Category: Gender

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

The bankruptcies of the BPS

AdminBPSWatch

David Pilgrim posts…

I recently returned from an excellent conference at University College London (July 5th and 6th). ‘Rethinking Youth Gender Medicine’ was organised jointly by CAN-SG (Clinical Advisory Network on Sex & Gender) and the US organisation SEGM (Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine). Recently Pat Harvey posted on this blog the letter she had sent of complaint about The Psychologist, first accepting an advertisement for the conference and then withdrawing the agreement. The conference opened with an address from Baroness Hayter. She commended the organisers for their emphasis on evidence-based and ethical clinical practice and she criticised the BPS for its lack of commitment to this approach in its decision making.

At the conference I reflected on the overlapping ways in which the BPS is becoming a bankrupt organisation. The obvious and literal point is about money. The Society has sold its Leicester HQ and is considering selling its London offices. This has proceeded without open discussion and consultation with members, which is par for the course in an organisation which has long lost any claim to democracy and transparency. We must all feel for the poor BPS workforce in Leicester. For those not made redundant, presumably they are condemned now to home working and ad hoc meeting places in a COVID-style Groundhog Day. This has all the hallmarks of asset stripping rather than fostering organisational flourishing and the responsible stewardship of members’ assets.

The membership is depleting, with increasing numbers seeing little for their money. Students are not maintaining their memberships post-graduation and senior practitioners are resigning. The rearguard financial rescue plan to encourage mental health workers, who are not psychologists, to become fee-paying members may have been counterproductive retrenchment. One motive to depart we hear from longstanding members is that on learning the news of these professionally unqualified paying recruits, the name of the organisation has effectively been rendered meaningless. From their perspective, what is the point of being a member of today’s British Psychological Society?

The bottom line is that the organisation is on the brink of financial collapse; the uncollected fee for the advertisement for a topically important international conference came at a time when every penny was needed. Properties might now be sold off but the salaries of the senior management team roll on and ideologically driven decisions by the editor of The Psychologist remain unaltered.  Thus, it is not all about the money, even if the money may be the final determinant of the Society’s demise. 

Any historian of this emerging end of empire scenario in the BPS would also have evidence of other forms of bankruptcy. I now set these out below.  Culturally they all interweave in the ailing Society.

1 Strategic bankruptcy

The UCL conference was full of energy because of the interdisciplinarity of the audience and speakers. GPs, psychiatrists, nurses, physiotherapists, psychologists, social workers, paediatricians, psychotherapists, teachers, civil servants, surgeons, pathologists, pharmacologists, sociologists, and epidemiologists were all to be found. This reflected a political reality: today any research project or form of policy development worth its salt fosters an interdisciplinary exploration in which people can listen to one another, defer to rational authority and, if needs be, disagree civilly. Siloed single disciplines were fit for purpose in 1926 but are not in 2026. Interdisciplinary cooperation and the aspiration to produce trans-disciplinary knowledge were the emergent features of both research and policy development in the late 20th century (Wilden, 1972; Gibbons, 1994). In that context of new knowledge production the BPS is now an organisation notably out of time and in a self-deluding loop. The emergence of neuroscience is one clear example of psychologists being part of a body of knowledge, while having no unilateral academic authority within the field of inquiry.

The postings on this blog have focused on two particular policy distortions that reflect an anachronistic organisation. Their common feature has been a failure to recognise grave child protection implications [see here as well as previous blog posts] have a self-regarding siloed discipline being the victim of two forms of captured tunnel vision. In the case of memory, it has been about the enmeshment of the false memory movement with the goals of the Society, feeding the society-wide culture of denial about the scale of child sexual abuse and its public policy consequences for mental health (Conway and Pilgrim, 2022, 2026).  This has been a partisan capture by one group of experimentalists, so that a proper academic debate about the complexities of memory and the survival of sexual abuse in childhood has been pre-empted. In relation to gender, the policy has been under that direct influence of capture by transgender activism [see here as well as previous blog posts].

The implication of being strategically anachronistic is that when psychologists do commit themselves to interdisciplinary cooperation, as was the case in this conference, they stand up and speak knowing that their parent organisation is indifferent to them or that it actively undermines their work (Sadie, 2026). Similarly, those BPS members who have tried to pursue an alternative agenda about memory and law to protect victims, not favour those accused of sexual crimes, have all hit a roadblock of strategic inertia in the bureaucracy.

2 Intellectual bankruptcy

A challenge for a disciplinary body, which is so internally contested, is to be taken seriously in principle. Psychology (big P) is epistemologically confused and confusing (Richards and Stenner, 2022). Ask any psychology graduate to explain what the discipline is and then note the wide-ranging views expressed. It sits in the ambiguous space between natural and social science; there are advocates in the discipline pulling it one or other direction, with varying views about theory and methodology. This is not a challenge the BPS itself has created but is an inherent epistemological tendency in the discipline globally.

This lack of coherence should have created humility and caution, but the opposite seems to have occurred, with the BPS promoting its wares with no concession to its internal confusion. It over-claims the relevance of psychology in PR campaigns and argues for singular authority. The study of memory is a case in point, especially when there are competing disciplines which have equal claims to legitimacy. That overclaiming comes from pretending that epistemological coherence exists when it clearly does not. Psychologists cannot agree on theories or research rationales. The compromise has been to rely on a rhetoric of methodological rigour or ‘methodologism’, which disguises underlying incompatibilities about theory and practice (Gao, 2014). This methodological imperative seeks to disguise deep divisions in the discipline, allowing psychologists who are not in sympathy to retain the semblance of a common group identity.

The honest intellectual stance in face of this contestation would be for all psychological organisations (not just the BPS) to simply come clean about their failure to agree and on accepting that nearby human sciences (such as anthropology, sociology and economics) have as much right to explore human conduct and experience. One honest strategy would be to take history and the philosophy of science seriously in psychology degrees. However, attempts by those advocating this approach from within the History & Philosophy Section of the Society have, by and large, failed in shaping curriculum development. 

New psychology graduates are unlikely to be enlightened about either the history of their discipline or its highly variegated philosophical underpinnings. Consequently, they lack the competence or confidence to reflect critically on their own body of knowledge. When history is ever alluded to, what we tend to find is a mixture of celebratory accounts about the purported great breakthroughs made by the discipline, or its converse when critical – i.e. there is a head-shaking distancing from earlier wrong-headed claims. For example, the enmeshment of psychometrics and behavioural statistics with 20th century eugenics has proved to be a big target to hit. 

This mixture of ignorance and ambivalence encourages presentism – i.e. what we have discovered recently is fetishised to discount historical errors and superstition. Hot of the press insights can then be funnelled into journalistic outlets (in the UK All in the Mindis favoured on BBC Radio 4, where the latest studies are proudly announced). This PR tactic is highly informed by British empiricism, even though alternatives, from French poststructuralism to psychoanalysis and from humanistic psychology to critical realism sit comfortably with many BPS members. This leaves us with the collective noun of a ‘disagreement of psychologists’. To be fair, this point could also be made of psychiatry, but the latter is a profession, whereas psychology, represented by the BPS purports to be an overarching academic discipline, with all of the raised scientific expectations that this assumption then creates.

To call this scenario a ‘broad church’, a favoured rhetorical trope from BPS managers, is to massively understate both epistemological complexity and the contradictions this generates for psychological theory and practice. Without honest reflection about this confused and confusing picture, and without a respect for both proper historical and philosophical inquiry to inform that process, the BPS will continue to be intellectually bankrupt.

