Two articles in the most recent issue of The Psychologist, the British Psychological Society’s (BPS) monthly magazine, illustrate this professional body’s hopelessly entrenched position in relation to gender. Our colleagues over at BPS Watch have written a detailed account and we are posting the first half verbatim here below (for the full post go to the BPSWatch website.)
The Psychologist and Its Continuing Decline in Content
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].
Go to BPS Watch website to read the rest here.
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