“The Psychologist” – psychology UNREDACTED

David Pilgrim and Ashley Conway post…

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

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

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

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

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

Best wishes

Jon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

David Pilgrim and Ashley Conway

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tunnel vision and the four scenarios of false memories

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

Table 1. Four scenarios of false memories

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

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

Legitimation and de-legitimation of the false memory movement

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

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

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

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

Evidence of biased personal interest

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

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

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

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

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

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

Past and recent uses of the false memory defence

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

References

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Andrews, B. and Brewin, C. (2024). Lost in the mall?: Interrogating judgements of false memory. Applied Cognitive Psychology , 38, no. 6: e70012.

Baddley, A., Eysenck, M.W. and Anderson, M.C. (2025). Memory (4th Edition). London: Routledge

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Felstead, K. and French, C (2021). Dr James Ost’s contributions to the work of the British False Memory Society. Memory, 30, 6, 669-677.

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

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Hoult, J. (1998). Silencing the victim: The politics of discrediting child abuse survivors. Ethics & Behavior 8 (2):125 – 140.

Longhi, L. (2022). UNLV professor had prior investigation for sexual harassment Las Vegas Review Journal August 26th

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

TWO TYPES OF IDEOLOGICAL CAPTURE IN THE BPS

11th Feb 2026 AdminBPSWatch

David Pilgrim posts…..

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

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

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

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

Decolonisation as a restricted form of historiography?

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

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

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

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

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

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

And there is more….

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"The Psychologist", Gender, Governance

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

7th Oct 20257th Oct 2025 AdminBPSWatch

Pat Harvey posts….

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“TONE AND CONTENT:

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

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

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

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

OPPORTUNITY TO COMMENT/DEBATE:

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

I tweeted the following:

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

… after which this appeared:

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

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

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

The response was as follows:

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

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

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

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

^[^1] AI Overview

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

Why Members Have a Right to Know

Charity Governance:

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

Professional Association:

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

Ethical and Financial Implications:

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

Transparency in Professional Bodies:

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

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

"The Psychologist", Gender

The Psychologist and the Continuing Decline of Content

28th Aug 2025 AdminBPSWatch

Pat Harvey posts……

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

Context

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

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

A frightening agenda for Child Development?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further context

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

12th May 2025 AdminBPSWatch

David Pilgrim posts:

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

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

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

Heavy is the head that bears the crown

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

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

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

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

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

Back to the strange brew

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• acting ethically

• competent in using and evaluating information and technology;

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

• recognising, understanding and fostering respect for diversity;

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Insights after the Popperian watershed

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

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

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

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

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

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

References

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

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

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

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.

Loftus, E. and Ketcham, K. (1991). Witness for the defense. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

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.

Miller, G. (1991). Psychology: The science of mental life Penguin.

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

"The Psychologist", Gender, Governance, Identity Politics

The BPS : failed and still failing – and failed again.

3rd Sep 2024 AdminBPSWatch

You may have read our open letter [see here] to Professor Tony Lavender, Chair of the Practice Board of the British Psychological Society. We have had a number of responses to the letter supporting our view. This week (2 September) we received this response from Professor Lavender. Below it is our reply (sent today 3 September).

Dear Pat, Peter, and David

I am writing in response to your recent open letter, ‘The BPS and Gender: Failed and still failing.’

I understand that over recent years, you have raised these issues on many occasions and have received numerous in-depth answers which explain the BPS position, and which fully respond to your concerns. This has included responding to complaints, open letters, and concerns about specific members raised under our member code of conduct. The BPS has taken your concerns seriously and has addressed them with a considerable amount of care and attention as well as significant organisational resources. Because of this, it seems unnecessary to repeat information which has been communicated to you on multiple occasions previously, much of which is also publicly available.

Our Guidelines for psychologists working with gender, sexuality and relationship diversity are broad guidelines which set out general principles for psychologists and those working in associated fields. The guidelines clearly state they are not for the specific clinical treatment or assessment of gender dysphoria or incongruence. The society has stressed on multiple occasions that the guidelines do not relate to children and young people under the age of eighteen. So, while we note your concerns in the context of the Cass Review, we cannot agree that it is valid to project them onto guidance which is designed for adults. However, we do agree that there is a need for increased clinical guidance for professionals working with children and young people in the complex area of gender dysphoria. We have already indicated to NHS England our strong desire to join a consortium of relevant professional bodies to identify gaps in professional training and develop training materials to upskill the workforce. You will also know that the BPS recently created a Children and Young People and Gender task and finish group to look at the critical issues relating to children and young people and gender. This work is currently underway.

