Anyone want to email BACP re article about parents of trans people?

I cyberstalk the fuck out of any therapist before even getting in touch to enquire about availability. Published articles, book chapters, PhD theses, opinions expressed on social media, a history of complaints, anything that makes me doubtful and they're out. I don't give a fuck about their personal lives, obviously, but I've been burnt by a shit therapist with abhorrent views before (that she'd had professionally published!) and I'm not putting myself in that position if I can possibly help it. And I won't apologise for that to anyone, even if I have seen judgy articles written by therapists about how bad it is when patients access the information available to them

This is a really informative thread - thank you. It has made me realise that I would definitely need to google any potential future counsellor for myself or a loved one. A quick google of the names mentioned above makes me think that any counselling session with these individuals would be “all about them”.

@daisy1765 — the new and improved version of intersectionality, that is. As originally conceived, intersectionality is a really useful and important concept, but since "intersectional" has become a buzzword signalling belonging to a particular ideological club, seemingly used mainly for telling women to defer to the new improved even more oppressed type of woman, it's become difficult to use it in its original sense.

@ScrollingLeaves I saw one who said in her listing that she also worked as an IDVA, and she didn't go along with any of this shit.

How can an accrediting body be allowed to
put the well being of children at risk in this way? Any child and their parents going to that man for counselling will be in mental danger.

If you want a counsellor how do you find one who does not believe these things?

BACP is utterly captured by intersectionality and preaches trans ideology and critical race theory as absolute truths which cannot be discussed and definitely never challenged or debated. Ironically, the most vital aspect of doing therapeutic work with minors is always safeguarding and this is allowed to go completely out of the window when it comes to issues of gender. And obviously there's a total lack of care for the majority who are impacted negatively: girls and women of the biological kind.

Yeah — it's also deeply patronising throughout.

Saying that parents "often" feel like they're stepping into a minority group for the first time, the poor poppets, is just a reformulation of the tactic of sneering at people for being white, middle-class, able-bodied, neurotypical, cis-het [insert privilege unpacking list here] etc. (after first having blithely assumed that they are all these things), and giving them an amused head-pat because they think they're finding out what it's like not to be on top of the privilege pyramid any more — though I doubt this therapist will allow them to continue thinking they've accrued any oppression points.

And then there's the bit of finger-wagging about which sources of (naughty! transphobic! bigoted!) media these poor misguided parents might be guilelessly allowing to manipulate them, and how even if parents imbibe only correct ideas, they're probably steaming hypocrites about the whole thing anyway.

And the whole chunk about how a parent's sense of self, their self-perception and well-being, depends on their ability to mindlessly affirm and cheerlead their child as they take very possibly unnecessary, likely irreversible, and potentially misguided steps towards radically changing how their body functions support, understand and accept their child. What does he do with the parent whose sense of self depends on feeling able to keep their child safe from harm, or on their feeling of having some bloody integrity?

*homogeneous

I think I spelt that wrong, like, one time in 2017, and ever since then my keyboard has been determined to continue spelling it like that.

That's less "how can we best work with and support people in these situations to enable them to discover and make progress towards their personal valued outcomes, feel happier in themselves and in their lives, and at the same time support and respect their dignity and autonomy" and more "how can we make our clients do whatever trans people want them to do".

And WTF was that about older parents having grown up when being gay was illegal? True, there were some age of consent anomalies until surprisingly recently, but it feels like something written by a person young enough and ignorant enough to file everything before about 2015 under a homogenous "old-people times" label.

Haven't got time to read fully and respond right now, but I'm bookmarking and bumping as I think this is important info.
(Don't know how they square this with Hannah Barnes book or if they'll have a review of that in TT?!)

Interestingly, I had a conversation with a very good friend who is a train driver and he said it's the same where he works. Which surprised me. But then I googled the trade magazine for one of the railway unions and it was spookily similar to Therapy Today!

I feel exactly the same way. I'm accredited as well and as far as I'm concerned the entire membership process is one pyramid scheme to fund a body that represents none of us.

But we're hamstrung because BACP accreditation / UKCP membership are the 'gold standard' for work.

I remember when TT published a GC letter from Stephanie Davies-Arie about 5 years ago and then grovelled and said sorry.

It's ridiculous.

Fellow utterly ashamed to be a member of the BACP here, too.

I used to read Therapy Today and now I put it straight in the bin. I noticed that Therapy Today seemed to go in a social justice direction when the new chair took over in 2020.

I know most of the board and senior managers have also left since then, but that appears to be due to SCOPeD - For the benefit of most of this board I will explain that SCOPeD is a highly unpopular project that membership boards like BACP have developed to focus on putting fully qualified counsellors/ psychotherapists into competence categories as opposed to addressing the much more significant issue of counsellor / psychotherapist not being a protected title and therefore anyone can call themselves that and practice as such.

The addition of Luanne Baines-Ball appears to have had a significant impact of the quality of output of Therapy Today as a journal.

Sorry you work for such a captured corner of the world, OP, I'm just glad I'm freelance.

Goodness that's depressingly uninterested in the actual psychological wellbeing of people caught up in this ideology. Change your bodies kids! What could possibly go wrong?!