Navigating Ideological Currents: Why We Will Continue to Avoid Ideological Bias
An essay I wrote with Helen Pluckrose. I'm very interested in this Venn Diagram that I worked with Christina Buttons to design. I'd love to hear people's thoughts on this and on the essay.
It is hard to think of any topic more likely to incite fear, rage, suspicion, purity-testing, name-calling, highly uncharitable mindreading and all the other less-than-delightful features of intense political polarisation than issues of sex, gender, gender identity and gender distress. Genspect experienced all of these with great intensity following our last conference in Denver, Colorado in November due to the presence of a man who writes about autogynephilia and was wearing a dress. Some of the individuals who became so angry or distressed had experienced mistreatment or abuse from different autogynephilic men of whom they were reminded by the presence of Phil Illy. Their distress was surely genuine and their trauma real and we are sympathetic to it. However, for weeks after the event, we fielded hundreds of “Culture War” style queries about whether Phil had entered the women’s lavatory (he had not) and whether we would, in future, require sex-specific dress codes (we will not). This significantly disrupted our work developing ethical and effective frameworks for addressing gender distress.
Genspect has a very full plate and the primary reason that we are trying to do so much1 and feel such a strong sense of responsibility to make what we do rigorous is because of the desperate need for it. Parents, in particular, and their vulnerable children but also gender-distressed adults and people working in healthcare and education have a pressing need for evidence-based research that they can rely on.
Our stated purpose is to engage with rigorous research, advocate for an evidence-based approach to gender distress and be a reliable, trustworthy, and well-informed source for parents and professionals in healthcare, education, and media, as well as for laypeople. The guiding principles that we believe will facilitate this are a commitment to being politically non-partisan and upholding freedom of expression, diversity of viewpoint and robust but civil, well-reasoned and well-evidenced discussion. However, some of the responses to the incident of “the man in a dress,” and to the appointment of advisors have made it apparent that some people either do not agree with this stance or do not realise how essential it is to rigorous knowledge production to have a wide range of worldviews and to take all possible steps to minimise ideological bias. This essay will attempt to explain.
Genspect is an organisation formed because of harm done by ideological bias. Children are currently being failed by the “gender healthcare” that is available to them.
The services available to children who are questioning their gender are based on an ideological belief in an innate gender identity – a nebulous concept for which there is, as yet, no evidence. Despite this, a child’s perception of their gender identity is believed to be authoritative and requires affirmation. Medicalisation may then follow, including puberty blockers, hormones and irreversible surgery. Gender identity ideology has its roots in the gender identity theories of the discredited psychologist John Money, and, more recently, in the evolution of Queer Theory which aimed to liberate sexual minorities by blurring the boundaries of categories of sex, gender and sexuality into popular activist culture. Gender identity is conceived as a kind of unquestionable essence distinct from and more definitive than biological sex and the only solution to someone feeling ‘wrong’ or uncomfortable in their sexed body is to change it to more closely resemble the other sex. Since clinics became captured by this ‘affirmation only’ model, evidence-based research into other potential causes of gender distress has been sadly lacking.
WPATH (World Professional Association of Transgender Health) is the central headquarters for the propagation of this kind of gender ideology. In many parts of the world, policies and institutions follow the WPATH approach, presuming that they can rely upon the information they offer, even though we have shown countless problems with their output. The disproportionately high level of neurodiversity among gender-distressed children has not been addressed as a potential explanatory factor to be investigated. Neither has the high number of same-sex attracted people or the number of children who question their gender while coming to understand themselves to be lesbian or gay. There has been very little consideration of the long-term impact of the irreversible interventions involved in the ‘gender affirmative’ pathway. In September 2022 WPATH released their eighth version of their Standards of Care and chose to dismiss the hardship facing the detransitioners; to include eunuchs as an identity that required medicalisation; and eliminated age constraints for irreversible surgeries on children. This alarmingly eccentric Standards of Care also chose to delete their already written chapter on ethics. This is what an approach rooted in ideology rather than evidence-based research looks like.
The UK has seen some significant progress. The Gender Identity Development Service at the Tavistock in London, one of the world’s largest paediatric gender clinics in the world, was ordered to close as a consequence of detailed reports on these uncontrolled experimental interventions. There is an increasing realisation that services based on ideology rather than reality cannot lead to ethical and effective support for gender-distressed people. However, plans to create more evidence-based services that can investigate a range of causes of gender distress are faltering and Genspect must continue in its efforts to push for these. To do so, it must resist being swayed, influenced or pressured by any other kind of political ideology.