In relation to the Cass Review, we cannot accept your view that the BPS is somehow ‘anti-Cass.’ Our response, as stated by Dr Roman Raczka, to the final report of the Cass Review commended Dr Cass for her ‘thorough and sensitive review into an area that is highly complex and controversial to many.’ He went on to state that, ‘Dr Cass and her team have produced a thought-provoking, detailed, and wide-ranging list of recommendations, which will have implications for all professionals working with gender-questioning children and young people. It will take time to carefully review and respond to the whole report, but I am sure that psychology, as a profession, will reflect and learn lessons from the review, its findings, and recommendations.’ This analysis of the final report and the resulting implication for psychology is currently underway. To support the cross-organisational group of members collaborating on our response, we reached out to the wider BPS membership to submit their evidence-based contributions. It does not appear that you took the opportunity to input into this important work.

I note your concerns that any perception that the BPS had adopted an ‘anti-Cass’ position could endanger the organisation’s important relationship with NHS England. I am pleased to be able to reassure you that the BPS continue to have a positive relationship with NHS England. NHS England did recently approach the BPS to provide a statement relating to theirannouncement on the expansion of services for children and young people. On this occasion we politely declined as our consultation work with members was ongoing. NHSE readily understood and referred to our initial response to the final Cass report as “supportive.”

The BPS recognises that the society may adopt policy positions that some of our members disagree with, but these policy positions are arrived at by assessing the evidence base, accessing the relevant expertise of our members as well as providing opportunities for our wider membership to feed their evidenced-based reflections through our consultation processes. While the BPS acknowledges that you remain dissatisfied with the society’s views on gender, with a membership of more than 65,000 passionate people, it is not expected that all our members will hold a single, unified view on any issue. Diversity of thought and opinion is a welcome hallmark and an inherent strength of both our profession and of our organisation.

Kind Regards

Tony Lavender.

This is our reply:

3 September 2024

Dear Tony

Thank you for your response of 2 September to our open letter of 14 August.

We find it difficult to believe that you wrote this reply although you have signed off on it. Accordingly, what follows is not directed at you personally.

Does no-one at the BPS recognise the very serious reputational mess that the BPS finds itself in on this matter? Apparently not. The tone of the response is arrogant, defensive and patronising to senior long-term members who have spent many hours over the years contributing to the Society, latterly to attempt to orient it to a better and more responsive and responsible course. The response is so inappropriate and, in a number of ways dishonest, that it requires point-by-point dissection and this follows below in the order offered by your response.

Your opening paragraph states:

You imply that the BPS has been more than helpful, bending over backwards providing us with plentiful information in an open and transparent manner. That does not square with our experience. Only recently there was the example of the highly irresponsible actions of the editor of The Psychologist (supported by the Chair of the Editorial Board) in posting and retaining a link online to the Singapore-based Gender GP, a supplier of puberty blockers, despite being shown specific warnings from the NHS and the clear position taken by Cass concerning puberty blockers. That link remained online for several months after the representations had been made and rebuffed, and it was only taken down – without acknowledgement to us – after a judge had issues a warning about Gender GP in the High Court. We made a formal complaint about the rude and inappropriate response made by the two men. This was rejected out of hand. No acknowledgement, no reflection, no learning, no apology. The Chair of the Sexualities Section has repeatedly criticised Cass and insulted psychologists he deems supporters of Cass/Gender Critical and has cast disparaging and unprofessional aspersions on social media on LinkedIn. The BPS argued that it should be dealt with by the HCPC and their decision was that this did not reach their threshold for investigation as a fitness to practice issue. On then requesting that the BPS formally investigate (under the BPS’s own Member Conduct Rules and Social Media Guidelines) it refused to act (or may have done but the Complaints Process does not allow complainants any meaningful feedback). Issues of confidentiality regarding complaints aside, some years ago there was an undertaking to publish anonymised data about the types of complaints that were being received, investigated and their outcomes. This appears not to have been done, and it is our view that beyond fitness to practice responsibilities taken by the HCPC there are member Conduct Rules, Code of Ethics and Conduct, Social Media Guidelines and rules for members undertaking official duties for the BPS which should be in force but about which there is no feedback given in terms of application. The BPS is not a learning organisation in itself or for its members.

Your comment about information being publicly available mystifies us. One of our enduring complaints is the lack of information for members. It is our group, as well as others on social media, who have been the source of much information that should have come from the BPS.

It is galling and insulting to be admonished in the second paragraph with

“The guidelines clearly state they are not for the specific clinical treatment or assessment of gender dysphoria or incongruence. The society has stressed on multiple occasions that the guidelines do not relate to children and young people under the age of eighteen. So, while we note your concerns in the context of the Cass Review, we cannot agree that it is valid to project them onto guidance which is designed for adults”.

We need to remind you that it was as a result of a lengthy complaint by one of us (which required considerable persistence) that it was finally made clear two years after publication of the 2019 Guidelines that the Guidelines were for adults/over 18s. On 9 April 2021 the Director of Membership and Professional Development wrote to confirm to us that

“…we have offered to put a statement on the front of our guidelines, on our website and all points/places where the guidelines are referenced to confirm that the BPS guidelines for psychologists working with gender, sexuality and relationship diversity are rot adults. We will implement this urgently.”