3 Moral bankruptcy

The previous point was an ethical one (about honesty) but there is more. We have had the covered-up fraud and the lack of any accountability [see here]. We have had regular censorship in the editorial policies of The Psychologist, which supresses any form of expression from members who challenge the status quo about the policies or direction of the Society. As we have noted previously the magazine is little more than a propaganda front for the dominant factional interests operating in the Society at a point in time (both academic and managerial). It is like Pravda was to the Soviet Communist Party. 

With reference to the unadvertised conference I attended, we can only surmise that editor Jon Sutton or his managers opted to refuse the very needed revenue for The Psychologist for ideological reasons. They have taken a position in a currently contested area of psychological theory and practice. Sutton has felt able to reject publications which debate that position by indicating that he prioritises submissions from transgender people or those who work directly with them  [see here]. Moreover, when we and others have ever tried to challenge the censoring of worthy submissions to The Psychologist a clear pattern became evident. Jon Sutton tells people to refer their concerns upwards to his editorial committee or even the CEO. He does this very confidently in the knowledge that they will always support him – and they do. They, like him, are part of the BPS cabal. The deal is that they unconditionally support him and he loyally preserves the policy status quo in the Society. We know of no complaint about his decision making which has been upheld (but if we are missing examples, we would like to hear about them).

If the BPS is allegedly a scholarly Society, then one of its primary duties is to defend academic freedom and promote free debate. The decision to pull the agreement for the advertisement for the conference is another blatant example of the ethical failure of the BPS and its apparatchiks. At the gate of the conference, transgender activists were banging the drum (literally) and telling entrants that ‘trans rights are human rights’, that attenders were Nazis and that ‘in there they kill children’. Of course, the drum bangers wanted to stop the conference occurring as they made clear. I imagined that the editor of The Psychologist would have had more sympathy with the protesters than in supporting the freedom for sex realists to argue their case legitimately. If he respected that case then he would have respected, not pulled, the advertisement.

Thankfully UCL were happy to host a legitimate multi-disciplinary conference, but the suppression of academic freedom comes in many forms. One of them is when background decisions of bodies like the BPS seek to undermine scholastic autonomy. When that happens, they have lost their mandate to claim that they are a learned body. Their political capture by lobbyists for now is obvious and this overrides academic freedom. 

If we put that bias into the wider context of financial and intellectual bankruptcy, then the Society’s current death spiral is now clear to see. Maybe that scenario is for the best. Members might then stop wasting their fees and a world of multi-disciplinary scholars may thrive more freely to teach and research. That sort of free exploration is currently under strain in higher education, and those running the BPS are not defending academic freedom – quite the reverse (Pilgrim, 2026). What seems like a trivial event, like the broken agreement over the advertisement for the conference, signals that the Society is falling into oblivion, with no insight.

Psychologists and the conference

Quite understandably, the organisers of the conference sent the advertisement to The Psychologist. Although gender confusion in young people requires a biopsychosocial sensibility from case to case from all relevant professionals, they are most frequently seen by psychological practitioners. For this reason, that broad constituency of practice (clinical psychologists, counselling psychologists and psychotherapists) might have welcomed conference attendance. They would have found that the quality of the papers was high, with international speakers presenting their research clearly to an engaged and appreciative audience. 

Those potential attendees were lost and so their appreciation of the content went missing. This was precisely the intention of those in the BPS responsible for pulling the advertisement which they had agreed to originally. As one of the contributors to the conference outlined well, the suppression of gender critical viewpoints entails more than simply cancelling individuals; there are a range of other wilful organisational and publishing processes involved (Sullivan, 2026). In this case, Jon Sutton and his colleagues in the BPS have set out deliberately, as indicated above, over several years to ensure that only the views of transgender activists are represented in publications. This is ‘trans capture’ in practice, and the BPS offers the world an ideal case study in how identity politics has dangerously undermined academic freedom. 

The blocking of the advertisement is part of a longer misguided policy position adopted by the publication gatekeepers at the BPS about suppressing gender critical viewpoints. This can be traced to the refusal of the editor of Clinical Psychology Forum to publish letters and articles I offered about the emerging crisis at GIDS in the Tavistock Clinic, before it was eventually shut down. (I subsequently found out that the Forum editor was instructed ‘from above’ to impose this censorship, it was not his personal wish.)[see here and here]. With hindsight, the end of empire at GIDS was obvious at the very time when my own censored critiques were displaced by a long letter of justification for the affirmative care philosophy being published instead. This was from the clinical psychologist Bernadette Wren, a previous service lead, who was in the thrall of an anti-realist postmodern turn (Wren, 2021). Retrospectively we now can see that dissenting voices at GIDS, such as Anna Hutchinson (cited at length in Barnes, 2023) and Kirsty Entwistle (2019), in advance of Cass, spotted and reported the Emperor’s New Clothes. 

The GIDS regime lacked an evidence base and was a clinical scandal in the making with psychologists like Bernadette Wren and Polly Carmichael at the helm. Endocrinologists were certainly complicit in this scandal, but we cannot deny the clear fact that the regime was psychology led. This is the first time in Britain that a clinical scandal has not had medical malpractice at its centre but psychological malpractice. GIDS was dominated by transgender ideology from staff, augmented sometimes by parental homophobia and, of most importance, it was an evidence-free zone. So much for the vaunted ‘scientist-practitioner’ model boasted in applied psychology.

A suitably just outcome was that the clinical psychologist Anna Hutchinson could now stand up at this conference and lay out the case for a sensitive and sensible biopsychosocial appraisal of gender confused young people, with their highly variegated reasons for presenting, or being referred, to services (Hutchinson, 2026). Sanity is eventually prevailing in this arena of psychological practice, even if the absurd proposed conversion therapy legislation and the controversial puberty blocker trial remain battles to be fought by sex realists (Sodha, 2026; Pilgrim, 2023; Sex Matters, 2026).

In a clear and well received presentation, the clinical neuropsychologist Sallie Baxendale explained the developmental implications of biomedically interfering with puberty. Jon Sutton might may recall that in 2007 he received a letter from her, asking why an advertisement for ‘Soul Therapy’ had been placed in The Psychologist. He replied confident (as ever) in his editorial decision making [see here]. Professor Baxendale was no young hot head, making a mischievous complaint to the editor. She is a level-headed research-based senior neuroscientist par excellence. She was awarded the Distinguished Contribution Award in 2023 from the BPS for her outstanding contribution to clinical neuropsychology [see here].

This is a classic example of BPS doublethink to retain its rhetoric as a scholarly organisation. It goes through the motions of honouring those like Professor Baxendale but then ensures that audiences are denied knowledge of her work. It legitimises its own pretence of being academically robust with one hand, while undermining academic freedom with the other. This is part of the wider picture we have explored on this blog about rhetoric from the top in the BPS. The management bullshit machine in the BPS just keeps on giving (Pilgrim, 2023b).  To finish on another illustrative point, Jon Sutton is not merely the editor of The Psychologist he is also ‘Head of Science [sic] Communication’ for the Society. Here is one of his commendations for a piece he chose to publish for its clear rhetorical value: 

As they say, ‘you couldn’t make this up’…..

References

Barnes, H. (2023) Time To Think: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Tavistock’s Gender Service for Children London: Swift Press.

Baxendale, S. (2026) Effects of puberty blockers on the adolescent brain. Presentation at CAN-SG/SEGM conference Rethinking Youth Gender Medicine University College London, July 6th.

Conway, A. and Pilgrim, D. (2026) Witness for the Prosecution: Resisting the False Memory Movement Oxford: Karnac.

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. 1-12. 

Entwistle, K. (2019) https://medium.com/@kirstyentwistle/an-open-letter-to-dr-polly-carmichael-from-a-former-gids-clinician-53c541276b8d

Gibbons, M., C. Limoges, H. Nowotny, S. Schwartzmann, P. Scott, and M. Trow. (1994) The New Production of Knowledge. Social Studies of Science. London: SAGE.