To be clear, our position is not that ideologies are bad. Although the term is often used disparagingly, it simply refers to having a set of beliefs, usually political at the root. Having political convictions and arguing for them is a central part of a thriving democracy. The problem arises when people decide what is true based on their ideological beliefs and then impose this on others rather than subjecting their hypotheses to empirical research. The problem with John Money was not that he posited the hypothesis that children are socialised into conceiving of themselves as girls or boys, (having a gender identity) but that, in addition to other highly unethical behaviour, he did not test his hypothesis empirically in ethical ways. He simply assumed his hypothesis was true, leading to the medicalisation, mutilation and eventual suicide of a child. The problem with the current gender identity ideology is not that the hypothesis, “Everybody has an innate gender identity which is separate to biological sex and more authoritative than biological sex” exists. It is that, rather than being tested with empirical research, it has been accepted as true in healthcare, education and media and used to treat gender-distressed children while shutting down research into other potential explanations as transphobic and ignoring all disconfirming evidence.
It is extremely difficult to challenge the social power of this ideology and, as we continue to do so, we must be conscientious to avoid becoming influenced by other political or religious views on sex and gender. The two largest political groups who share our concerns about gender identity ideology are gender-critical feminists and religious or social conservatives. Both of them are genuinely concerned about gender-distressed youth and the absence of evidence-based research needed to alleviate their distress, but they also each have a set of political beliefs with which the concept of gender identity conflicts and this has an impact on how they perceive the problem.
Gender-critical feminists, radical feminists and people with a gender-critical worldview more broadly have been at the forefront of the drive to protect women’s spaces and sports, defend their own right to speak and draw attention to how ideologically captured clinics have been failing children. Their organisation and persistence have been pivotal to bringing about positive change and Genspect is glad to include many of them in its membership. They are proudly centred around “a movement created by women, for women, and about women” and understand gender as a construct integral to “the mechanisms by which sex oppression had been sustained throughout history” (which is why they are critical of it). Feminists’ overriding aim is to protect the interests of women as a sex class from patriarchal oppression by men. This can limit their concerns about gender identity ideology to how it impacts women’s sex-based rights. This is a perfectly valid and, indeed, important focus for a woman’s political movement to have. Genspect, however, must not become a political movement for women but remain a non-partisan organisation researching psychosocial solutions for gender-distressed children and vulnerable adults.
The gender-critical feminist position on gender as an oppressive construct operating in the service of patriarchy can also drive and limit what they believe to be true about the causes of gender distress and the solutions to it. It is important that Genspect not be limited to this line of inquiry which is based on a very specific ideological perception of society or accept it as true but maintain a wider scope for research and be open to a wide range of worldviews. Some feminists have put pressure on Genspect to become a feminist organisation or to narrow its scope of research and membership to align completely with feminist aims. In contrast, others have understood why we cannot do that and supported us in our non-partisan and evidence-based advocacy for gender-distressed youth.
Social and religious conservatives have also been very vocal about their concerns about women’s spaces, the right to disbelieve in gender identity and say so, and ideologically captured clinics for gender-distressed children as well as the materials children are exposed to in social and sex education in schools. Their action in bringing to the attention of the wider public age-inappropriate and ideologically driven materials being presented to children has been valuable and Genspect is grateful for the support of many ethical social or religious conservatives. However, they are, of course, hardly non-partisan or ideology-free either, particularly when their values are rooted in religion. Social conservatives’ primary aim is to protect conservative social norms around marriage, family, sex and gender roles because they believe that these serve people (particularly children) and society best. Any discussion of social change profits from the inclusion of conservatives reminding us of the benefits of longstanding norms and customs. However, this stance can cause them to be intolerant of the beliefs, dress, roles, speech and consensual sex lives of others. Genspect cannot take this stance but remains supportive of lesbian, gay and bisexual people as well as gender nonconforming people. Young people who fall into these categories are particularly vulnerable to gender identity ideology.
