Identity Politics – psychology UNREDACTED

David Pilgrim posts…..

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

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

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

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

Decolonisation as a restricted form of historiography?

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

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

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

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

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

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

And there is more….

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

EDI, Ethics, Identity Politics

On performative diversity and virtue signalling.

19th Jan 2026 AdminBPSWatch

Peter Harvey posts…

Below is a screen shot from an email I received recently from Clinical Psychology Forum (CPF) which outlines its revised guidance for submission of articles:

You will have your own opinions, thoughts and raised eyebrows about this but here are some of my observations.

My first impression is that this is incredibly patronising. Understanding sample selection and generalisability is a fundamental element of research design. Are the editors seriously suggesting that doctoral level graduates and trainees do not have this knowledge? Likewise the comment on ‘positionality’ in qualitative work. When I was examining some 25 or more years ago and these methodologies were becoming more common, it was a sine qua non that the investigator engaged in multiple and frequent reflections on the material and their interaction with it. Why do people need reminding of this? Perhaps I am missing something here. Is it that CPF is actually getting submissions that have to be rejected for such basic errors? If so, it suggests a more serious problem – that research design and methodology are not being properly taught and supervised either at an undergraduate level or during clinical training. I am far too distant from it all to know the answer to that so it would be interesting to get a view from those currently involved.

There are two words, however, that (in the modern parlance) are triggers for me – ‘diversity’ and ‘colonial’. Starting with diversity I am absolutely not arguing with a principle that treats all humans as equal and that discrimination on the grounds of, for example, race or sex is fundamentally and morally wrong. Nor am I disputing that people are excluded and discriminated against historically and currently both in society at large and in the psychological research literature. Nor do I deny that much of the history of European colonialism is shameful. These are moral positions supported (in my case) by a strong humanist philosophy. But if I am engaged in a research exercise then what needs to guide my thinking is “What method or procedure do I need to employ that will give me at least an approximate answer to the research question that I am asking?”. This is not an ethically neutral question, of course, as a flawed design will produce flawed results which, if inappropriately applied, may cause harm. As participant characteristics and sample selection are an integral part of that process then it should go without saying that this is guided by the same ethical and moral principles as the rest of the project. In fact, the BPS’s Code of Human Research Ethics (2021) is explicit:

Section 2.1, Respect for the autonomy, privacy and dignity of individuals, groups and communities

Psychologists have and show respect for the autonomy and dignity of persons. In the research context this means that there is a clear duty to participants. For example, psychologists respect the knowledge, insight, experience and expertise of participants and potential participants. They respect individual, cultural and role differences, including those involving age, disability, gender reassignment, marriage and civil partnership, pregnancy and maternity race (including colour, nationality, ethnic or national origin), religion and belief, sex, sexual orientation, education, language and socio-economic status.

That seems pretty clear to me, so what does emphasising “diversity” add? All the editors of CPF need to do is to require that all submissions follow the BPS Code – job done.

Once the research is completed it is always incumbent on an investigator to highlight the limits to their data and for the reader to be equally alert to the dangers of over-generalisation. This is no more than good practice.

There is a further question which relates to the diversity of the population from which you are sampling. When I was part of a selection team for a clinical training course we, along with others in the profession as a whole, were concerned about the ethnic diversity of trainees. The problem for us was that the ethnic diversity of psychology graduates was (at that time at least) poor. However much one wants to strive for diversity (however defined) there are factors that are beyond our control.

Apart from that, we need to ask the question – how diverse is diverse? Do we select from the ever-expanding categories on a random basis or just pick the one that happens to be most fashionable at the current time? Do we pick one of each? Will we need a sort of diversity quotient threshold that all published work has to reach? Or do we do what seems to happen with monotonous regularity – have some token representation that simply ticks the box so we can get on with our lives comfortable that we have assuaged at least some of our guilt? Surely the diversity to be aimed for is the one that is most representative of the group to which we want to generalise rather than engaging in a performative exercise?