Gao, Z. (2014) Methodologism/methodological imperative. In T. Teo (ed) Encyclopaedia of Critical Psychology New York: Springer.  

Hutchinson, A. (2026) Psychotherapeutic work with gender distressed youth (part 1). Presentation at CAN-SG/SEGM conference Rethinking Youth Gender Medicine University College London, July 6th.

Pilgrim, D. (2026) A critical realist understanding of cancel culture in academic settings. Journal of Critical Realism (in press).

Pilgrim, D. (2023a) 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, 

Pilgrim, D. (2023b) BPS bullshit. In D. Pilgrim (Ed.) British Psychology in Crisis: A Case Study in Organisational DysfunctionOxford: Phoenix. 

Pilgrim, D. (2022) Critical Realism for Psychologists London: Routledge.

Richards, G. and Stenner, P. (eds) (2022) Putting Psychology in its Place: Critical Historical Perspectives London: Routledge.

Sadie, C. (2026) Psychotherapeutic work with gender distressed youth (part 2). Presentation at CAN-SG/SEGM conference Rethinking Youth Gender Medicine University College London, July 6th.

Sex Matters (2026)  https://sex-matters.org/posts/updates/the-puberty-blockers-trial-on-trial/

Sodha, S. (2026) The conversion practices bill: vibes-based legislating Substack July 6th.

Sullivan, A. (2026) Barriers to research in gender medicine. Presentation at CAN-SG/SEGM conference Rethinking Youth Gender Medicine University College London, July 5th.

Wilden, A. (1972) System and Structure: Essays in Communication and Exchange London: Tavistock.

Wren, B. (2021) Epistemic injustice. London Review of Books 42, 23, December 2nd.

"The Psychologist", Academic freedom and censorship, Gender

IDEOLOGICAL CENSORSHIP AND THE ACCELERATING DEMISE OF THE BRITISH PSYCHOLOGICAL SOCIETY

AdminBPSWatch

Pat Harvey posts…

Further to previous blog posts (see, for example here) the letter below was sent to the BPS. It is entirely self-explanatory. As yet there has been no acknowledgement. The X account @psychsocwatchuk, which recounts this rejection of the advertisement, posted the following  


BREAKING: CENSORSHIP SCANDAL at The Psychologist? International Conference on Youth Gender Medicine: speakers include notable clinical and academic psychologists. BPS cancel advert already placed by agents at last minute ‘without explanation’.

As of the time of writing it has had 13 500 impressions.

Credibility of the BPS is dying, alongside its sold off and not replaced Leicester HQ, its financial viability and its falling membership.

Dear Dr Cole, Baroness Hayter and Mr Bajwa,

Re Conference Rethinking Youth Gender Medicine https://www.tickettailor.com/events/clinicaladvisorynetworkforsexgender/2162461

I am writing to you on a matter of considerable gravity. This international conference is due to take place this weekend in London. The conference is highly topical and centrally relevant, in terms of policy and practice, to many UK psychologists. 

It will be opened by Baroness Dianne Haytor, who has served as Shadow Deputy Leader of the House of Lords and as Chair of the Labour Party. She has led several NGOs, including Alcohol Concern, sat on the board of the National Patient Safety Agency, and was Director of Corporate Affairs at the Wellcome Trust.

Amongst approximately 28 speakers there are 4 well known and respected clinical psychologists who are HCPC registered and chartered psychologists, and a prominent research / academic developmental psychologist. Their backgrounds and current relevant work are detailed on the conference schedule. 

You should particularly note that one of these psychologists, Professor Sallie Baxendale, is Professor of Clinical Neuropsychology at the UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology. She was awarded the International Neuropsychological Society Arthur Benton Prize in 2018 in recognition of her outstanding scientific contributions to the field of neuropsychology. You chose, in 2023, to bestow upon her the British Psychological Society’s Distinguished Contribution Award.

Your agents sent the following back to the conference organisers following an unexpected refusal by the BPS to proceed with an agreed advertisement.

I am coming to you with not great news I am afraid: unfortunately, we are not able to run your advert on the monthly email this week.  As discussed I must get the BPS to sign off the content, and they have come back with thef ollowing: Under The Psychologist’s published advertising code of practice, The Editor of The Psychologist reserves the right to refuse or cancel any advertisement or part of any advertisement without reason, or notice. I will speak to accounts and cancel your invoice — if you have already made payment I will ensure this is refunded asap. Apologies once again and sorry for the inconvenience.

It would seem highly likely that the reasons for the editor’s action is his declared personal affiliation with a particular ideological viewpoint in relation to transgender issues. He has made this bias clear in communications with numerous members, in his censorship or outright rejection of publishing views different from his own, and by his suppression of open debate on the matter. The blog to which I contribute BPSWatch.com has numerous articles on the failure of the BPS via The Psychologist to promote or even allow discussion of diversity of ideological, professional and clinical views of gender issues. Members including myself have made representations and complaints to the BPS and to the editorial board. To no avail. Some highly contentious articles from his viewpoint have been published, however. I have made formal representations at least two with serious safeguarding concerns. 

This latest occurrence constitutes an unacceptable slur on members of the BPS involved in this conference, a failure of duty to members and may bring the Society into further disrepute. In the light of dwindling advertising revenues, the rejection of a significant sum of money for a prestigious conference opened by a member of the House of Lords is simply perverse.

Yours sincerely,

Patricia Harvey,

CPsychol., AFBPS.

Gender, Identity Politics

Yet another captured professional body…

AdminBPSWatch

BPSWatch reprints from genderclinicnews.com, with his agreement, a post by Bernard Lane. Bernard is a Sydney-based journalist covering the international debate about gender clinics and trying to shed light on what appears to be an emerging medical scandal. The post below explains what looks like the cowardice and compromise on matters of gender of yet another captured organisation, the Australian Psychological Society. This repeats the same shoddy and misleading fudge of the British Psychological Society with regard to authoritative professional guidelines and the current data.

Inside job

The Australian Psychological Society took four years to produce a gender dysphoria statement that gaslights members by hiding the woeful state of the evidence base.

BERNARD LANE

APR 09, 2026

Thought within Thought
Photo by Hirzul Maulana on Unsplash

Comment

In its new statement on gender dysphoria, the Australian Psychological Society promises it will “inform members of relevant advancements in the field”.

But this is a document doctored to exclude the most significant development of recent times—the 2024 UK Cass report and a brace of gold-standard systematic reviews since 2018, all exposing the lack of good evidence for the “gender-affirming care” of minors.

And yet the society has the cheek to insist that members must keep “up to date with the latest knowledge and guidelines”.

A psychologist reading the new position statement—“Supporting the mental health and wellbeing of transgender and gender-diverse people”—will find little reason to hesitate before referring a child to a puberty blocker-driven gender clinic.

This statement has a backstory. In 2021, clinical psychologist Dr Sandra Pertot was confronted with a complaint, her first in 45 years’ practice. In a podcast, she had talked about gender dysphoria from a mainstream clinical perspective. She did not sound “affirming” enough, according to some trans listeners. The complaint was resolved with the society acknowledging the “multiple perspectives and views” on the topic.

But now the society was on notice. It had an uncritical affirmation-only policy and activists stood ready to enforce it. Back then, the policy stated: “As a professional organisation committed to evidence-based practice, the Australian Psychological Society (APS) therefore opposes any forms of mental health practice that are not affirming of transgender people—including children. Any psychologist involved in such practices is likely to be in breach of the APS Code of Ethics.”

But the APS also had some members well-informed about the risks and flaws of the gender-affirming model. So, in 2022, the APS commissioned a panel to review its affirmation-only policy. Two years later, it issued a new draft policy for consultation. Last year, members began to wonder why it had not been finalised and published.