The belatedly “adults only” badging would not have happened had it not been for this hard-fought complaint and the rebadging did not remove ambiguities in the content of the guidelines that had implications for a philosophy of practice for young people.

The concerns of the Cass Review on children’s gender services subsequently raised wide ranging issues of

service philosophy;
exploratory versus affirmative psychological practice;
diagnostic overshadowing;
the needs of detransitioners.

All of these critical matters are largely downplayed, disregarded or ignored in the revised 2024 adult guidelines. You cannot surely think that at age 18, the radical paradigm shifts proposed by Cass suddenly do not apply?

The 2024 edition of the Guidelines is a document entirely discontinuous with, and dislocated from, the services which will be developed from Cass, and you actually confirm that with your ridiculous phrase “…we cannot agree that it is valid to project them onto guidance which is designed for adults“. Please do not think it is remotely permissible to bandy the word “project” about in this fashion with clinical psychologists and please endeavour to reflect how utterly patronising and inept these two paragraphs are.

Regarding your third paragraph – is the BPS anti-Cass? The balance of evidence so far is certainly that it has not been interested in, or has been defensive about, the highly relevant recent history of disquiet about the psychologist-led GIDS service that finally led to the Cass Review. This can be evidenced in detail by scrutinising what the BPS has said and done on its website and in The Psychologist, latterly and most blatantly in relation to the revision of the adult Guidelines which we emphatically argue above should show some continuity and consonance with the Cass paradigm shift. The Guidelines patently do not. We would direct you to the following: https://www.bps.org.uk/news/bps-response-new-nhs-england-regional-model-gender-identity-services-children-and-young-people.This is an alarming response following proposals from Cass that GIDS should close. It focussed away from the service philosophy and inadequate psychological practice issues then emerging, and on to waiting time problems. It placed its concern with the current GIDS psychologists rather than showing any curiosity that possibly damaging practices might have been going on there in psychology-led services for children and young people:

We are aware that some BPS members will work across the Tavistock Clinic and that this news might be unsettling and upsetting for them. We would encourage any members who are affected by this to seek support from their Union or by contacting the BPS where we will work, as their professional body, to support them accordingly.

A response (https://www.bps.org.uk/psychologist/time-honest-reflection-not-defence) from senior members/practitioners to this BPS reaction stated :

These constitute serious criticisms of a flagship psychology-led service, resulting in its closure to protect patient safety. In this context, the statement issued by the BPS is profoundly inadequate. It offers no acknowledgement of the severity and range of these problems, or of the harm done to some children and young people. There is no reflection on mistakes made or lessons to be learnt. Defence, not reflection, has been a theme throughout the story of GIDS. Many clinicians, parents and patients have raised repeated concerns about the practice model. Ex-patients have discussed feeling rushed into body-altering interventions which some have come to regret. Criticism has grown louder recently, following a 2018 internal report, a judicial review in 2020, damages awarded to the Trust safeguarding lead and an ‘inadequate’ CQC report in 2021, plus increasing media coverage. Concerns that GIDS was operating outside usual clinical practice were first raised, however, in 2004. Critics have consistently been labelled bigots or transphobes and ostracised.

Key people at the BPS remain openly hostile to Cass. The Chair of the Sexualities Section has stated publicly that he will be part of a group criticising her Review and its evidence base. The BPS appointed two new members to the working group for the revised Guidelines who were implacably trans-activist and anti-Cass. They are employed in private service provision, Gender Plus, who will get their clientele (including some children) from those who wish to by-pass service strictures in the new NHS provisions. The BPS as a body have been constipated in producing any fully worked out response to Cass. Roman’s response is far from that – it is just a place holder. This is a marked deficit in timeliness and enthusiasm, critical or otherwise, given that psychologists have such a central role to play – no signs of BPS reflection or audit of what went wrong. What has he or anyone else done to action his comment ‘I am sure that psychology, as a profession, will reflect and learn lessons from the review, its findings, and recommendations.’ Not happening and no proposals to make it happen. This response demonstrates that very clearly.

You refer to our failure to contribute to the project identifying the implications of the Cass Review for psychology (https://www.bps.org.uk/news/members-encouraged-contribute-cass-review-project ). Have you considered how that was phrased by the BPS Comms Team? Fill in an online form and “Members are reminded that contributions should be evidence-based”. So, individual members are supposed only to send in opinions which are evidence-based. When part of the problem in previous services was poor evidence, when Cass has extensively, and over a long period reviewed evidence, what is an individual psychologist going to do to produce a contribution which is evidence-based? This was going to discourage more people than just ourselves from thinking there was much point. Maybe, given our experiences, that was deliberate.