But it is the phrase “…mindful of colonial influence…” that really got me scratching my head. What does that mean in operational and behavioural terms? What would I, a researcher, have to do in actual practice, to demonstrate that I am mindful of colonial influence? Is this a test of my knowledge of British and European history? And what exactly does the phrase “…mindful of…” mean? And, whose colonial influence do we include? The exhortation assumes that all clinical psychologists share the same colonial history. Whilst the profession may not be as diverse as the general population of the UK I know that not everyone shares the same background as me. So would a psychologist from a different ethnic or cultural background to me (perhaps someone from one of the historic colonies) have a waiver? Or would a clinical psychologist qualified in Holland need to be mindful of the actions of the Dutch East India Company? Should a Christian psychologist be mindful of the Crusades? Perhaps all submissions need to be accompanied by statement from an independent asssessor to the effect that they have witnessed and can attest to the fact that the experimenter did in fact, reflect mindfully on colonial influence for the prescribed 30 minute period ( I am happy that CPF use this freely and without authorial credit).

But perhaps I am being too literal here and a more nuanced and sophisticated reading of colonial influence is required. In his endlessly entertaining and intellectually sparkling book After Theory, Terry Eagleton argues that post-colonial studies have “… been one of the most precious achievements of cultural theory…” despite his observation that

… some students of culture are blind to the Western narcissism involved in working on the history of pubic hair while half the world’s population lacks adequate sanitation and survives on less than two dollars a day. [page 6]

He goes on to be much more critical and places this particular approach within a wider critique of post-modernism generally (in my view the book should be required reading on training courses). But his phrase Western narcissism is perhaps key here and is what the editors are trying to address. I interpret that as questioning the assumptions that we make as post-Renaissance liberal Europeans about our shared culture and heritage which usually lead to a sense of intellectual, moral and ethical superiority. This stance, of course, devalues other cultural norms and values.

Cultural relativism is a key element of of post-modernism, a definition of which is provided by Eagleton…

By ‘postmodern’ I mean, roughly speaking , the contemporary movement of thought which rejects totalities, universal values, grand historical narratives, solid foundations to human existence and the possibility of objective knowledge. Postmodernism is sceptical of truth, unity and progress, opposes what it sees as elitism in culture, tends towards cultural relativism, and celebrates pluralism, discontinuity and heterogeneity. [footnote, page 13]

This is not the place to engage in a critique of post-modernism (particularly as Eagleton does it so much better and with far greater wit and panache than I) but I do have some problems. In particular, this approach is often applied uncritically (an irony for so-called critical theory) and presents us with contradictory positions and yet further confusions. The Editors’ injunction demonstrates just such a problem.

Are they asking us to be aware of our colonial history or is it a more general reminder to be aware of our particular cultural values, of which colonialism may be a part? This certainly makes more sense to me. Taking a critical and questioning stance about making ‘cultural’ assumptions and decrying a position that assumes it is superior to others is not the problem. Where I struggle is in knowing how to deal with that in the real world out here. I suppose that part of it is (to my mind anyway) oversimplification – it’s almost as if it is “My culture bad, your culture good. I was the oppressor, you were the oppressed.”. There is no nuance, no ability to take a stance that says that there are both good and bad aspects of my culture as there are of yours. I suppose that some would argue that there is no equality or balance to be had as, historically, the balance has always been in favour of the colonialists and cultural supremacists. I am not going to take issue with that. But I still struggle when a particular culture espouses values and principles that I cannot support. So within our “English” culture (now there’s a concept freighted with conflict) there are beliefs I certainly don’t share and people whose behaviour I don’t support because they conflict with my ethical and moral system. In the same way there are values and beliefs in other cultures that I cannot support (where women are systematically oppressed, for example or where homosexuality is punished by death). I cannot ignore or defend the idea of so-called ‘honour killing’. An example of how this plays out in practice is shown in recent paper on female genital mutilation in the Journal of Medical Ethics (see here for the full version)

…we highlight a troubling double standard that legitimises comparable genital surgeries in Western contexts while condemning similar procedures in others…