The 2024 draft was a compromise. It was far from free of gender ideology, but it would have alerted psychologists to the sobering results of systematic evidence reviews in the UK, Sweden and Finland, and the more cautious approach in those countries to the gender medicalisation of minors.

The tension in the draft document showed in the “further reading list” for members. It included the Cass report, but it also recommended gender-affirming treatment guidelines from the Royal Children’s Hospital Melbourne and the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH).

Psychologists diligently working through the reading list could end up very confused. Those treatment guidelines were found to be of low-quality and not fit for use, according to a peer-reviewed study commissioned by paediatrician Dr Hilary Cass, the author of the 2024 report. Dr Cass was critical of a practice of circular referencing among low-quality guidelines which created a false impression of consensus favouring the gender-affirming model. Where should psychologists place their trust—in the Cass report or those guidelines?

Today we discovered how the APS has resolved the dilemma. 

No mention of the Cass report in the 2026 position statement. No mention of the systematic reviews, undertaken independently in several countries, which showed no good evidence for the puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones given to gender-distressed minors. But the low-quality gender-affirming guidelines remain in the new statement. Gone is the draft’s warning that these guidelines “differ in terms of ideological standpoint and scientific rigour and the outcomes have been widely debated”.

This story has played out internationally. Small groups of activists capture the policymaking machinery of medical or mental health associations and resist attempts to restore balance. It’s easy to see now why such factional politics are necessary. Gender-affirming care for minors has such a weak evidence base that its clinical dominance must depend on authority—so-called eminence-based medicine—and the silencing of dissent.

The new APS statement makes no reference to the unprecedented spike in gender clinic caseloads since the 2010s, nor does it note the puzzling flip in patient profile from boys with early-onset gender dysphoria to teenage girls often with a range of psychiatric problems but no prior history of dysphoria.

The 2024 draft did not dodge this reality: “In recent years, there has been a marked increase in the number of young people being referred to specialist or medical gender clinics, the reasons for which are debated”.

The draft cited the work of the American researcher Dr Lisa Littman who coined the term “rapid-onset gender dysphoria” to suggest that social media and peer groups might be influencing the trans identities adopted by young people. This possibility is unacceptable to gender ideologues. And so, the Littman references are banished from the 2026 statement. 

Even the WPATH guideline, much cited by the new APS statement, concedes that, “For a select subgroup of young people, susceptibility to social influence impacting gender may be an important differential to consider.”

Speaking of subgroups, the APS has an entity known as the Psychology of Diverse Bodies, Genders, and Sexualities Interest Group. They get a shout-out on the Acknowledgements page of the new position statement.

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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

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 4th 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 20thcentury, 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. 

Gender, HCPC

ScotPAG’s tribute to a Clinical Psychologist

AdminBPSWatch

Pat Harvey posts…

BPSWatch is keen to see a wider recognition of the contribution that Dr Anne Woodhouse, consultant clinical psychologist, has made to exposing the worrying deficiencies of the HCPC. Far from providing reassurance that their regulation offers the public protection, they waste resources and fail to deal with the worst of their trans ideology activist registrants who make malicious and unjustifiable vexatious complaints. Simultaneously, they are failing to investigate a myriad of potentially legitimate complaints about social media propagandising or serious specific practice issues in such contexts as expert witness provision. We recently made a fully referenced and evidenced complaint against a senior practitioner responsible for the Tavistock GIDS children’s service debacle and linked their professional behaviour to specific HCPC standards which were not met by that registrant in that key position over a number of years. Unsurprisingly, the HCPC chose not to investigate, stating that “… Concerns which relate to an organisation are outside our remit and should be resolved through the local complaints process…”.

Below, with the agreement of ScotPAG, we reprint their account of Dr. Woodhouse’s experience and pay tribute to her persistence and courage. This is a link to the blog and the original piece which itself has additional links to all the documentation of Dr Woodhouse’s Tribunal papers.

Our Homage to Dr Anne Woodhouse

​Dr Anne Woodhouse is a member of ScotPAG. We are delighted that her recent HCPC Tribunal found that there was no case to answer regarding allegations of misconduct affecting her fitness to practice as a clinical psychologist. 

The allegations were clearly vexatious, made by a LGBTQ activist and Depute Head Teacher of the school Dr Woodhouse’s daughter attended. The HCPC took the claimant’s unfounded allegations at face value, and failed to do any due diligence to establish the burden of proof, pursuing Dr Woodhouse for three years over fact-based tweets. This has been tantamount to harassment. 

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​The HCPC has lost its way as a regulatory body, and it is time for similar organisations to wake up to their ignorance of what is actually happening in society. Instead of persecuting individuals like Dr Woodhouse, HCPC should have been supporting and congratulating her for her diligence and care. She had done her research, and had surveyed the evidence. Dr Woodhouse had also been alert to the failures of various organisations and public services which had, via their promotion of gender identity ideology, twisted and corrupted the original safeguarding regulations for women and children. 

​​Gender identity ideology is a scam based on junk science, which has been visited on us all. It has caused terrible harm to countless children and their families, and it has hounded countless women and some men out of their jobs and livelihoods. It has upended many organisations and made them not fit for purpose. Politicians and many organisational leaders have proved themselves to be useful idiots to this authoritarian movement which demands the sterilisation of children and the compliance of all. If organisations like the HCPC, the BPS, the Scottish Government, the Labour Party and the BBC (plus too many others to mention), had actually done their homework properly, the gender identity ideology movement would have been ignored and labelled as the snake oil nonsense that it is.

Gender, Identity Politics

Plea to Wes Streeting to halt the Puberty Blocker Trial

AdminBPSWatch

The Secretary of State will currently be receiving many representations to stop what is being tagged #StreetingTrial. He has publicly registered his discomfort with medically interfering with natural puberty and also appealed for cross-party consensus “to take the heat and the ideology” out of the debate.  However, aside from the ubiquitous heat and ideology in the context of current debate on “gender”, there is no real possibility of clinical and professional consensus on allowing a clinical trial of puberty blockers to go ahead on children reaching and going through puberty. Many clinicians would say that a serious medical intervention which impacts the body and brain of a developing child is unjustifiable where it is seeking to address what are fundamentally psychological matters of feelings: wishes, desires and dislikes. But many clinicians who would say that have been silenced over the last decade by anxieties for their jobs and reputations. They may have hoped for the universities  and research journals to have promoted enquiry and discussion and their professional bodies to have supported ethical and cautious individualised psychological practice. Until now that enquiry and caution has not been forthcoming and they have seen that the heat and ideology of transgenderism has resoundingly captured the floor. 

The Cass report, the closure of Tavistock GIDS and the banning of puberty blockers seemingly opened a door for more widespread and welcome reflection and review.  A hoped-for follow up of the many young people who were given puberty blockers in the UK, however, has never been undertaken and the prospect of using this medication on more children in the context of a “clinical trial” now looms. This is a turning point for many silent and silenced clinicians and they are protesting. 

We publish here a letter to Wes Streeting that sets out the objections of clinical psychologists whose professional training and expertise means that they cannot, in conscience, agree that such a trial is justifiable.

The Rt Hon Wes Streeting

Secretary of State 

Department of Health and Social Care

14 December 2025

Dear Secretary of State,

Plea to halt the Pathways Puberty Blocker Trial

We, the undersigned 20 clinical psychologists, have personally noted and experienced the censorship of open debate in academia, educational and health service settings and in the media. Clinicians and other professionals have been silenced and feared for their jobs and reputations. It is only now that more of us feel able to speak out, and we are doing so to ask that the Pathways Puberty Blocker trial be halted.