In noting in our letter to you that adult gender services were now also to be reviewed, we have stressed above the discontinuity of paradigm between remodelled children’s services and the stale narrow re-statement in 2024 of a BPS position that had been extant from 5 years before in the 2019 Guidelines. Can you believe that these guidelines will say anything whatsoever in terms of their content to impress policy makers that the BPS can assist them? The BPS is stuck in its activist capture demonstrated with evidence in our letter. The appointment of Moon and Zitz to a team led by Richards was doubling down on existing massive bias in the ideology of the authors. Your last paragraph

is patently ridiculous and insults our intelligence. Everything in this last paragraph is untrue. To use common parlance, the whole reply is gaslighting. How could a small writing group of six who shared clear common affiliations with trans activism such as WPATH and BAGIS and working for Gender Plus represent a breadth of viewpoint? Why choose an additional psychologist such as one still aligned with GIDS instead of someone from the thirty-five experienced psychologists who had left that regime? Why had two of the previous authors taken the decisive decision to have their names removed from the 2019 document? Despite seismic shifts in the context of gender services between 2019 and 2024, the BPS made decisions which showed no reflection of that and reinforced its capture by trans activists, a narrowing of dogmatic prescription rather than more nuanced, diverse and inclusive perspectives. It is beyond irony that you trumpet diversity of thought and opinion in your defence of an entirely exclusive and inflexibly rigid document. The Society has dug a deep hole for itself, and it keeps on digging. Your Comms-Speak response confirms this: “65000 passionate members” is taking that rhetoric to its silly apogee.

Withdraw the guidelines now.

Yours sincerely,

Pat Harvey, David Pilgrim, Peter Harvey,

BPS members, Clinical Psychologists.

BPSWatch.com, @psychsocwatchuk

"The Psychologist", Gender, Governance, Identity Politics

The BPS and Gender: Failed and Still Failing

15th Aug 2024 AdminBPSWatch

The following open letter was sent on Wednesday 14 August 2024.

Professor Tony Lavender, Chair of the Practice Board of The British Psychological Society

Dear Tony.

We write this open letter to you as Chair of the Practice Board, under whose scrutiny and authority the updated Guidelines for Psychologists Working with Gender, Sexuality and Relationship Diversity were released in June 2024 (https://explore.bps.org.uk/content/report-guideline/bpsrep.2024.rep129b). You and your Board members, as well as the President (copied in), bear a collective responsibility for the claims we make about the gross inadequacies of the document that we elaborate below. One of us (Pat Harvey) was involved in direct discussions with you and the then President-Elect prior to that document’s publication. You were made fully aware of serious concerns about the positioning of the British Psychological Society on the controversial matter of gender prior to release by senior clinical psychologists, some with extensive experience in this area of work.

In the light of those continuing concerns, and in the context of recent relevant events, we are appalled by what you have now ratified as the official and definitive BPS position on Gender. We believe that the content of the document and the gross ideological bias of the authors will bring the BPS into further disrepute. Moreover, it will isolate the Society from the wider community of professional bodies and their practitioners, who are now engaging in an active debate about gender services, led by the NHSE.

The letter by Dr Hilary Cass written in May 2024, but released on 7 August, sets out a catalogue of serious failings in the adult Gender Identity Services in which psychologists have been centrally involved (https://www.england.nhs.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/PRN01451-letter-from-dr-cass-to-john-stewart-james-palmer-may-2024.pdf). The following from Cass will suffice to illustrate:

Clinicians who spoke to me felt that, in common with the population that is presenting to children and young people’s services, the majority of patient presentations were extremely complex, with a mix of trauma, abuse, mental health diagnoses, past forensic history, ASD and ADHD, and therefore this limited assessment was inadequate. These other clinical issues were not addressed or taken into account in decisions to prescribe masculinising or feminising hormones.

The revised BPS Guidelines downplay any notion of the common presence of serious mental health problems in gender confused individuals, be they adults or children. Instead, they encourage an essentialist view of gender identity as a coherent psychological phenomenon. This ‘stick of rock’ approach to personal identity reifies transgender patients as if they are all psychologically identical, which is crass and implausible (an approach called ‘diagnostic overshadowing’). The latter then deflects needed clinical attention from the very diverse biographical contexts of gender confused presentations. As a result, common and variegated mental health problems, along with disavowed same sex attraction often underlying the gender confusion are ignored. Indeed, the gender ideology that permeates the Guidelines actively assumes that, in the main, the only distress that transgender patients experience is socially created by minority stress.

The empirical evidence does not support this thesis. Transgender presentations often arise from biographical contexts of trauma and are attended by a range of anxiety and depressive symptoms, with some patients having marked autistic tendencies. In the case of children, the homophobia of parents is at times relevant. In some adult cases, the presentation reflects extended fetishism (‘autogynephilia’) or masochistic castration fantasies (see later). Contrast our points here about complexity with the reductionist certainty of the Guidelines:

“…marginalisation due to a GSRD identity or practice. This marginalisation can cause distress leading to mental health problems…” .