There can be little doubt that we are all struggling with how to manage our personal and cultural backgrounds in a humane and honest way. As psychologists we should, more than most, be aware of these and have the tools to deal with them. But is this self-awareness and self-knowledge enough? In my own case I am more than conscious of the privilege that my sex, ethnicity, education and class give me as I tick all the wrong boxes when it comes to diversity. I cannot change these things nor can atone for them – they are an integral part of me. I can, however, try to apply this self-awareness to ensure that I do not abuse those characteristics to take unfair advantage of anyone. But in our post-modern Zeitgeist that is not enough it seems. We have been told that we need gatekeepers, monitors of language, taste and public presentation, people to guide our thoughts, feelings and behaviours. This is well articulated by Rosanne McLaughlin when discussing how critics and curators are reframing great artists to fit with modern ethical narratives in the visual arts.

Now I am not going all Andrew Tate or Jordan Peterson here. I am well aware that people like me are disproportionately represented in most organisations and professions (although, it should be noted not in clinical psychology in which 80% of the workforce is female – see here). I am also aware that we wield a disproportionate amount of power and influence and that, both historically and currently, people have suffered at the hands of those who abuse their power and position.

So what can I do? If I were in practice and wanted to submit paper to CPF how will they assess (and, just as importantly, how do I assess) whether I have been culturally mindful or not? And this is what is wrong with the editors’ injunction. Unless these statements are operationalised and clarified in behavioural terms they are little other than vacuous feel-good phrases. They are no more than a pious posturing in order to placate our own feelings. It is also dangerous. Such superficial poses feed the reactionary forces that wish to pursue a frankly racist agenda. And this is what really, really gets me angry. That there are serious failings in both society at large and psychology, both historic and current, which need addressing when it comes to matters of equality, fairness and justice is beyond dispute. It is right that we should know about and reflect on the lengths to which our predecessors went (and the depths to which they sank) to exploit people and cultures to feed their (and now, our) appetites and desires (see, for example, the history of nutmeg (Ghosh, 2021)). It is also right that we are aware of the exploitation that goes on to this very day, although rare earths for our electronics have replaced aromatic spices (see, for example, Sebastião Salgado’s photographs and Niarchos (2025)). We need to take a critical stance when we assess past psychological research and ensure that we are not over-interpreting data from limited samples (such as US psychology undergraduates earning course credits for participating). We need to remind ourselves that the world within both our and our clients’ heads is not just a function of internal psychic forces but is influenced by the outside world of society and culture (perhaps all psychology degrees should have mandatory sociology and anthropology modules).

Knowing this stuff is uncomfortable – as it should be. Feeling upset and some sort of empathy for those who have suffered is an understandable humanitarian response to exploitation, pain and distress. We have to be grown-up enough to live with and deal with that discomfort. A mere recitation of fashionable diversity mantras changes nothing. We cannot alter what has happened. Our timeframe in the now and the future. Let us learn from the past and do our level best to ensure that our actions and behaviours do not repeat the exploitative oppression of our forebears.

References

Ahmadu, F.S.N., Bader, D., Boddy, J., et al (2025).Harms of the current global anti-FGM campaign. Journal of Medical Ethics . Published Online First: 14 September 2025. doi: 10.1136/jme-2025-110961

British Psychological Society. (2021). BPS Code of Human Research Ethics. British Psychological Society.

Eagleton, T. (2003). After Theory. Allen Lane.

Ghosh, A. (2021). The Nutmeg’s Curse; Parables for a Planet in Crisis. University of Chicago Press.

Niarchos, N. (2026). The Elements of Power. William Collins.

Salgado, S. (2024). Workers. An Archaeology of the Industrial Age. Taschen.

Salgado, S. (2026). Gold. Taschen.

Gender, Identity Politics

Plea to Wes Streeting to halt the Puberty Blocker Trial

15th Dec 202515th Dec 2025 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?

25th Nov 2025 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.

Gender, Identity Politics

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

19th Aug 202519th Aug 2025 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).