There are many possible psychological, familial, cultural and social reasons why some children show signs of feeling unhappy with the sex they were conceived with and born as. This distress is not the same as suffering an inborn constitutional condition or a serious life-threatening illness such as cancer, hence the ethics and the cost-benefit weighing of the medical risks of clinical trials is completely different. It is neither ethical nor is it possible to conduct a legitimate randomised controlled trial on puberty blocking for psychologically based distress. The actual purpose of the Pathways Puberty Blockers trial is ill-defined, and its methodology cannot answer questions beyond “what happens if we do this to one group and do it a bit later to another?”. With such an unsound rationale it is clear that the medical and developmental risks are not justifiable.

It seems only political intervention at this stage can pause the trial so that the many serious questions can now be raised by clinicians. There is not a current professional or clinical consensus in this area of practice and many clinical experts have grave reservations. We are concerned, as you are, about the sociopolitical context that has influenced previous decision making and we strongly question the assumptions that underpin the rationale for this trial. Our concerns include ideological agendas and vested interests. Past research in this area has been heavily scrutinised and weaknesses, bias, suppressed and inadequate research exposed. The current trial risks repeating and replicating these issues again in its flawed research design. 

Key psychological and clinical considerations are central to our grave concerns. Young children do not understand the essential nature of their birth sex until they are older, or the nature and fluidity of the concept of their identity which is still forming. At the age at which it is being proposed they receive puberty blockers they cannot validly consent to risk their fertility, their ability to experience sexual pleasure and other aspects of adult sexuality. Parents cannot validly consent on their behalf as this is not the same as their sanctioning risky treatment for potentially life-threatening diseases.

Politicians on all sides of the House would support you to act with courage and responsibility.  Halting the Pathways Puberty Blocker trial will allow these seriously problematic issues to be fully and more widely considered before more children are subjected to medical interventions that we already know interfere with normal maturational processes and which are likely to result in serious lifelong changes to their bodily functions and their brains.

We welcome your openness where you acknowledged that you have concerns with, and deep discomfort about, medications that interfere with puberty. As clinicians we share that discomfort. Leaving behind the heated ideology which to date has interfered with debate, the reality is that previously suppressed profound lack of consensus remains within the clinical community and that the trial should therefore not proceed. We are happy to engage in further discussion or assistance.

Yours sincerely,

Ms Patricia Harvey           Consultant Clinical Psychologist (rtd) on behalf of

Dr Lucy Johnstone           Consultant Clinical Psychologist

Dr Gill l’Anson                   Consultant Clinical Psychologist

Dr Celia Sadie                  Consultant Clinical Psychologist

Dr Libby Barnardo          Clinical Psychologist

Dr C Thompson               Consultant Clinical Psychologist

Dr John Higgon               Consultant Clinical Psychologist (rtd)

Prof David Pilgrim        Chartered Clinical Psychologist

Dr Peter Harvey              Consultant Clinical Psychologist (rtd)

and 11 named Consultant Clinical Psychologists/Clinical Psychologists.

Gender, Identity Politics

Would we treat eating disorders with Ozempic?

AdminBPSWatch

Gender distress in children and young people may have been the subject of a raging social polemic, but it is undeniably psychological phenomenon arising within diverse developmental, family and social contexts.  The proposed Pathways clinical trial [see here]  is laden with methodological and ethical concerns. Its publication has been in the pipeline for some time. Yet again the British Psychological Society fails members and the general public – it has neither produced a timely response the this highly controversial project, nor is there any sign of the guidelines for psychological interventions with gender distressed children that was promised many months ago. The BPS has fundamentally abdicated on this important issue of psychological theory, research and practice. We republish here, with permission and in full, a highly pertinent blog post [see original here].

As well as concerns about risks vs benefits, and the ethics of irreversible interventions  with children, the UK’s puberty blocker trial raises fundamental questions about how we respond to distress.

So the UK’s puberty blocker (PB) trial has ethical approval, and thus the green light to proceed. The details of the trial are extensively covered elsewhere. Suffice to say that drugs which suppress the hormonal changes which come with puberty are currently banned from being prescribed to minors. This  follows concerns raised by the Cass Review. Clearly this is not a perfect ban, both inside the NHS and outside it (I won’t provide any link to recent publicity surrounding dodgy private providers). However, the Cass Review also pointed to the limited evidence for the effectiveness of such drugs and called for more research. So, the UK is now running a trial to consider the effects of these medications on the mental and physical wellbeing of under 16s with gender incongruence “when a person’s gender identity does not match the sex they were assigned at birth” (a quote from the trial summary). The evidence to date has been of poor quality and, charitably put, not hugely suggestive of benefits.

While this trial has been long-anticipated, reactions have been, perhaps predictably, mixed. Here though I want to focus on some of the risks. There have been a number of prescriptions of such drugs in the UK in the last fifteen years (estimates suggest at least 2000) and, as Cass pointed out, follow up of those people has been poor. Also significant health concerns about the wider effects have been raised (and have been known for some time). Indeed the original “Dutch Protocol” for young teens assumed to be transgender, relied on the effects of such drugs stunting male genital growth to facilitate later “passing” as female. And while that sounds really very creepy indeed, it’s fairly remarkable the degree to which this was overlooked as the protocol influenced the development of services in other countries. There was simply an assumption that we were sure, even at very early stages, that we know what gender ‘is’, that we would know who would have a settled transgender identification, and that the risks of treatment were worth the benefits. The first assumption has been thoroughly debunked by the Cass process, and worries about the second (harm vs benefit) are really at the heart of objections to the current research.

In relation to harms, as well as effects on sexual development, concerns have also been raised in relation to irreversible consequences for bone health and brain development. Given this I don’t think it’s hugely insightful to point out that proper follow-up of those given such drugs is a logical first step. Not to mention the possibility of further animal trials before opening up more experimentation on children. While proper follow-up has been an aspiration for a while (and there is a current review into adult gender services which might provide some of this information), finding the data for that basic first step has been more difficult than you might imagine. But still lot of this information is out there already. On the basis of what was effectively a huge unregulated trial conducted by the UK’s Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS). The concerns about brain development are clearly present for the investigators, and there will be a parallel study looking at brain changes over time. However, this study is also with live ammo (i.e. actual human children), something which surely should be ethically questionable given the, at best, inconclusive results from previous animal trials (linked above).

These worries about the general mental and physical health effects of PBs are also highly relevant when considering the quality of the study protocol itself. This piece, by Hannah Barnes (the author of Time to Think, award-winning account the UK’s national gender service), outlines many of the issues. Methodology will, I think, be a significant area of coverage over the next few weeks. Initial concerns include the degree to which the questions about any changes to mental wellbeing will be answered at all, given that the study compares the PB group to a group receiving other support and interventions. The risks (and apparent irreversibility) of the effects of such drugs also raises ethical questions which it is perhaps surprising that the ethics committee has not taken more seriously. As Dr David Bell (a clinician who investigated practices at GIDS) said the other day, not only is the trial unable to reliably answer its own questions, but also,

“UK law, derived from European law and the Declaration of Helsinki, says that research on children should not disrupt their normal stages of development without good reason,”

Part of the reasoning behind such prohibitions is that we do not consider children able to meaningfully consent to potentially permanent changes of the sort puberty blockers may produce. All of which is to say there is more to this than simply a poor study design. We’re asking children to consent to something permanently life altering. We may do this with medical trials where lives are at stake but, again a significant finding of Cass, was that suicide risk in the cases of children presenting in GIDS services was not discernibly different from those presenting in other mental health services. The myth which terrified so many parents (“would you rather have a live son or a dead daughter”) was just that.