This emphasis in the Introduction (Page 4) continues throughout the brief document, locating and thereby reducing the diverse psychological distress presenting to practitioners:

“…It is the marginalisation and repression that causes the difficulties, rather than the identities and practices themselves”.

Whilst, paradoxically, the BPS promotes the notion that working with gender identity requires highly specialised practitioners, diverse gender identities are normalised

…”diverse gender identities are a normal part of human diversity…”

and non-problematic

“…Any exploration of a client’s identity or practice will be on the understanding that GSRD identities and practices are as legitimate an outcome as any other…”.

This is patently untrue and irresponsible: it is an ideological assertion not a conclusion derived from a balanced consideration of psychological complexity in open systems. The “understanding” that is here being required of a practitioner is a judgemental ideological position. If adopted by the practitioner in each and every case it may actively encourage clients to enter a biomedical pathway of hormones and surgeries which involve serious iatrogenic risks.

The Guidelines promote the unwise adherence to an approach that culminates in distressed detransitioners and those who come to regret the biomedical approach encouraged by practitioners in the past. Detransitioners report that they were insufficiently assessed or challenged by clinicians and encouraged instead to believe that a trans identity will be a legitimate and beneficial outcome.

As Cass noted in her review, there is no evidence that ‘gender medicine’ is either safe or that it achieves its claimed goals of psychological wellbeing. Accordingly, two major medical ethics criteria are breached : first, ensure beneficence and second, ensure that no harm is done to patients (non-maleficence). Your support of these Guidelines makes the BPS explicitly culpable in supporting an unethical approach to clinical care.

Dr Cass’s letter (note, about adult services in this case) contains the following:

“Adverse outcomes • Clinicians informed me that suicides of patients on treatment were not formally discussed in Morbidity and Mortality meetings, with no clear strategy for determining whether there were lessons to be learnt for future cases. • I heard that detransitioners tended to move between clinics, often not returning to their clinic of origin, and there was no system for informing the originating clinic about them. In one clinic regret was treated as a new episode of dysphoria.”

The Cass Final Report (https://cass.independent-review.uk/home/publications/final-report/) has a section on Detransition and makes recommendation (No. 25) about service provision, which is to be followed by NHS England. The authors of the revised Guidelines and the BPS Practice Board should have been well aware of the publicity over the past few years regarding transition regret. The Cass report with the section on “Detransition” was released in April 2024. The BPS Guidelines, released in June 2024, nowhere contain the words, “detransition”, “detransitioners,” or “regret”.

It is our contention that these Guidelines, ratified by the Board which you chair, represent an active barrier to much needed change in philosophy and practice for psychologists working in re-formed Gender Services in the immediate future. Ironically the release of the Guidelines was accompanied by this, in effect, pseudo acknowledgement of the challenging situation since the previous heavily criticised Guidelines had been written 2019: Debra Malpass, BPS director of knowledge and insight [sic] said:

“We appreciate this is a sensitive, complex and sometimes controversial area. The BPS has worked to produce guidelines that are balanced, accurate and based on principles that derived from both the literature and best practice agreement of experts in the field.” ( https://www.bps.org.uk/news/updated-guidelines-psychologists-working-gender-sexuality-and-relationship-diversity-published)

You informed us that this was to be a revision rather than a rewrite. This was clearly a strategic mistake given the seismic conflicts in the field of gender services that had unfolded since 2019. In the context of these high profile controversies about children, including a Judicial Review which addressed consent, one of us made a formal complaint which saw the BPS add a retrospective note that the Guidelines had only been intended to apply to over 18s. This had not been evident to practitioners in the first two years after publication!

Owing to its revision status, you told us that the same authors had to be used. Again, given the dramatic changes in the wider context since the 2019 publication, this was clearly a mistake. Furthermore, of the original six authors, two had demanded that their names be removed post-publication. We can reasonably suppose that those dissenters were unhappy to be associated with the document and that they had not signed off on its final form. This would indicate clear maladministration by those in the BPS responsible for ensuring due process. When the 2024 revision came out, it was evident that two new individuals had been added to the working group to bring the number back up to six. As ever with the British Psychological Society, the process for making those appointments was entirely opaque. The new appointees galvanised and amplified an already rigid and biased approach in the previous Guidelines. In order to understand the wider context of our criticism, some background is needed to explain their personal ideological alliances. The particular and named transgender activists who wrote these Guidelines endorse the wider position of international activist organisations. Indeed, some such as the Chair, Christina Richards, were actively involved in writing those international guidelines for the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH). As psychologists they are narrowly committed to Queer Theory/radical social constructivism. This position is only one of many espoused by BPS members in their theory and practice and hence the author group is clearly unrepresentative. Here we list the organisations and ideology in which the activist authors of the Guidelines are embedded:

WPATH. Key to the global controversy regarding gender is the organisation World Professional Association for Transgender Health who produce “Standards of Care”, now on their eighth version (Soc 8). In the last year WPATH has been riven by scandal concerning its suppression of evidence, leaks of its revelatory internal discussions of its pursuit of specific agendas and by its introduction of the sinister Eunuch Gender (see https://environmentalprogress.org/big-news/wpath-files and https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/mar/09/disturbing-leaks-from-us-gender-group-wpath-ring-alarm-bells-in-nhs). Despite this, the response of a BPS staffer to a critical comment made on the draft of 2024 was this:

These guidelines align with scientific literature and this is listed in the references section. For example, the largest ever meta analysis undertaken by the World Professional Association for Transgender Health.

