Campaigning against Gender Identity Ideology in Therapy

Thoughtful Therapists is a group of therapists campaigning to preserve ethical, non ideological counselling and psychotherapy

WHO ARE WE & WHAT DO WE THINK?

We are a group of counsellors, clinical psychologists and psychotherapists from across the UK and Ireland with a shared concern about the impact of gender identity ideology on children and young people.
While we can see there are merits to a ban on conversion practices to protect vulnerable people from extreme homophobic, religious and cult-like groups we do not believe that additional legislation is necessary as these acts are already covered by existing laws.
We believe that there is no convincing evidence that conversion therapy is being practiced within regulated therapy settings in UK.
We believe that whether the government passes a conversion therapy law or not, our freedom to practice normal exploratory therapy is restricted by the existence of the Memorandum of Understanding on Conversion Therapy.
The MoUv2, updated in 2017, extended the guidance to include ‘gender identity’, a fluid and undefined term, which has muddied the waters and made it impossible for therapists to practice ethically without inadvertently opening ourselves up to unfounded accusations of conversion therapy.

We wish to protect the integrity of neutral, exploratory therapy for clients struggling with issues regarding sexual orientation or gender identity.
We seek support from the government and our professional bodies to continue to practice in line with the modality we are trained in, and the ethical framework of our registering bodies.
We wish to hold a boundary around the therapeutic space and to limit constraints placed upon us by political ideologies of any kind.
We would like the government to abandon it’s current plans to introduce legislation to prevent ‘Conversion Therapy’.
We call on our regulatory bodies to reconsider their allegiance to the MoUv2.

Integrity

Empathy

Political neutrality

Honesty

Respect