All of these concerns are being raised and documented elsewhere, and there will doubtless be more critique emerging. But, however we gauge the risk vs benefits, there is still something that is somewhat odd with the PB trial. Are we looking to treat mood and wellbeing issues? But we seem to be doing so by accepting that someone simply is what they say they are. And by enacting that belief with them. This is dramatically different from the way we would proceed in most other areas. We don’t, for example, respond to bodily dysmorphia by instead decide to amputate limbs. Indeed reactions to such things have generally been very negative. Maybe we just haven’t become open minded enough yet, but I’d be surprised if we ever even consider broad acceptance of this to be a sign of progressive liberality. Imagine, for a moment, that the proposed trial was about mastectomies for thirteen-year-olds with gender discomfort. Would that seem shocking? I imagine it would. What though is, fundamentally, the difference between that and permanently impeding the effects of puberty? Other than that it is less visible.

Another parallel might be if we decided we’d trial treating eating disorders with Ozempic. If we actually decided the treatment was to encourage children to become as thin as the want? At a key moment in their physical development. Would that be OK? It seems that in the case of eating disorders we enter treatment with an idea that living in your body and minimising dangerous changes is our preferred stance. With gender issues however, sometimes that stance seems to be dismissed as cis-hetronomative or as conversion therapy.

Of course all such calculations of cost vs benefit fall away if one other factor holds: that we treat the idea of being trapped in the wrong body as real. That we decide that an experience or feeling is some kind of metaphysical identity. As Helen Joyce puts it, a “gendered soul”. After all, you perhaps need to believe in something pretty strongly if you are, for example, going to castrate a child on TV. Risks/side effects/long term outcomes, comorbidities and complexities will be of little concern as the belief is so fundamental. Given that, it is worth revisiting the quote at the beginning of this piece, about “when a person’s gender identity does not match the sex they were assigned at birth”. The reference is to “gender identity” rather than, for example, to bodily, or role, discomfort. An experience is being interpreted as an identity which is potentially fixed. But one which really has no scientific validity. And this is happening in reference not even to a real case, but when considering hypothetical children who might enter the study. As an encore we get sex “assigned” at birth, something which may have some relevance to very rare circumstances of unusual genital development, but for the rest of us create the false impression that sex is somehow a chancy guess. This kind of language is something we might expect from gender identity activists, but I at least was surprised to see it from the oversight committee of a high profile medical trial. Perhaps it’s less surprising though when you consider that the host institution has a long record of an affirmative position around what is routinely framed as LGBTQ+ rights. Which now, evidently, include the right of adults to deny children normal development.

Kathleen Stock recently compared PBs to trepanning, a process that presumably also felt less morally complex in a time when we believed we needed to release tormenting demons. Maybe, if you believed hard enough, you might allow a shaman with a dubious skull-slicing protocol near your head? I had rather hoped medical researchers today might not ground their judgement in such notions of souls and spirits. After the announcement of the puberty blocker trial though I am left wondering.

"The Psychologist", Gender, Governance

Bullying, harassment? It’s not the members, BPS.

AdminBPSWatch

Pat Harvey posts….

Dealing with the many ongoing dissatisfactions of members at BPSWatch, I have just received yet more alarming information about the way in which members are actively dissuaded from persisting to query unsatisfactory responses to their concerns. They are threatened and bullied. This post will provide examples of such evidence that will not breach the confidentiality of those who have brought their reports to us having received the same treatment as I will outline below. We consider this scandalous and worthy of immediate re-scrutiny by the Charity Commission.

Right at the outset when we were propelled to launch BPSWatch.com due to the plethora of concerns amongst psychologist colleagues about their professional body, we were astonished to discover that the CEO of the Society had been suspended, along with the Finance Director. We reported this as mere fact, as we believed that the members had a right to know that some kind of serious incident had occurred. Suspensions of such senior officers in large organisations are often reported as matters of fact which can be expected to have an important impact upon the functioning of that organisation in the short term at least. We received a letter from the then Legal and Governance Officer at the BPS claiming that this was defamatory content. Inexperienced, we were alarmed by this and removed it. AI gives in the footnote below the reasons why we should have stood firm [1]. [This footnote appears at the end of the post].

The behaviour of the BPS towards its members subsequently has given us ample reasons for saying, five years down the line, that we would not respond to threats and bullying because they are the modus operandi of dealing with dissatisfied members who challenge Senior Managers, the Editor of The Psychologist or sometimes Elected Officers. This is a very strong allegation to make, but it has been reported to us by numerous individuals who have persisted with complaints or have challenged policy. We have kept the evidence that has been given to us, often by individual members who feel they have been suddenly subjected to extremely inappropriate threatening communications when they are acting as questioning members whose fees keep the Society afloat and senior staff handsomely remunerated, are entitled to do.

It is as if the BPS are operating the DARVO (Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender) playbook when they are called to account on highly controversial policy pronouncements, failure to respond to important practice issues, publication bias, censorship of debate, communication blackouts and more (see here). It almost seems as though at some stage there has been a policy directive: “If you want to close the member communication down, tell them their persistence is bullying, harassment or vexatious, perhaps threaten them with member conduct rules or violating dignity at work, or legal action”. I think that it is now long overdue that we provide for members/readers the evidence of this ‘BPS as the victim of its members’  stance. 

 It is notable that the exactly the same phraseology is used by different senior staff regarding different issues to different members and this is particularly evident in direct quotes below:

Response to representations about governance and concerns about openness and transparency – reply from the Deputy CEO:

“I ….will not be engaging in any correspondence relating to the internal affairs of the society. I feel that some of your phrases, and the volume of repeated correspondence when answers have been provided, can be construed as harassment and bullying and I will not allow my team to be subjected to inappropriate behaviour. I would like to draw your attention to both the BPS Dignity at Work policy (attached) and the Member Code of Ethics and Conduct.”

Response to communications critical of media engagement of the BPS – reply from Director of Communications and Engagement:

“I also note that some of these emails have been sent early morning, some on Easter Sunday and others at weekends. I would respectfully ask you to review how you correspond with the society. I feel that some of your phrases, and the volume of repeated correspondence when answers have been provided, can be construed as harassment and bullying and I cannot allow my team to be subjected to inappropriate behaviour. I would like to draw your attention to both the BPS Dignity at Work policy (attached) and the Member Code of Ethics and Conduct.”

It is laughable to complain about the timing of emails. Staff need only open work emails during working hours whereas some members will be attending to issues whilst outside their working hours and their working week!

Response to communications about extended debacle surrounding the BPS Memory and Law Group and failures to reply- reply from Director of Knowledge and Insight:

” I feel I have responded to your substantive comments, so I will regard our correspondence as closed. I did not intend my emails to be made public, however one of my emails to you has been posted on the BPSWatch blog with my name, under the heading “Dereliction of Duty”.  I reserve the right to take action in relation to any inappropriate reference to me in any public domain”. (See, however, here for full context of blog article “Dereliction of Duty”)

With regard to the above instances, these are a sample of the many related to us over the past 5 years. Members have told us that they are frustrated, dissatisfied – worse still – intimidated by the direct or implied threats of censure and expulsion. In those instances we have heard and seen nothing to suggest personal abuse against BPS staff and officers or actual harassment of them. The communications have been with personnel who are in a formal role and hence accountable for their actions as representatives of the organisation.

Very frequent and particular concerns have been expressed about the role and function of the BPS magazine, The Psychologist, and decisions of its managing editor, recently retitled Head of Science Communication/ Managing Editor, and his Editorial Advisory Committee (PDEAC). The concerns range from failure to inform, or inform accurately and openly (see below), important relevant Society business when it is not bland, comfortably self-congratulatory, or when it is subject to controversy. With regard to controversy, members have long stated that there is a party line and that the Editor, supported by the PDEAC, resists initiating publication of material which goes against the prevailing editorial position and also resists printing a full range of critical responses.