EDI, Gender, Identity Politics

Open letter to the British Psychological Society

11th Jul 2025 AdminBPSWatch

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

Dear Dr Lavender,

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

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

Adult Gender Services

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

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

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

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

Children’s Gender Services

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

Further Questions

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

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

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

The Future of Psychology and the BPS in relation to Gender

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

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

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

EDI – where did it all go wrong?

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

How is Gender Different? Let me Count the Ways

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

We demand action.

Yours sincerely,

Pat Harvey

Peter Harvey

David Pilgrim

BPS members and BPSWatch.com

cc.

President of the BPS

Chair of BPS Board of Trustees

CEO

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

EDI, Gender, Identity Politics

How is Gender Different? Let me Count the Ways

9th Jul 202512th Aug 2025 AdminBPSWatch

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Academic freedom and censorship, EDI, Identity Politics

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

4th Jul 20254th Jul 2025 AdminBPSWatch

David Pilgrim posts….

John has offered us a clear critique of the mess we are in in relation to the battle between transactivists and their opponents. Rather than counter anything John has said I want to extend the implications of some of his statements (hence I cite these directly and then comment). My points make links directly to British psychology in general, which includes how the BPS has managed ideological trans capture.

“But, to sex realists, sex and gender are different. Sex refers to biology, gender refers to the expectations that culture places on men and women to behave in particular ways….”

This is a standard and legitimate truism. However, since the shift from a largely empiricist tradition in British psychology in the 1980s towards postmodernism, a whole generation of recruits to the discipline has been exposed to the idea that ‘everything is socially constructed’. This has softened them up more generally to uncritically accept what Noam Chomsky called ‘postmodern gibberish’, epitomised in the writing of the third wave feminist Judith Butler. Reality is old hat and language is everything. To me this epistemic nihilism is a form of collective psychosis offered to us by idiots with high IQs. It has fitted hand in glove with transgender activism.

“The rights of various groups often clash, and society has to find a way to balance these opposing rights as best they can be. This is where we find ourselves now. Trans-identifying people should of course have rights and should not be subject to unreasonable discrimination. But it is not self-evident that their rights should trump women’s rights.”

The chances of clashing rights to citizenship increased with the expansion of identity politics and the emergence of an Olympics of victimhood. This is not that complicated: key groups such as the poor, women and children share clear objective criteria of vulnerability to oppression and detriments to their wellbeing. However, once subjective self-identification began to over-ride this starting point, then anyone could claim an equivalence of vulnerability.

This has culminated in special pleading from men who believe that they are women (and demand others must agree with them), men who want to claim the right to have sex with children and men who reserve the right to pursue their autocratic theological authority (see Pilgrim (2022) for more on this point about the interaction of neoliberalism and patriarchy). The original materialist focus of intersectionality, on overlapping points of structural inequality affecting social groups, has been superseded by a version where self-identification now predominates. Now the self-declared victimhood of individuals has become a narcissistic faux-criterion of social justice.

“Trans activists have also been very successful in finding their ways into influential positions within organisations. The BPS is no exception. Once there, they have a more or less free rein to make whatever pronouncements they see fit, all with the implied backing of the organisation which they represent.”

John correctly celebrates the pressure now on trans activism created by the Cass Review and the Supreme Court ruling. That strain is showing at last in the BPS. The cadre of transactivists enjoying their hegemony, say two years ago, is now fragmenting, with key figures either departing or re-grouping and licking their wounds about the battles they are losing in public policy settings. Stonewall and Mermaids are enjoying far less patronage from public and private recently. This particular culture war is not going well for transgender activists The cases John cites of female nurses fighting back, with public support, about their privacy signal this trend. A caveat to this is that in the context of the wider culture wars, the sex/gender controversy is unusual but it is not unique (Pilgrim, 2024).

“The problem for public sector organisations is that a whole generation of employees has been exposed to gender ideology and actively dissuaded from critically appraising it. The challenge now is to re-engage our critical faculties so that we can develop new strategies for supporting gender-non-conforming and gender-dysphoric individuals, ensuring that those strategies are evidence-based and do not lead us into situations where one group’s rights come at the expense of another’s. Psychologists have a role here. We are trained to think critically. If you are not convinced by gender ideology, surely nobody can blame you for asking an innocent question at the next team meeting.”

