The Person-Centred Association, one of the main therapy organisations promoting this particular modality, recently published a statement to the effect that the PCA was antithetical to gender critical beliefs. Peter Jenkins takes issue with this stance and the arguments used in its defence.
Therapy in the real world: A therapist responds to the claim that ‘A person-centred approach is antithetical to gender critical beliefs’.
The recent article by GSRD Communities of Practice (2025), asserting that “A person-centred approach is antithetical to gender critical beliefs” provides worrying evidence of the continuing fragmentation and decline of a once-well respected form of therapy in the UK, namely the person-centred approach. The piece makes a number of claims, that gender is a construct, and therapists work with constructs all the time anyway; that therapists should affirm their trans clients, who are the experts on their own lives; that our job is not to try to fix clients; that the suicide rate for people identifying as trans is increasing; that therapists should not practise exploratory therapy, which is akin to conversion therapy, which is in any case proscribed by the Memorandum of Understanding on Conversion Therapy (MOU); and that therapists’ best hope is to become activists in this cause.
This is quite a mix. Firstly, as a gender critical therapist myself, I would agree that our job is not to fix trans clients, whatever that means, but to offer engagement in a therapeutic process, which may have a number of different outcomes for that client. The claim that the client is the expert on themselves is open to question within that process, given that the client may well be in great distress, be deeply incongruent, or may be not be fully acknowledging some key aspects of their own experiencing. The therapist will have their own expertise and perceptions of the client’s experience and process. The goal here is not to fix the client, but to help the client to be open to other perceptions, including some possibly currently disowned.
Working with social constructs?
The major point at issue here is about working with constructs. Yes, gender is a construct, as is sex, money and so on. Any concept or idea is a construct. However, the more accurate way to frame the issue in working with trans clients is not about gender as such, but about gender identity, which is a very different thing. We don’t know the client’s gender, although we might have an initial sense of it from their dress, physical appearance and voice timbre. Gender identity is held to be the client’s own internal sense of their gender, which may or may not correspond with their biological sex.
The therapist may be made aware of the client’s gender identity, but only if the client chooses to disclose it. However, gender identity is simply a belief, regardless of how strongly felt this belief may be held by the client. As a therapist, I am no more obliged to accept, agree with, or affirm the client’s self-belief, than I would if the client disclosed that other people are always secretly talking about them on the bus, or that they believe the world is about to end, or that they thought that they deserved to be heavily punished by their coercive partner or parent. There are no criteria for defining a gender identity, no proof of its existence in reality, and no way of knowing how many gender identities might or might not exist. Gender identity is simply a belief, which the therapist, person-centred or not, is not ethically obliged to endorse.
Yes, comes the reply – gender (identity), money and sex are all social constructs, and therapists deal with social constructs all the time. True enough, but some social constructs correspond much more closely with external reality than others, the social construct of fast-moving traffic perhaps being one fairly critical example of this. Equally, we ignore or tinker with the social construct of gravity at our own peril. We can similarly play with the social concept of biological sex as being largely performative, but this ignores the messy reality of medical transition, and the lifelong dependence on cross-sex medication required to sustain this illusion as social fact.
It seems that holding to the view that “a person-centred approach is antithetical to gender critical beliefs” depends on being able to keep the external world on hold, in a fragile bubble where inconvenient facts can be kept at bay. Thus Helen Webberley is not the only or even most authoritative source to quote on the alleged rise in trans suicides in the UK. There is the contrary analysis by Louis Appleby, who carried out an assessment of deaths by suicide recorded by the Tavistock and Portman Clinic in 2024. He concluded that the “figures clearly do not support the main claim that suicides have risen steeply since the High Court judgment”. In a post-Trumpian world embellished by alternative facts, the GSRD Communities of practice can, of course, choose to believe what they want, but the data does not support their belief on this important point.
Exploration equals conversion?
Another claim made is also inflammatory, namely that exploratory therapy is akin to conversion therapy. Exploratory work is central to all modalities of therapy, including the person-centred approach. Non-exploratory therapy is therefore a contradiction in terms. Here emerges another inconvenient aspect of reality, which the article studiously avoids acknowledging. Therapists in the UK, person-centred or otherwise, who hold and express gender critical beliefs are legally protected by the Equality Act 2010, following substantive case law, such as Forstater. Dragging in the MOU at this point of the argument doesn’t change a thing. The MOU is simply a policy document with no standing in law. It is therefore legally unenforceable against gender critical therapists, including person-centred gender critical therapists. GSRD Communities of practice can argue that person centred therapists cannot hold gender critical beliefs, but they will be on very thin ice if they attempt to discriminate unfairly against their person-centred colleagues on these spurious grounds.
Finally, the article supports the need to affirm trans clients. There is no supporting evidence for the effectiveness of an affirmative approach in this or any other context, that is if we dismiss the wearisome background noise of largely US-based policy statements on this issue. And if therapists’ best hope is now to become activists (but only of the right sort, of course), then perhaps in future we should routinely be asking our clients if they really want therapy, person-centred or otherwise, or the GSRD-approved version of political activism?
References
Appleby, L. (2024) Review of suicides and gender dysphoria at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust: Independent report. Review of suicides and gender dysphoria at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust: independent report – GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)
GSRD Community of practice (2025) A person-centred approach is antithetical to gender critical beliefs. Person-Centred Association.https://www.the-pca.org.uk/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=2786&catid=25&idU=1&fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR3NNPEl9N1f2-7fIfKIkqFd413mC0R12pvf2i_3cRy1MN3j1–Ceoj-h9k_aem_VrgZX_7kVL7-jsmaJY2kIQ
By Peter Jenkins, counsellor, supervisor, trainer and researcher in the UK. He has been a member of both the BACP Professional Conduct Committee and the UKCP Ethics Committee. He has published a number of books on legal aspects of therapy, including Professional Practice in Counselling and Psychotherapy: Ethics and the Law (Sage, 2017). https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/author/peter-jenkins
Peter is also a member of Thoughtful Therapists. His critique of the Memorandum of Understanding on Conversion Therapy was described as ‘instrumental’ in persuading the UKCP Board of the case for leaving the MOU in 2024.
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