For example, in 2021, the Editor reprinted a one-liner from the acting Chair of the Board of Trustees:  “… In February, our Vice President David Murphy chose to resign from the Board of Trustees…”. This resignation by a very long serving volunteer and member-elected officer merited coverage in external publications:  Civil Society (see here)  reported that “…In February 2021, a long-standing trustee and former president of the BPS, David Murphy, resigned citing concerns about governance, spending and transparency...” and Third Sector  (see here) noted that “…A long-standing trustee and former president of the British Psychological Society has resigned citing concerns about governance, spending and transparency...”. Dr. Murphy was aggrieved and had to take to X: “I was disappointed to read the statement in @psychmag today  https://thepsychologist.bps.org.uk/volume-34/june-2021/society-crossroads which states that I “chose to resign” without any mention of the reasons. The subsequent focus on gender & prescribing issues may imply these were involved, I’ve posted my resignation letter below.”. That letter can be read here and it is also referenced in a previous blog post here. None of this controversy about profligate spending, transparency and openness was mentioned in The Psychologist and only favourable propaganda about the organisation appears in the publication to this day, hence the continuing function of BPSWatch.

One of the most serious issues that we have covered in this blog has been the avoidance of discussion of the matter of gender ideology and activism and its impact upon controversial psychologist-led services for children. During this last five years the UK has seen relevant judicial rulings, the closure of the national service at the Tavistock and the Cass Inquiry Report. My own complaint about the lamentable BPS Gender Guidelines (2019) secured one concession in 2022, a rebadging to indicate that these did not apply to minors under 18 years of age. Since then the BPS has failed to produce professional practice guidelines for children. The Editor has been reluctant to initiate publication of any articles which are not firmly espousing the trans gender affirmative line and has actively sought articles to promote an evident bias about which he is openly proud. He has stated categorically to me and others that he will always prioritise material on this subject from transgender people and those who work directly with them. He has put this in writing to individuals and in print as a response when pressurised to publish a multi-signed letter from practitioners, a number of whom were former workers who left the discredited services due to concerns (see Editor’s Response here). Despite the assertion “In terms of our own coverage, we are a forum for discussion and debate and we are keen to hear from a range of voices, including trans people and those psychologists who work directly with them. We will begin to publish a selection of responses here.”, only 4 were published, 3 of which were trans ideology affirmative. We know that more responded and that others were immediately discouraged, seeing the caveat of preference expressed by the Editor. The privileging of lived experience as the foremost influence upon, and basis for, policy-making is now the subject of much concern, even from campaigners who are stressing the need for objectivity and balance. A search will demonstrate that proportionally, very little has been published about or by detransitioners or by practitioners who are sex realist and critical of gender ideology and of the medicalisation of gender distress. 

So, having considered above a highly topical issue which has psychological principles and practice at its heart and has suffered suppression by editorial bias at The Psychologist, how is the “reverse victim and offender” seen in its pages? A statement was issued here which reads as defensive of wider criticisms. It also includes “…with extra online comment from the Managing Editor…“. Here the Editor states:

“Challenge and criticism are to be expected and even welcome. But I will no longer engage – I can no longer engage – with false information and the targeting of individual, named staff in repeated abuse. There have to be boundaries for professional and constructive discourse. And I’ve been particularly shocked by accusations of playing the victim or weaponising mental health: perhaps it’s time for a discussion on how we talk about such areas, and my own feeling is that as psychologists we must do better“.

I complained about this to the Chair of the PDEAC at the time. I stated:

“TONE AND CONTENT: 

The tone and content of that section is highly personalised and self-referential, about “I” whilst supposedly writing in the context of considerations about the role and function of a publication of which he is managing editor.  In what is a short section there are 26  first person personal pronouns. He alludes to unspecified and unevidenced abuse and false information, by implication, on social media:

“But I will no longer engage – I can no longer engage – with false information and the targeting of individual, named staff in repeated abuse. There have to be boundaries for professional and constructive discourse. And I’ve been particularly shocked by accusations of playing the victim or weaponising mental health: perhaps it’s time for a discussion on how we talk about such areas, and my own feeling is that as psychologists we must do better.”

These allegations are easy to make, easy to exaggerate, easy to stir up disapproval when you are in the position to publish them mainstream. They should not be made in this way unless there is evidence given and they are serious enough to be actionable. Robust criticism in this context is not abuse. If “false information” is being propagated this gives an opportunity for clarification and correction. Controversy can be debated in a healthy fashion if it is open to general scrutiny. These accusations are not, and are being used in a way currently being referred to as “cancel culture” and “the right not to be offended”.

The comments made in this section are particularly provocative in a circumstance where The Psychologist previously linked the now infamous Youtube video impugning the integrity of the deposed President Elect made by Carol McGuinness (the link posted on The Psychologist which was removed, as it now has been by the BPS themselves). It will undoubtedly be contended legally that this widely circulated and publicly available video constituted harassment and detriment to an individual at the point at which legal redress is sought. It can only be at best insensitive and at worst excruciatingly provocative in such circumstances for Sutton to juxtapose the innuendoes about member abuse with specific reference to Carol McGuinness’ exhortations in the following manner: “…I can only echo Professor McGuinness’s request that we debate with courtesy and respect; give trustees and staff support; and stand for elected roles…” when Carol McGuinness was visibly at the forefront of that attack on an elected officer.

OPPORTUNITY TO COMMENT/DEBATE:

This article appeared in the Debates Section. When I saw the article I checked to see whether anyone had commented, comments section being open and there were none. Later I checked again, and the comments section was no longer open.

I tweeted the following:

DEBATES SECTION: “From the Psychologist and Digest Editorial Advisory Committee…with extra online comment from the Managing Editor”. Accusations made here of “false information” and “repeated abuse” – BUT MEMBER COMMENTS ARE DISABLED ON THIS (see here)

… after which this appeared:

“P.S. And yes, comment is disabled on this post; I feel for very good reason given past experience. This is an opportunity to explain our position, rather than an invitation to debate. However, email addresses are there for both the Chair of PDEAC and myself, and any letters for publication will be considered in the usual way.”

I think many members will agree that this is a petulant, disrespectful and entirely inappropriate way for an editor to behave towards members – anticipating responses that had not occurred! Far from the supposed contrition of the earlier comment “I’m the first to admit we’ve never quite nailed that ‘discussion and controversy’ aspect. We’re far from perfect, and I’ve personally made some big errors of judgement over the years”

Sutton escalates hostility to which only alternative media would be able to reply. I am the author of the Twitter @psychsocwatchuk. I am named on the site. The added PS of the article which appears after I tweeted begins “…and yes, comment is disabled on this post etc…” appears to be a direct response to me and Sutton has blocked my twitter where he might have properly and openly responded to me instead of using the pages of The Psychologist. Something of a power imbalance, but one I as an individual member can do little about. It is precisely for these kinds of reasons  of shutting down debate that alternative media BPSWatch.com and @psychsocwatchuk have come into existence. It seems they continue to be needed.

The response was as follows:

“Thank you for your letter. After careful consideration I am of the mind that your complaint is about Jon Sutton’s conduct as a BPS member rather than any misapplication of PDEAC policies and procedures. I would therefore advise that you submit it via these channels: https://www.bps.org.uk/contact-us/complaints

I would add that the PDEAC (the committee) had oversight of Jon’s letter and approved it, and I personally stand by the content. PDEAC agreed at the time of conceiving of the two letters that their purpose was to put out a clear statement dispelling the suggestion that The Psychologist was being silenced. I would invite you to continue the debate by writing a letter to The Psychologist.”

