general agreement that discrimination should not be based on irrelevances such as one’s age or sex or ethnicity.  To counter discrimination of this kind, we have promoted inclusivity both as a value and as the mechanism by which equality can be more closely attained.  These aims are noble and worthwhile, and nobody would want to dispute them, I hope.  Even so, when translated into a legal framework, the perceived rights of one group (trans-identifying people) have in recent years come into sharp contrast with the perceived rights of other groups (women in general and lesbians in particular).  As a society we are in the process of navigating that, and unfortunately, current EDI practice is not helping.

Some history 

Legislation in the UK addressed discrimination on the basis of race (the Race Relations Act 1965), sex (Equal Pay Act 1970) and disability (Disability Discrimination Act 1995), but it was only in 2010 that these were brought under the umbrella of the Equality Act.  This is a landmark piece of legislation that protects nine groups of people.  Specifically, the ‘protected characteristics’ are age, disability, gender reassignment (more on this later), marital status, pregnancy and maternity, race, religion or belief, sex and sexual orientation.  So far, so good, but there is a fly in the ointment.  The Equality Act has conflated sex and gender, for in the Act gender reassignment is defined as ‘proposing to undergo, undergoing or having undergone a process to reassign sex’.  The linguistic conflation of the words sex and gender is of course not unique to the Equality Act.  We see it everywhere.  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: “boys don’t cry”, and so on.  And, whilst this conflation may not matter much in many day-to-day settings, it becomes very important in a legal context. 

As we know, trans rights activists sought to capitalize on this ambiguity by claiming that the Equality Act offered protection to individuals identifying as trans or non-binary.  Specifically, they claimed that the rallying cry of “trans women are women” had a legal significance, and therefore that the law supported the supposed right of transwomen to, for example, attend single-sex services, use female changing rooms and access lesbian networks.  All of a sudden, the rights of women were pitted against the rights of biological males identifying as women.  How did this play out?

Single-sex services

Here in Scotland we recently witnessed the debacle of the Edinburgh Rape Crisis centre, run by a transwoman, which refused to offer single sex groups until forced to do so by its parent organisation, Rape Crisis Scotland.  Rape Crisis Scotland noted that “We are extremely concerned that for around 16 months [Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre] did not provide dedicated women-only spaces, as required by the National Service Standards, while declaring to [Rape Crisis Scotland] that they were adhering to the standards” (‘Our statement on the Edinburgh Rape Crisis National Service Standards Report’ (Rape Crisis Scotland, accessed on the internet 02/07/2025)).  If you believe that transwomen are women, then it follows that you were providing a single-sex, women-only space.  Unfortunately for the Edinburgh branch, Rape Crisis Scotland central office clearly did not follow this line of reasoning.

Female changing rooms

Just last month, eight nurses in Darlington won their case against their employer.  They had taken their employer to court for its failure to provide single-sex changing facilities, by allowing a biological male identifying as female to use their facilities.  Meanwhile in Fife, another nurse, Sandie Peggie, is fighting her own battle over the exact same issue.  Interestingly, Fife NHS Trust are still withholding documentation that the court has demanded in an apparent delaying tactic.  You would think that they could see where this legal case is headed, given the success of the Darlington nurses and particularly in light of the April 2025 Supreme Court judgement confirming that ‘sex’ means, and has always meant, ‘biological sex’ in the eyes of the law.  But, as I shall suggest later, public sector bodies seem to find it difficult to envisage any way of approaching the trans issue other than the current, largely affirmative, way.

Lesbians’ right to associate on the basis of sexual orientation

 Finally, we come to the infamous ‘cotton ceiling’, perhaps the most extreme example of perceived trans rights clashing with the rights of same-sex attracted women’s rights.  Just as women face a ‘glass ceiling’ in their career advancement, it’s been suggested that ‘transwomen’ (intact biological men) face a ‘cotton ceiling’ when it comes to trying to have sex with lesbians.  Since the phrase was first coined, there have been attempts to deny the sexual connotations of the term, but the ‘cotton’ in ‘cotton ceiling’ is widely interpreted as referring to cotton underwear.  It’s hard, therefore, to see how there isn’t a sexual element to this.  Any reasonable reader would conclude that some transwomen – biological males identifying as women, if you prefer – feel aggrieved that they are not considered as potential sexual partners by lesbians.  The sense of entitlement is astounding.  Indeed, you could say that there’s something quite male about it.

These cases are all quite well known and there is no need to add to the list, although I could.  The point is that the rights demanded by trans activists obviously and self-evidently clash with rights previously accorded to women and lesbians in particular.  The lawyers who drew up the Equality Act cannot have seen that coming, because, as we have seen, the Equality Act, whilst it talked about gender, really meant ‘sex’, as is clear from the definitions contained within the act.  (In fact, they perhaps should have seen the potential for inconsistencies, given that the act offers protection from discrimination to people who are merely ‘proposing to undergo’ procedures to change sex.)