While the Department of Health said NHS England ‘moved away from WPATH guidelines more than five years ago’ the WPATH Soc8 is given as a key reference in the 2024 document by the BPS.

BAGIS. The British Association of Gender Identity Specialists is the UK home for many trans ideologue practitioners who are often also members of WPATH. Prominent members include practitioners at the existing 6 adult clinics which withheld information about outcomes from the Cass Review, notably Walter Bouman, who has heavily criticised Dr Hilary Cass, questioning her expertise and commenting in that context that there is “…a fine line between naivety, narcissism and psychopathy…”.

Both WPATH and BAGIS have members who strongly espouse variants of Queer Theory (QT) which seeks to support, via discourse analysis, any rejection of what is seen as ‘normal’ sexual conduct and gender expression. This is explicitly on the basis of’ liberation’ and ‘individual authenticity’. At times this libertarianism extends to an ‘anything goes’ stance. The latter legitimises lowering or eliminating the age of consent for sexual activity, castration, bestiality, ‘age-play’ and other fetishes or paraphilias. The latter context means that transgender activists reject the common fetishistic underpinning of autogynephilia in male to female transexuals. Moreover, as well as this extreme relativism, Queer Theory by dint of its radical social constructivism, is anti-realist and so it dismisses a biopsychosocial consideration of material reality (both biological and social), to which most clinical psychologists are committed.

The BPS has demonstrated an extreme reluctance to acknowledge the need for psychological debate about all of these contentious matters, and has, instead, simply bowed to activist demands and preferences. This has meant that child safeguarding has been eschewed and instead the normalisation of gender education has ignored it as a version of grooming. Neither social contagion nor the role of the internet have been discussed. None of these troublesome issues that practitioners may regularly encounter in services is addressed in the Guidelines or allowed to be explored in The Psychologist. Even more basic discussions about the likely diverse aetiologies of trans identification of such different groups as teenage girls and middle-aged men are suppressed.

PRIVATE CLINICS, GENDER PLUS. These have emerged as privatised alternatives to proper holistic mental health care for children in the NHS. They circumvent objections to the drive that has come from activists to affirm and encourage paediatric transition. This is far more than avoiding waiting lists but is about an ideology of their service philosophy. Since GIDS was shut down and puberty blockers banned in the NHS these private arrangements have taken on a particular political salience. When these private clinics generate iatrogenic harm in some patients (as they will), it will be the NHS that will have to deal with the consequences. This picture is already apparent in relation to those seeking detransition after a biomedical regime has significantly affected their health . Likewise, the diagnostic overshadowing of these clinics means that they do not consider the wider mental health needs of their clients on a long-term basis. Nor do they provide an environment in which long term follow up data can or will be collected to address the deficits in research and evidence base. Gender Plus is a recent arrival on the scene. Its ethos and attitude can be quickly understood from this article from its director, Aiden Kelly, a clinical psychologist, reminding us that as with the GIDS debacle, services are still being led by psychologists: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/jul/19/transgender-children-ban-puberty-blockers-wes-streeting?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other . This article was reposted – with evident approval – by Dr Rob Agnew, Chair of BPS Section on Gender, Sexuality and Relationship Diversity https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7220099032344375298/ another vociferous trans activist in a key BPS position.

Given the context of all the above, the constitution of the named author group for the new Guidelines, starting with the retained Chair, warrants particular critical scrutiny viz:

Professor Christina Richards (chair) (2019, 2024) is a transwoman reported to have an intimidating and domineering style by previous insider observers. Richards lost two disaffected authors post-publication of the 2019 Guidelines. The 2024 revision may be seen to have lost some of Richards’ previous directive and declamatory style “…psychologists should…”. In the 2019 publication, in a mere eleven full pages that comprise the body of text, that phrase was used fifteen times out of twenty-seven headings and an additional forty-two times beneath the headings. In the new version, the infamous ‘Slut’ reference is amended and ‘Kink’ is omitted from favoured BDSM allusions but the 2024 version is still, in essence, the same deplorable document. Richards has twice been an inappropriate choice of Chair for the previous Guidelines being a proponent of Queer Theory, a self-styled expert author on BDSM and Kink, ‘furries’ and ‘age-play’. Richards is a WPATH chapter author and a BAGIS council member (https://bagis.co.uk/council/christina-richards/). Richards’ credibility as a psychologist with respect for research and open-mindedness was profoundly undermined with a presentation at Lincoln University in which Richards claimed forcefully in relation to outcomes of trans surgery that the debate “…is shut: there is not a debate about this anymore…” (see https://youtube.com/clip/UgkxRGiT6y5ouSa6T9Nes0om-J6HWo7otLDx?si=oIRaEuIZ2ER659rw). Further evidence of an unprofessional biased attitude can be taken from a quote from Richards regarding a specialist gender job advertisement in The Psychologist – “The details of Gender Diversity can be learned, but an open and inquiring mind cannot. Bigots and exploitative theoreticians need not apply!” .(https://www.bps.org.uk/psychologist/featured-job-highly-specialist-clinical-or-counselling-psychologist). The contempt that Richards holds for both routine empirical science, academic freedom (no debate should surely ever be ‘shut’) and alternative theorisations about gender in psychology other than Queer Theory are very evident.

The other authors are:

Martin Milton (2019, 2024) was Professor of Counselling Psychology at Regents University, and is a consistent defender of transgender demands in the field of psychological therapy.

Penny Lenihan (2019, 2024) was Richards’ supervisor and is a member of WPATH. Lenihan’s website confirms being a ‘BPS and HM Government Registered Gender Diversity Specialist”. The notion of being a ‘specialist’ in this contested clinical domain is taken for granted without explanation or justification.

Stuart Gibson (2019, 2024). Nothing of note publicly in relation to transgender activism. His main background is in relation to psychological aspects of HIV and AIDS, and this reflects a legitimate input to the guidance about gay men. As a representative of the LGB rather than LGBTQ+ community he is somewhat of an outlier, but nevertheless he presumably supported and signed off the document we criticise.

The following were newly appointed for the 2024 Guidelines:

Claudia Zitz (2024) BAGIS member, Queer Theory, Gender Plus. Worked at the now discredited GIDS and along with some others in that group is attempting to replicate that pre-Cass clinical model.

Igi Moon (2024) WPATH member, Queer Theory proponent, Gender Plus team member. Moon has been the vocal leader of the MOU on ‘conversion therapy’ campaign and used the BPS administrative system and resources to advance its aims.

Considering how unfit for purpose the 2019 Guidelines produced by the first four authors above were, it was inconceivable that a fresh approach or greater balance would be applied to the Guidelines revision by adding to the reduced group the trans activist hard-liners Zitz and Moon. The 2024 Guidelines form a policy ostensibly for the use of, and compliance with, the whole membership. Its authorship as represented above clearly renders the following statement accompanying publication absurd:

The principles they are based upon are derived from both the literature and best practice agreement of experts in the field and may also be applied to other disciplines, such as counselling, psychotherapy, psychiatry, medicine, nursing and social work.

The expansionist ambitions of this statement beggars belief in a post-Cass context.

The BPS has embarrassed itself and undermined its public standing by issuing this flawed and highly biased set of Guidelines and demonstrated that as a professional body it is unfit for purpose. The BPS has now further isolated itself from a rapidly moving context of debate and changing practice by adhering to an extremist pre-Cass set of policy expectations. The Cass review now has the full confidence of the Secretary of State for Health as well as the Association of Clinical Psychologists, the Royal College of General Practitioners, the Royal College of Psychiatrists, the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges and the British Pharmaceutical Society. In addition, the UKCP has withdrawn its support for the Memorandum of Understanding on Conversion Therapy. Notably only the BMA, which has also been captured by transgender activists, is swimming alongside the BPS against this broader policy trend.

Moreover, in that new context, the BPS refuses to encourage and allow the exploration of competing ideas about psychological practice in the area. It fails to reflect upon any lessons learned from the psychologist-led failed GIDS services. Adult NHS Gender Services are now in the spotlight as unfit for purpose. These 2024 Guidelines contain absolutely nothing of relevance to the changes that have to come. This is shameful.

The BPS publication, The Psychologist, has also demonstrated organisational capture. In recent years the editor has repeatedly censored contributions from dissenting voices. He commissioned a trans activist non-member to write (with active help from the staff) an ill-judged article which he published immediately after a Judicial Review. We know the details of this from an irritable exchange with the editor on the matter https://www.bps.org.uk/psychologist/blow-rights-transgender-children). This article, as they say, has aged very badly. Worse, the editor, a person we have found peculiarly tetchy and thin skinned about any challenge, chose to leave a reference link for the infamous Singapore-based Gender GP online for several months despite protest and evidence of warnings from the NHS. This was seriously irresponsible.