Unsurprisingly, I got nowhere with an impervious environment at The Psychologist. To edit a publication which claims a readership online of 200,000 per month and to choose what to put out to those readers is an onerous responsibility. To choose to characterise dissent amongst members with dark undemonstrated allegations of this kind and to block comments is an abuse of responsibility by a powerful voice in the British Psychological Society.

David Pilgrim, alongside us at BPSWatch, edited a book on the BPS in 2023 . Its title “British Psychology in Crisis: A Case Study in Organisational Dysfunction” remains pertinent today as we have kept all the receipts that have come to us since its publication. The disregard and disrespect for members and for the important psychological issues continues apace. Student members are failing to join on graduation, practitioners are leaving. Membership has dropped by around 8000 since 2020. Fees have gone up. The headquarters is being sold. No reflection has taken place, no lessons have been learned.

[1] AI Overview

Members of the British Psychological Society (BPS) have a right to be informed about the suspension of the CEO and Finance Director, especially given the Society’s structure as a charity and professional association, and the potential legal and ethical ramifications of such a suspension. A member of a similar group, bpswatch.com, was threatened with legal action for reporting the suspension of a CEO, indicating that such information is considered to be something members are entitled to know. 

Why Members Have a Right to Know

  • Charity Governance: 

As a registered charity, the BPS has a duty of care and transparency to its members, who are stakeholders in the organization. This includes informing them of significant leadership changes or issues that could impact the organization’s operations or finances. 

  • Professional Association: 

The BPS also serves as a professional association, and its leadership structure is integral to its functioning and reputation. Members rely on the Society for professional development, standards, and ethical guidance, making them invested in its governance. 

  • Ethical and Financial Implications: 

The suspension of key positions like the CEO and Finance Director suggests potential serious issues within the organization, such as financial misconduct or mismanagement. Members, especially those holding high standards like Chartered Psychologists, have an interest in upholding the ethical and responsible governance of their professional body. 

  • Transparency in Professional Bodies: 

Professional bodies like the BPS are expected to operate with a degree of openness and accountability to their members, particularly when leadership is involved in significant internal issues. 

Therefore, withholding this information would contradict the expectations of good governance for a charity and professional association, and could be seen as a failure to be transparent with its membership. 

"The Psychologist", Gender

The Psychologist and the Continuing Decline of Content

AdminBPSWatch

Pat Harvey posts……

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

Context

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

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

A frightening agenda for Child Development?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further context

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gender, Identity Politics

“Protect the Dolls!” Profanity, Sanity, Sanctity and Sanctuary?

AdminBPSWatch

A feminist psychologist seeks to promote open discussion of a trans campaigning phrase. Natalie C Rose posts….

In the United Kingdom, very recently, the government’s current Culture Secretary, Lisa Nandy, was pictured on a Pride parade wearing a t-shirt proclaiming Protect the Dolls (see here). “Dolls” in this context are males identifying as females, so-called trans women, who seek to “pass”. Passing means achieving the perception by others of the trans person being their adopted gender rather than their biological sex. For some trans people this is more important than for others. Social experiences of failing to pass are deemed to cause distress, anger and despair. Google the phrase Protect the Dolls and AI will inform you that “…the phrase originated in the 1980s ballroom scene and has become a popular slogan supporting transgender women. The term “dolls” is a term of endearment used within the LGBTQ+ community specifically by and for trans women. The phrase, popularised by designer Conner Ives (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protect _the_Dolls) is a call for protection and affirmation of trans women, especially in the face of increasing attacks and discrimination…”. This is a demand made on everyone in society. As far as I am aware there is no similar injunction pertaining to trans men.

Profanity?

But why dolls? Dolls are the archetypal toys of childhood, having manifestations across many cultures through human history. They are varied in form and meaning, witness baby dolls and Barbie Dolls™. The term Doll meaning a woman was once familiar in the all American movie. Uttered by an all-American teen or GI it objectified the glamorous female catching his attention. Dolls, however, are also the stuff of the Horror movie genre; unsettling, uncanny, creepy and threatening.  They stray easily into the profane – blow-up dolls with usable orifices for an adult market not only interested in doll adults but also in doll minors. This was presaged by the shockingly aberrant forms of the misformed sexualised child dolls of YBA’s Jake and Dinos Chapman in the art exhibition Sensation, which opened its world tour in London in 1997 alongside the famous pickled shark and the children’s handprints constructing the face of Myra Hindley (see here). Culture plays out many forms and has multiple active connotations and allusions. Sexual desires weave their way through much of this, and it seems sexual proclivities and fetishes still need material material as well as digital imagery on screen and online.

Sanity?

So, what is with the dolls of transgenderism beyond the ballroom scene that most will know little or nothing about? These trans dolls may be 6 feet 2 inches tall with unalterably broad shoulders, and the male to female dolls are the ones we are urged to protect. Within transgender campaigning, this truly concerns only the males wanting to be females not the females wanting to be males. From the perspective of psychological inquiry, this quickly takes us into the psychological world of some of that male group and their allies and into a delusion of trans-substantiation. To trans woman India Willoughby and to the gender studies scholar Professor Sally Hines, males who don female clothes and make up and also take oestrogen do actually become the 1959 Cliff Richard’s real cryin, talkin’, sleepin’, walkin’, living’ doll, – they become embodied woman, real females   “..take a look at her hair, it’s real, and if you don’t believe what I say just feel…” (see here).

How many of males currently identifying as females are actually aspiring to a notion of the living doll? More real than a real woman. Some openly describe themselves as better women than cis women;

Trans women are the only real women! Humanity through technology and medical advances has progressed to the point that cis females have gone the way of the Neanderthal; a biological dead end that’s time and purpose have passed”. (see here)

 Are we allowed to say this is not sane, call it a delusion? Here the belief system joins forces with Transhumanism, where individuals want to shuffle off the limitations of the actual mortal coil and attain their fantasised essence, incorporating and possessing it for themselves, forever. Real women, biological females, are an irritating inconvenience and are dispensable.  Surely this is a less than sane and morally offensive subjectivity?

Sanctity?

Non-doll-like, actual women are diverse, messy, imperfect, flawed. Conceived as female, born as baby girls, navigating the trials and tribulations of growing into womanhood, women make up half the human race and they sit at the heart of nature’s preferred model for reproduction of the species. From fairly early on, in all cultures, those women have a wariness (more or less conscious depending on upbringing and experience) of the otherness of males, their superior strength, their propensities for significant differences in sexual, aggressive and dominant behaviour, their gestures, gait and mannerisms. Most men, including trans women, will never understand how instantaneously women, including young girls, women with Down’s syndrome and older women with dementia will reflexively perceive that a trans woman is not a woman. This recognition is not necessarily one of perceiving an active threat, but of something disquieting, untoward. This will add to their sense of vulnerability when it occurs in the context of a woman’s sickness, psychiatric disturbance, trauma or incarceration. Sometimes there will be real danger.  

Sanctuary?

As acknowledged above, trans women, in the main, may present no physical threat to women when they enter women’s spaces, but they do disturb the precious sanctity by disturbing women’s inner peace. Sanctity for womanhood has been sought, often in vain and at a high price, in human cultures through millennia. Where it has been achieved, it is precarious and fragile. Latterly it has been threatened by chants of “Transwomen are Women”, the mantra that closes down discussion and when contested has lost women their jobs.  Sanctity needs sanctuary. Such sanctuary gives women psychological as well as physical safety. Women want it for women’s reasons, such as being able to just be off-guard, to enjoy dignity and privacy, a rest from being kind when you just feel uncomfortable. It is not wanted for the performative reasons of many trans women who seek to enter women’s spaces. As a woman out there, you can only reliably take that privacy and dignity for granted in the company of your biologically female kin in unquestionably women only spaces. 

Please now let us keep to the letter of the UK Supreme Court Ruling about those spaces (see here).