Culture wars

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.  Trans activists have responded to challenges by adopting the strategy of avoiding any debate of these issues, as recommended in the Denton Report, and for a long time they have got away with it.  Witness the treatment of Kathleen Stock.  Witness the extreme and unchallengeable assertions – “transwomen are women”.  Witness the attempts to shut down academic study that is anything other than affirming (the refusal of scientific journals to publish Sallie Baxendale’s work on puberty blockers and their potential effects on cognitive development, the expulsion of James Caspian from his psychotherapy course because of his proposed research into the experience of detransitioners, the expulsion of James Esses from his psychotherapy training course for his views on affirmative therapy).  Witness the violent protests at sex realist meetings or attempted viewings of sex realist films such as Adult Human Female.

The reason they have got away with it is that these extreme positions are both tacitly and often explicitly supported by EDI policies put together in the HR departments of institutions, in particular, public sector institutions.  It’s not surprising that these policies have developed as they have.  ‘Co-production’ emphasizes the benefits of the public sector working with marginalized groups (“Nothing about us without us”), and whilst there is a place for this, it is reasonable to ask whether trans activists have become the self-serving tail wagging the compliant dog.  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.  In this way, a culture has gradually come into existence which promotes the incorporation of preferred pronouns into name badges, which accepts uncritically the grafting of the ‘T’ onto the pre-existing ‘LGB’, which actively promotes Pride events whilst doing far less to promote other protected groups, and which promotes Stonewall-inspired narratives about gender identity whilst coming down firmly on sex realist narratives.  The climate that has been created looks like it is very diverse and supportive, but woe betide anyone who challenges it.  

Nothing needs to be stated explicitly.  In the same way that health service employees know always to substitute the word ‘challenge’ for the word ‘problem’, employees ‘just know’ that there are things they can say and other things that they shouldn’t.  Self-censorship sets in.  Why would a young professional embarking on the early stages of their career risk gaining a reputation as ‘difficult’, ‘ideologically suspect’, ‘bigoted’, ‘transphobic’?  In a public sector service that rightly exists to cater for all sections of society, it is wise to avoid having these kinds of terms applied to you – whether they are deserved or not.  (And mud sticks.  Some students at Sussex University happily denounced Kathleen Stock as transphobic, whilst simultaneously cheerfully admitting that they had not read her book!) 

On the one hand, then, we have extreme demands from aggressive activists who are not seeking the same rights as ‘the rest of us’, but who are seeking rights that ‘the rest of us’ don’t have – in particular, the right to identify in the way that they see fit, and for the rest of society to bend around that self-identification in any way that is necessary.  On the other, a culture that has permeated large institutions, but in particular public sector institutions – one which provides the necessary intellectual air cover for the activist activity.  Health, schools, higher education and social work have all taken on board the Stonewall narrative, and it is all too easy to join the dots: children exposed to gender identity ideology at school; adolescents, often same-sex attracted, finding a health culture that is willing and able to provide the medical interventions that will realize their trans identities;  and social workers, teachers and health workers who will sideline the concerns of sceptical but deeply caring parents who never drank the Kool Aid.  

A way out

I asked at the beginning of this piece where it all went wrong.  I suggested that the apparently harmless conflation of sex and gender was seized upon by trans activists and turned to their own advantage.  I suggested that activists used tactics to shut down public debate, whilst simultaneously inserting themselves into key positions in public sector institutions, either as advisors from third sector groups, or as fully paid-up employees.  There, they developed policies that enshrined the rights of trans identifying individuals, even when these came self-evidently at the expense of other groups.

Let’s look now at how we can move on and start to put things right.  First, I think we need to support gender-non-conforming people to live the kinds of gender-non-conforming lives that they wish to.  It has been noted elsewhere that on one analysis, the trans project is in fact deeply gender-conforming: “My son played with dolls from an early age, therefore he must really be a girl”.  Second, we have to abandon the practice of creating narratives based on how we would like things to be, and get back to examining how things actually are.  Biological sex is messy, difficult in some ways to define (do we do so on the basis of chromosomes, or genital development?) but ultimately there are two sexes, each evolved to play a part in the reproduction of the species.  It’s really not that difficult.  Beyond that, we can conform to the stereotypes that attach to our sex, or not, and there should be no penalty for choosing either route.  Clinicians should acknowledge that some people are extremely distressed about their sexed bodies and/or their gender, and we should recognize that these feelings are most likely to surface around adolescence.  We need to establish, through the usual process of clinically-based research, what approaches, if any, help gender-dysphoric individuals feel better about themselves.  To date, the evidence base for hitherto standard approaches has been weak to say the least. Third, public sector institutions need to re-think how they are going to support trans and gender-non-conforming people.  There is more than one way to do this.  We can carry on doing what we have been doing: nodding along with over-valued ideas about innate gender identities numbering in the dozens, and acquiescing to every extreme demand made by ‘the trans community’.  Or we can start to think about how to balance competing rights and how to gently push back on some of the wilder unevidenced claims of gender ideology.  

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?