In the wake of the recent UK government change of position with regard to its proposed conversion therapy bill, the Anna Freud National Centre for Children and Families issued a response (screenshot below). It is clear from the wording of this statement that this venerable institution is under the control of trans activists. Note its allegiance to discredited organisations such as Mermaids and Stonewall. Consider the gender ideology fundamentalism that informs a statement such as, ‘The Centre utterly rejects the implication that being trans is a form of distress that requires therapeutic intervention’.

It is dispiriting to watch this once prestigious psychotherapy institute lose its moorings. But it also raises a broader question – why has the psychoanalytic establishment not drawn on its rich repertoire of developmental theory to protect young people from the antitherapeutic incursions of gender ideology?