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

[Bananaketchup]

It's a completely reference-free article on supporting parents of trans+ people (I don't actually know what the + means, and the article doesn't tell me) in the April Therapy Today journal, which is sent to all BACP members. With unevidenced assertions that transitioners are happier and an ominous warning that 'without acceptance from their parents, trans+ people have no choice but to seek acceptance outside of their family'. It isn't explicit that it's talking about children/teens rather than adults, but all the anecdotes are clearly about parents of minors. Nothing at all about social contagion, watchful waiting, the barbarity of pharmaceutical or surgical transition. Just 'this is how to help clients get over their concerns and affirm gender change in their child'.

I'm a member of BACP and work for a completely captured NHS Trust. I've stuck my head above the parapet probably as much as I safety can recently. But if anyone feels like banging their head on a brick wall (BACP are captured), responses can be sent to [email protected]

Thanks to anyone who tries.

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?!

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.

@itsyourletters yep that they/them contributor, plus Meg John Barker writing good practice guides Literally every edition of Therapy Today has at least one uncritically pro trans article. When Captured! was published I emailed asking for BACPs response. Then I asked again as they'd ignored me, and they replied saying they had no intention of responding to it. Great listening from the professional body for counsellors If I wasn't required to be BACP accredited for my job, they wouldn't see me for dust.

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.

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!

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?!)

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.

*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.

Yes! Where is the respect for the client, for their autonomy, or even their feelings and beliefs? I can't imagine a journal for therapists publishing a similar article about any other group in society with this horrible, coercive undertone of 'support' (meaning uncritically affirm) your child or they'll cut you off. The lordly assumption that the parents are wrong and will see the light is chilling.

I found the last paragraph really upsetting too - the idea that parents have to dismantle their attachment to who they think their child is, as if changing clothes or pronouns or even taking drugs or having surgery changes who you are as a person. My child isn't a different person with a different name, or different clothes. Medication or surgery doesn't change who we are as a person, and I find it really concerning that this article breezily assumes who you are is fundamentally different if you transition gender. That's a big part of how we got here, young people being sold the lie that transition would change who they were, and then finding they're still them afterwards.

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?

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.

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?

@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.

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”.

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

I’m an accredited BACP member too and work with Children and Young people. That article, like most of the articles in Therapy Today, was just infuriating. Every day I work with families being torn apart by the enforced pressure of gender politics and ideology when very often, and especially but not exclusively with teenage girls, the real issues at play are things like ptsd, ASD, ADHD and the associated difficulties experienced in tolerance of strong emotions. Therapy Today goes straight in my bin.

I stopped being a BACP member in 2018. By that time I was well pissed off with them printing any old indulgent, harmful shite written by people I wouldn't trust my keys with, nevermind my MH.

I have counselled parents of trans-presenting teens. They were the client. Not their children. It was my job to be the parents' therapist. Not their children's.

As others have said, BACP is completely captured. They push for the ban on conversion therapy to be extended to trans identified people, they uncritically promote gender ideology in every issue of their journal, they run and recommend trainings which promote queer theory. They tell ordinary counsellors that adherence to gender ideology is good practice - so not only clients of this therapist will be subjected to reeducation out of their wrongthink, but potentially clients of a lot of other therapists who have trusted that their professional association is working from a sound evidence base and a position of non maleficence.

As PP have said, investigate the hell out of any therapist you use. There are gender critical therapists, but a lot of us have to fly under the radar when our professional body is infested with gender zealotry. Some have spoken publicly against the Memorandum of Understanding (the trans conversion therapy paper). There's also Thoughtful Therapists, I don't know them at all but I know James Esses is involved there (was kicked off a counselling course for not believing in gender ideology). GC therapists exist, but in a very hostile professional environment.

I don't even need my therapist to be GC, I just need them to respect the fact that I am.

I've had perfectly good, mutually respectful, helpful therapy from a practitioner who profoundly disagreed with me on trans issues — I even told her that though I understood that she was in no way intending to advocate for dangerous treatment, unlike her I believed affirmative therapy for young people with gender dysphoria was at best poor practice and at worst a form of abuse which could lead to profound harm, that treatment leading to the sterilisation of disproportionately gay and autistic young people was highly suspect, and that if she were to perform that type of therapy, in my opinion she would be, however inadvertently, potentially abusing and harming vulnerable people.

And you know what, it was absolutely fine. The therapist didn't try to educate me, or gaslight me, or turn me into someone else's support droid. We explored my thoughts and feelings about this topic, why it bothers me, and how that ties into my life, my politics, my sexuality, my autism, etc. etc. — y'know, therapy stuff.

I wasn't made to feel my beliefs and feelings were wrong just because they were different from the therapist's, or less important than the beliefs and feelings of genderists. Who knows, maybe she secretly judged the hell out of me but it doesn't matter because (a) that didn't show in session, and (b) the therapist didn't then publish an article in an industry magazine revealing dismissive and patronising attitudes towards my opinions and feelings. (They do know clients can access these things nowadays, right?)

The issue isn't so much having a therapist who disagrees with me, it's having a therapist who doesn't behave like a fucking therapist — where, if I'm the client, I'm the client, and what matters is what's best for me. Okay, relationships are part of that, and if one of the things I'm taking to therapy is that I want a better relationship with my gender-dysphoric kid, then discussing whether it's worth making concessions and changes is going to be part of that, but I don't expect the therapist to decide they know what beliefs I should change and what outcomes I should value, what fucking TV programmes I should watch, and what my function as a parent is, and therapise me with a goal of their choosing.

I was suffering from extreme anxiety which was making it impossible to hold down my job, a large part of which was caused by the trauma of being a transwidow. Booked counselling with a a BACP accredited counsellor to try to piece together my shattered mental health. As soon as I tried to talk about my experiences as a transwidow I was immediately shut down and left in no doubt that the counsellor considered me a hateful bigot. I made that my last session and there is no point in booking with anyone else as I'm pretty sure I would get the same reception. So I struggle to deal with my issues alone as my trauma is not considered deserving of help.

@JarByTheDoor you deserve your therapist to be your therapist.

Not your child's. Not your partner's. Not your mother's. Not a wounded helperperson that wants to push their own agenda.

Your therapist.

Exactly Boots!

And I don't mean that a therapist shouldn't challenge your ideas, offer alternative perspectives, talk with you about how you might be contributing to problems in relationships and whether changing how you act within these relationships could help you "achieve your therapy goals" (🤢), and so on — but the client is the focus, not their kid, and the client should be the one setting the broad agenda (even if the therapy is to help them work out that that they might have to follow a different route there than the one they thought they would travel).

Challenging is an important part of therapy. For a challenge to be an effective therapeutic tool, the therapist needs to know their client. That's why it is a late-stage tool and needs caution.

It should never be based on the therapist's preconceived notions or values. Or over empathy with someone outside the room.

Wow. That’s awful - your “trauma was not considered worthy of help”. So sorry for you.