The social and religious conservative position is generally positive about traditional gender roles and negative about divergences from them and this can also drive and limit what they believe to be true about the causes of gender distress and the solutions to it. Genspect cannot take this value-laden ideological position or accept it as true but must support empirical research into gender distress which attempts to avoid political bias. Some social or religious conservatives have tried to persuade Genspect to take a conservative stance or to allow conservative views to guide its research, but others have respected the importance of non-partisan advocacy and research and supported our goals.
Is it ever possible to be non-partisan and avoid ideological bias, though? Must we not always end up favouring some political stance or another? As individuals this is almost impossible. As social psychologist, Jonathan Haidt writes,
[E]ach individual reasoner is really good at one thing: finding evidence to support the position he or she already holds… But if you put individuals together in the right way, such that some individuals can use their reasoning powers to disconfirm the claims of others, and all individuals feel some common bond or shared fate that allows them to interact civilly, you can create a group that ends up producing good reasoning as an emergent property of the social system. This is why it’s so important to have intellectual and ideological diversity.
The Righteous Mind; Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion.
Genspect believes this approach to be the most effective way to minimise the risk of research becoming ideologically biased and undermining evidence-based research. We do not hold a naive belief that we can ever entirely remove ourselves from culture and politics and every one of us has views on them. Rather, we believe that an organisation that makes a conscientious effort to mitigate bias by encouraging intellectual and ideological diversity, with an expectation that arguments will be well-evidenced and well-reasoned, will do better at discovering what is true and developing effective and ethical frameworks than organisations that make no such effort.
This commitment to the free exchange of ideas and openness to viewpoints from all over the political spectrum is closely associated with the philosophical liberalism of John Stuart Mill:
He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side, if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion… Nor is it enough that he should hear the opinions of adversaries from his own teachers, presented as they state them, and accompanied by what they offer as refutations. He must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them…he must know them in their most plausible and persuasive form.
On Liberty
Genspect can best maximise the scope and rigour of its research by protecting the ideological diversity of its members while maintaining its commitment, as an organisation, to being non-partisan. The factual, reliable information provided by our empirical research may then be used by those with any political or ideological position to make the strongest arguments they can for societal change. The more evidence-based such arguments are the better the quality of political discussions and solutions will be. Genspect cannot allow its research to be driven by a political position.
Because Genspect supports open and robust debate, our content is likely to include worldviews that some will find distressing. Trans-identified individuals may find gender-critical views, socially conservative views as well as the experiences of detransitioners upsetting. Gender-critical and radical feminists may find the views of transgender/transexual/transvestite individuals or even their presence distressing, as may social conservatives. Social conservatives and gender-critical feminists may well object strongly to each other’s views, and detransitioners hold a wide range of views on sex and gender that may contradict some people’s deeply held beliefs.
Some people, due to past experiences, may become so distressed by the expression of certain views that they feel unable to cope psychologically with them. We provide information about the topic under discussion at any conference or event and attempt to title our content so people can make their own decisions about whether to attend events or engage with content. We reject the concept of trigger warnings, and we think society is better served when people take responsibility for their own difficulties. We must prioritise our goal to provide the wider community with as diverse a range of topics and opinions as they and their situations require so they can be informed as they seek to have a positive impact on society.
Although Genspect is an organisation that seeks to improve therapeutic frameworks for gender-distressed people, its conferences and events themselves cannot be therapeutic spaces if we are to keep our commitment to rigorous methods of knowledge production for the benefit of gender-distressed people.
Genspect may be unique among organisations seeking to better understand gender distress for the sheer range of ideological and political diversity among its members. We value all of you for your insights and for your willingness to enter civilly into constructive discussion and productive, collaborative disagreement with evidenced truth claims and reasoned arguments. We commit to defending your right to bring your arguments to the table and to continuing to provide well-informed evidence-based research to support you in that endeavour.
Image by Christina Buttons
Genspect exists to advocate for an evidence-based approach to gender distress, primarily in children and vulnerable adults. We take a cautious and compassionate approach that prioritises a non-medicalised approach and considers everyone’s rights and needs. It is shaped by existing research into outcomes for gender nonconforming children that finds that approximately 80% become comfortable in their own skin, so long as they are free from radical interventions and by the fact that a disproportionate number of children seeking medical transition have co-morbidities that require differential diagnoses. We advocate for conventional psychotherapy as a means to help cope with distress as we believe that the currently popular ‘gender-affirmative’ approach to therapy is misguided and anti-therapeutic.
