As I write, it is two weeks since I received an email from UKCP with the subject line “update on conversion therapy” (available on the UKCP website). My heart immediately sank and my blood ran cold; I knew this would be going in a bad direction.
Back in November 2023, UKCP issued a statement telling members “that gender-critical beliefs (which include the belief that sex is biological and immutable, people cannot change their sex and sex is distinct from gender-identity) are protected under the Equality Act 2010”, and that, “exploratory therapy should not in any circumstances be confused with conversion therapy”. This signalled a significant endorsement of gender critical views as part of UKCP settling a court case brought against it by James Esses. It was also a startling demand that members view an approach to therapy with all the hallmarks of conversion therapy as being something other than it is. Transfeminine jurist and bioethicist Florence Ashley’s “Interrogating Gender-Exploratory Therapy” is good reading here.
Therapists Against Conversion Therapy and Transphobia organised an open letter to UKCP to oppose this statement and ask questions about how it came about, to which UKCP has responded. This response could reasonably have simply been “yeah but no”.
In this context, an email from UKCP with an update on conversion therapy did not bode well.
And so here we are two weeks on. UKCP has withdrawn from the Memorandum of Understanding on Conversion Therapy and, in keeping with the topsy turvy logic of cognitive dissonance, tells us it does so in order to better oppose conversion therapy.
TACTT have organised a new open letter that also acts as a recall petition for the Board of UKCP. Constitutionally, a petition of 2% of UKCP members can trigger a recall vote for the Board (Chair, Vice Chair, Trustees). As of 10th April, the number of eligible members was 9,072, giving a target of 180. Seeing as TACTT’s open letter has some 1,500 signatures, I feel confident that the threshold for UKCP members will be reached. Meanwhile, UKCP have responded to claim they are being misrepresented.
So that is where we are.
Reflecting on how UKCP is responding to the field conditions of our times, I feel worried and deeply saddened. Homosexuality was only removed from the DSM as a mental health disorder in 1973. As a profession, psychotherapy has a history of profoundly failing LGBTIQA+ communities, repeatedly interpreting any deviation from white cisheteronormativity to be rooted in mental illness or a response to childhood abuse. This is why conversion therapy has been able to flourish for so long, and why the Memorandum of Understanding is such a necessary document.
Up until recently, it seemed reasonable to me that a client coming to see a therapist could reasonably assume that the therapist they are seeing is supportive of LGBTIQA+ people. It seemed to me that most therapists would be aware of the discrimination queer people face, that society is structurally queerphobic in a variety of ways, and that each of us as practitioners will inevitably be implicitly queerphobic in various ways as a result of socialisation within a queerphobic culture. This would all add to that lovely grist we therapists like to put in our mills!
Unfortunately, some heated exchanges on a mailing list for private practitioners has disabused me of this notion.
Consequently, I’m writing this post to make the implicit explicit. I stand with LGBTIQA+ people against queerphobia in all its forms. In the context of the current issues with UKCP, I specifically stand with trans people against the ongoing trans panic. It is a targeted hatred being fuelled in this country by an increasingly far right Government willing to burn everything down in a culture war in an effort to retain power.
I’m also writing this as an accountability practice. I have signed TACTT’s open letter. Should a recall vote be triggered, I will campaign in that vote for the removal of the Board. If the Board is removed, I will stand for election as a Trustee on a platform of signing UKCP back up to the Memorandum of Understanding at minimum. I would also like to correct UKCP’s previous endorsement of gender critical views in the context of therapy with gender questioning clients. I would also like the new Board to ask a relevant committee to carry out a special investigation into whether gender exploratory therapy should be considered a form of conversion therapy.
Should a recall vote fail, I will take that as confirmation that UKCP has chosen transphobia and find an alternative accrediting body.
