The Wall Street Journal has published an opinion piece about a student’s experience of her professional therapy training program at Santa Barbara University in California, focusing on the module on human sexuality. She spells out the problems she experienced when objecting to the content of the syllabus and the ethical violations inherent in completing the assessment task.
Over the last few years, queer theory has been making inroads into the therapy disciplines – its purpose being the dismantling and disruption of the established hetero-normative view on human sexuality (see this earlier insider account of post qualification sexual health training) . Hence, the increasing number of articles in our professional therapy journals positioning ‘kink’ and ‘polyamory’ as new frontiers in what is deemed to be an emancipatory enterprise, one that should be universally affirmed. Needless to say there has been no critical debate.
A whistleblower’s account such as this published piece is important and timely. The general public needs to know how therapists are being trained to approach human sexuality. Activists are working to undermine the established postion of understanding and accepting the wide-ranging complex nature of human sexuality. In its place they are imposing one view and one view only: sex is an emancipatory act and all boundaries are constraints to be dismantled. Therapists in training and established clinicians should feel emboldened by the courage of this whistleblower. It is time to stand up to this authoritarian move which seeks to replace an open and balanced approach to contemporary human sexuality with a regressive one-sided moral re-education.
The Wall Street piece is here (but behind a paywall). Below are some pertinent verbatim extracts.
“The first time I enrolled in the course, students were assigned to read sadomasochistic erotica and a book called “The Guide to Getting It On,” featuring sexually explicit illustrations. We were told to write an eight- to 10-page “comprehensive sexual autobiography,” which could include early sexual memories, masturbation, current experiences, and future goals with an action plan—all uploaded to a third-party platform for grading.”
“One exercise included anonymously writing down something we disliked about our genitals or breasts, to be read aloud in class by another student.”
“My objections weren’t treated as signs of a systemic issue but as a personal grievance to be managed quietly.”
“Concepts like modesty and marital privacy aren’t merely treated as optional or even dismissed. They’re seen as oppressive norms to be actively combated.”
“In Human Sexuality, we were taught that children with six months of “gender distress” should be “affirmed” in their belief that they are of the opposite sex—without deeper assessment, even when trauma or autism was present.”
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