We believe that you, the Practice Board and the BPS are failing the membership, practitioners and the public. Meanwhile the ACP-UK’s statement (below) is the one that has appeared on the official NHSE notice of future developments alongside those from Secretary of State Wes Streeting, Hilary Cass, the Chair of the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges and other key players centrally involved (https://www.england.nhs.uk/2024/08/nhs-to-roll-out-six-new-specialist-gender-centres-for-children-and-young-people/)

Professor Mike Wang, Chair of the Association of Clinical Psychologists, said: “The Association of Clinical Psychologists UK welcomes the publication of the Cass Review implementation plan. We have been involved in the development of the implementation plan at every level and we are pleased that NHS England and the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges is relying on senior clinical psychologists to deliver training and to lead the new service hubs. We continue to support the recommendations of the Cass Review and welcome NHS England’s vigorous implementation project”.

We are making the case to you that you and your colleagues, through neglect or active collusion with this ongoing capture, have ensured that the Society has no right to expect a seat at the table of future UK discussions on service delivery and on development of its evidence base. This is a task that psychology practitioners will have to pursue individually or via the ACP-UK or other more widely representative bodies.

We request your immediate active attention and intervention and a withdrawal of the 2024 Guidelines.

Yours sincerely

Pat Harvey, David Pilgrim, Peter Harvey,

BPS members, Clinical Psychologists.

BPSWatch.com, @psychsocwatchuk

"The Psychologist", Charity Commission, Expulsion of President-Elect, Financial issues, Governance

The BPS in court – again

22nd Jul 2024 AdminBPSWatch

Yet again the BPS is spending your money – despite its financial difficulties – on expensive barristers and KCs. This is taken from a press release published today (22 July):

The Employment Appeal Tribunal will this week (24 and 25 July) hear a landmark whistleblowing claim that could ensure protections to over 900,000 charity trustees who might need to blow the whistle on corporate governance failures within the charities they oversee.

The claim is being brought by Dr Nigel MacLennan against the British Psychological Society (BPS) in a legal case that could extend the same protections that workers and employees enjoy under whistleblowing legislation to the many thousands of trustees, school and NHS governors, and other volunteers who play a vital role in upholding proper corporate governance standards and ethical conduct within the organisations they have duties to serve and protect.

Dr MacLennan was a Trustee and President-Elect for the BPS at the time of his expulsion in May 2021. Following his appointment, he uncovered serious concerns of corporate governance failings within the BPS, including potentially illegal practices, which he reported to the Charity Commission.

The Charity Commission made the first of four regulatory interventions into the BPS within 11 days of Dr Nigel MacLennan taking office, based on his evidence. Despite this, Dr Maclennan was expelled and dismissed from office by the BPS, causing profound damage to his reputation and career, and significantly impacting his mental health.

Dr MacLennan took his claim to an employment tribunal which found that he was not protected by whistleblower legislation and he was not a worker of the BPS.

In bringing this appeal, Dr MacLennan and his legal team will argue that he entered into a contract with the BPS and was fulfilling his legal obligations in blowing the whistle, and should therefore be protected. They will also argue that Dr MacLennan and other trustees are protected from reprisals for blowing the whistle under Articles 10 and 14 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR).

The significance of this case has been underscored by the Judge of the Employment Appeal Tribunal, who, in allowing the appeal, made an order that the Government be invited to intervene in this case because of its significant public interest implications.

Just to be clear, this Appeal is to clarify an important legal principle rather than an appeal against Dr MacLennan’s expulsion by the BPS. Should the Appeal be upheld then it will allow him to take to BPS to court to contest his (in our view, unjust) expulsion (for more on this see previous blog posts Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3).

What may be news to you is the first sentence of the fourth paragraph. How many of you knew that the Charity Commission (CC) made four interventions? This is truly astonishing. It’s even more astonishing that the CC did not take any further action. However, why I raise this matter here is the fact that, as far as I am aware, this information has not been made public before. In its usual tight-lipped secretive manner [see here] the BPS has kept schtum and not any of of this has been shared with the members – the people on whom the SMT relies for their high salaries. I cannot imagine that the CC recommended that their intervention and the subsequent actions (if any) should be kept quiet. I would hope that the CC would have encouraged (if not made it mandatory) for the BPS to keep the membership fully informed. But no – a total comms blackout. We don’t expect anything from The Psychologist, of course, which seems to take perverse pride in not reporting on Society matters of critical importance to the membership.

We will keep you updated (although the judgement of this appeal is unlikely to appear immediately) on any other previously unknown information which comes out.

Peter Harvey

Blog Administrator

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

CASS, COLUMBO AND THE BPS

3rd May 2024 AdminBPSWatch

David Pilgrim posts….

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lessons from Crime and Punishment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

Category: “The Psychologist”

More on the BPS and the post-Epstein context

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

TWO TYPES OF IDEOLOGICAL CAPTURE IN THE BPS

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

The Psychologist and the Continuing Decline of Content

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

The BPS : failed and still failing – and failed again.

The BPS and Gender: Failed and Still Failing

The BPS in court – again

CASS, COLUMBO AND THE BPS