This is the only point where my interpretation of psychology differs from John; that psychologists trained to think critically – is that true? Certainly, during most of the 20^th century, the fact that the discipline was inherently contested led to psychology students being obliged to compare and contrast conflicting theoretical approaches to experience and behaviour. However, in the past thirty years that norm has shifted. Critical appraisal has given way to a soggy consensus about methodological rigour, evading an examination of underlying metaphysical divisions and theoretical incompatibilities (Gao, 2014).

This move to ‘methodologism’ in the discipline has then been compounded by the influence John points up about the EDI movement in higher education and settings in which psychologists are now employed. This has created a disabling pincer movement, which now undermines the confidence and willingness of young psychologists to speak their minds (about anything that legitimately comes to their minds). My personal impression now on clinical courses is that trainees are culturally divided. There are the virtue signallers enjoying the glow of self-righteous performativity and quickly pointing out when they are offended or ‘feel unsafe’, when certain words are ever uttered in their presence. These are the ‘new puritans’ who thirst for the judicial logic of Salem (Doyle, 2022). However, epistemic violence and real violence are really not the same. Feeling unsafe is warranted when your village is being bombed but not because people say things that upset you. As van der Kolk, the psychiatric proposer of PTSD noted correctly, being asked to read Othello is not really the same thing as being gang raped.

Alongside the virtue signallers are others harbouring their moral and intellectual doubts but who are wary to speak out. They may still think critically but that cannot speak critically. This scenario is a product of the betrayal of the post-Enlightenment value of freedom of expression in general and its close cousin but not twin, of academic freedom in particular. The depressing cultural outcome is not peculiar to one discipline but permeates the academy and the organisations that employ graduates.

Thankfully there is a fightback, organised by those like the Committee for Academic Freedom and Academics For Academic Freedom. The more of us who join their ranks the better. Hovering above the tedious ‘culture wars’ is a more important consideration: can critical thinking be expressed without fear in academic settings? At present a climate of intimidation dominates higher education. Psychologists are constrained by this norm as much as any other group. I am not confident that they have any special insight or privilege to develop and articulate a needed critique but maybe John is right, and I am wrong. The fight back I think must be multi-disciplinary.

Doyle, A. (2022) The New Puritans: How The Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World. London: Constable

Gao, Z (2014) Methodologism/Methodological Imperative . In T. Teo (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Critical Psychology, New York: Springer

Pilgrim, D. (2024) Identity politics: The sex/gender controversy Is unusual but not unique. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 53, 2431–2443.

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

EDI, Gender, Identity Politics

EDI – where did it all go wrong?

3rd Jul 20255th Jul 2025 AdminBPSWatch

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

This is the first of a continuing series.

John Higgon, a retired clinical neuropsychologist, posts….

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

Some history

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

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

Single-sex services

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

Female changing rooms

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

Lesbians’ right to associate on the basis of sexual orientation

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

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

Culture wars

Rights of various groups often clash, and society has to find a way to balance these opposing rights as best they can be. This is where we find ourselves now. Trans-identifying people should of course have rights and should not be subject to unreasonable discrimination. But it is not self-evident that their rights should trump women’s rights. Trans activists have responded to challenges by adopting the strategy of avoiding any debate of these issues, as recommended in the Denton Report, and for a long time they have got away with it. Witness the treatment of Kathleen Stock. Witness the extreme and unchallengeable assertions – “transwomen are women”. Witness the attempts to shut down academic study that is anything other than affirming (the refusal of scientific journals to publish Sallie Baxendale’s work on puberty blockers and their potential effects on cognitive development, the expulsion of James Caspian from his psychotherapy course because of his proposed research into the experience of detransitioners, the expulsion of James Esses from his psychotherapy training course for his views on affirmative therapy). Witness the violent protests at sex realist meetings or attempted viewings of sex realist films such as Adult Human Female.