Genspect offers training about the impact of gender distress to schools, organisations and other institutions and develops Brief Guidances for professionals working in the field, e.g. psychotherapists, paediatricians, youth workers, and mental health professionals. Our recently launched Gender Framework is a comprehensive document that is informed by the latest research to offer both a non-medicalised approach to gender dysphoria and resolution for the conflicts of rights that arise between those who advocate to prioritise gender identity over biological sex and vice versa.
We offer a range of perspectives about sex and gender as we are keen to demonstrate the wide range of ideas in this field. We monitor peer-reviewed research and other scholarly research as it emerges and highlight methodologically rigorous studies and other information on our sister website, Stats for Gender so that users can find the factual information they need to inform themselves about this complex topic. Our Beyond Trans programme is the only initiative in the world that offers funding for therapy to detransitioners and people who have been harmed by medical transition and we also offer free therapeutic support programmes to support this cohort. We run a peer-to-peer support service for parents and families in our online support meetings. The Gender Dysphoria Support Network provides the opportunity for parents, siblings and loved ones of trans-identified people to seek support from like-minded people in a confidential and gentle atmosphere.
One of our most important goals is to counter ideology-based services for gender-distressed youth with evidence-based ones. WPATH supporters typically advocate for #NoDebate so we counter this by holding our conferences at the same time and location as WPATH. Last year, when EPATH (the European counterpart to WPATH) had a conference in Killarney, Ireland, so did we. When USPATH held their conference in Denver, Colorado, so did we. This year WPATH will hold their conference in Lisbon, Portugal in September, and so will we. It is essential that people seeking information about gender distress do not have to rely solely on WPATH.
Hi Stella, I just want to offer a few thoughts as a mom. If it matters, I’m a gen-Xer and have a FtM daughter.
I was at your conference in Colorado. It was amazing, and I was extremely dismayed by the controversy that erupted - on social media - afterwards. If Phil’s presence was an affront to anyone at the conference, I didn’t notice. My sense was that there was a feeling on the ground of having bigger fish to fry.
I really appreciate your essay and I can easily see and situate myself within the ideological frameworks that you describe here.
TBH, I’ve never really considered myself a feminist. I’m grateful for the gains made over many decades for reproductive choices, job opportunities, etc. But I guess in recent years in particular I felt bothered or even alienated by what I perceive to be some of the more strident aspects.
Of course, seeing the TRAs run roughshod over women’s private spaces and women’s sports over the last few years has made me reconsider my reticent feminism. I’m middle aged now, and for the first time in my life, I’ve joined women’s rights groups. That said, I agree that Genspect should not strictly consider itself a women’s right group.
On the other side, I’m like most other left-leaning liberal Canadian folks. Hubby and I don’t care if (20yo) daughter is a lesbian. Any yet. Here she is insisting that she’s always had a boy brain and needs to transition. In my household there is no obligation around girls having to do this or that, no being forced to wear dresses or cook the food.
But TBH, having been put through the wringer the last five years, I think wistfully of the social conservatives that you mention. And in the dead of the night, I lie awake asking myself, what if I had made her wear a dress that time, do her hair? Put on some pretty shoes? Would she have found some joy in a simple act? Would that have been enough to tether her to being female? Would it have eased her over the rough patches of adolescence?
All that to say, I really appreciate the thoughtful approach you’ve laid out here, especially your determination to stick to truly Liberal values. It feels like this approach is getting to be a rarity, and that’s a shame.
I still believe in people with different points of view of view coming together for a greater good.
I want kids to have to freedom to grow up to be gay or lesbian. I want the MtF boys to get help, too. Stella, my heart breaks for the moms and dads of boys trapped in this hell. It’s so complicated for them. Genspect makes me feel less alone in the world. You have given me a sense of community and hope. Families of MtFs need the same. If that means I need to sit next to a guy in a dress at the next Genspect conference, so be it.
Again, thank you for this Stella.
About the Venn diagram, I wish I could get a better view. On my phone, it’s a tiny thumbnail. And it doesn’t show anywhere else on the post when I open it.
I agree, it is much better for Genspect to stay non-biased, non-partisan, and inclusive, because that is how they will invite more people to participate, and keeping this stance will have a farther reach and help many more people.