The reason they have got away with it is that these extreme positions are both tacitly and often explicitly supported by EDI policies put together in the HR departments of institutions, in particular, public sector institutions. It’s not surprising that these policies have developed as they have. ‘Co-production’ emphasizes the benefits of the public sector working with marginalized groups (“Nothing about us without us”), and whilst there is a place for this, it is reasonable to ask whether trans activists have become the self-serving tail wagging the compliant dog. Trans activists have also been very successful in finding their ways into influential positions within organisations. The BPS is no exception. Once there, they have a more or less free rein to make whatever pronouncements they see fit, all with the implied backing of the organisation which they represent. In this way, a culture has gradually come into existence which promotes the incorporation of preferred pronouns into name badges, which accepts uncritically the grafting of the ‘T’ onto the pre-existing ‘LGB’, which actively promotes Pride events whilst doing far less to promote other protected groups, and which promotes Stonewall-inspired narratives about gender identity whilst coming down firmly on sex realist narratives. The climate that has been created looks like it is very diverse and supportive, but woe betide anyone who challenges it.

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

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

A way out

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

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

The problem for public sector organisations is that a whole generation of employees has been exposed to gender ideology and actively dissuaded from critically appraising it. The challenge now is to re-engage our critical faculties so that we can develop new strategies for supporting gender-non-conforming and gender-dysphoric individuals, ensuring that those strategies are evidence-based and do not lead us into situations where one group’s rights come at the expense of another’s. Psychologists have a role here. We are trained to think critically. If you are not convinced by gender ideology, surely nobody can blame you for asking an innocent question at the next team meeting?

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

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

12th May 2025 AdminBPSWatch

David Pilgrim posts:

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

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

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

Heavy is the head that bears the crown

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

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

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

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

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

Back to the strange brew

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• acting ethically

• competent in using and evaluating information and technology;

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

• recognising, understanding and fostering respect for diversity;

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Insights after the Popperian watershed

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

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

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

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

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

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

References

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

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

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

Conway, M.(2012). Ten things the law and others should know about human memory. In L. Nadel and W.P. Sinnott-Armstrong (Eds.). Memory and law : Oxford University Press.

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

Hulme, J, Skinner, R., Worsnop, F., Collins, E., Banyard, P., Kitching, H., Watt, R. and Goodson, S. (2015). Psychological literacy: A multifaceted perspective. Psychology Teaching Review 12, 2, 13-24.

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McGovern, T. V., Corey, L., Cranney, J., Dixon, W. E., Jr., Holmes, J. D., Kuebli, J. E., Ritchey, K. A., Smith, R. A., & Walker, S. J. (2010). Psychologically literate citizens. In D. F. Halpern (Ed.), Undergraduate education in psychology: A blueprint for the future of the discipline (pp. 9–27). American Psychological Association.

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Miller, G. (1969). Psychology as a means of promoting human welfare. American Psychologist, 24(12), 1063–1075. doi:10.1037/h0028988

Pilgrim, D. (Ed.) (2023). British Psychology in Crisis Phoenix Books.

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

Pilgrim, D. (2020). Critical Realism for Psychologists Routledge.

Richards, G. (2009). Putting psychology in its place: Critical historical perspectives. Routledge.

Smedslund, J. (2016). Why psychology cannot be an empirical science. Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science 50, 2, 185-95.

Tortorello, F. (2017). What is real about reductive neuroscience? Journal of Critical Realism 16 (3):235-254.

Trapp A., Banister P., Ellis J., Latto R., Miell D and Upton D. (2011). The future of undergraduate psychology in the United Kingdom. Higher Education Academy Psychology Network, https://groups.psychology.org.au/Assets/Files/Future%20UG%20UK.pdf

Uher, J. (2021). Psychology’s status as a science. Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science, 55, 212-224

Category: Identity Politics

TWO TYPES OF IDEOLOGICAL CAPTURE IN THE BPS

On performative diversity and virtue signalling.

Plea to Wes Streeting to halt the Puberty Blocker Trial

Would we treat eating disorders with Ozempic?

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

Open letter to the British Psychological Society

How is Gender Different? Let me Count the Ways

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

EDI – where did it all go wrong?

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