UKCP – The Board Removal Vote.
As many of you know, The UKCP Board held an online meeting Monday to put its case to members on how to vote in its forthcoming removal election. Over 300 UKCP members are reported to have joined this meeting.
We are listing here the headlines, as we understood them, and below this (in the longer version), quotations from the meeting and links to relevant documents.
As the vote begins we remain extremely concerned about the actions of the UKCP Board and we do not believe that their actions in withdrawing from the MoU have been adequately explained. We believe that some very serious questions remain, and in the absence of receiving answers, despite trying for months, our UKCP cohort continues to call for the removal of the Board and their subsequent replacement with a new team which will restore the UKCP to the MoU (as the current Board restated that it would not do), unless a full and transparent consultative process involving members of all kinds indicates a different course of action.
The headlines from the meeting are:
1. The UKCP Board states that their figure for triggering the vote is 2% and that that’s low by comparison with other organisations. They stated that the petition achieved this level, just, and inferred that if a higher number had been required, it wouldn’t have been reached. We’d like to respond that TACTT’s open letter stopped being promoted at the point we reached the number of signatures required and a decision was made to submit to UKCP. TACTT is confident that it could have added more signatures, perhaps significantly more, had it continued to seek them.
2. The UKCP Board states that NCPS supports them in the aim of creating a new, alternative version of the MoU. NCPS has categorically denied this and has now asked UKCP to stop saying it’s true. (Please note that communication from the UKCP to TACTT after the publication of this blog asks us to update. The UKCP is not planning to create a new version of the MoU. We are not sure what they are planning to create, except a regulatory document of some kind that involves conversion therapy. In the meeting they discussed the MoU ‘not going far enough’ and wanting to strengthen this, but it seems that what they are planning to create is not something like the MoU).
3. The UKCP Board states they had no choice but to withdraw at speed from the MoU and although they knew that this may be seen as a transphobic action, they a) didn’t have time to mitigate the process around this, and b) although they knew it could be perceived as transphobic, they didn’t consider how their action would impact members. They also feel that they are “ethically sensitive” and the right people to remain on the board. However, the Board has also said it discussed this in advance of making the decision with colleagues and some of the member colleges. Which is it? That there was time to engage with several colleges and colleagues, or that this had to be done so fast that there wasn’t time to consider the impact the decision would have?
WHY did the decision have to be so fast? Can the UKCP categorically state that they have signed no legal settlement that has compelled them to withdraw from the MoU?
4. The UKCP Board’s original stated reason for withdrawal was about ‘children’. At the meeting the main message seemed to be about ‘insurance premiums’. The Board now states that it had to withdraw the UKCP because of insurance policy premiums (and that their responsibility is to UKCP, with no mention of clients or their members). With respect to stated concerns about the care of children, the UKCP board has claimed that the MoU Secretariat refused to engage on this. There is nothing in the minutes of any UKCP trustee meeting from the last 18 months that suggests this and it has been stated in the meeting on June 17th by an attendee (presumably on the secretariat) via the Q&A panel that the minutes of the MoU meetings do not support this. Whichever way, the MoU was a guideline, rather than a legal document.
5. The UKCP Board has repeatedly said that they want to hear from LGBTQ+ (and other) voices. TACTT has been trying to engage with UKCP on this matter since November 2023, with no results whatsoever. The UKCP Board also states that it supports the Cass review, which has been widely criticised since its publication, not least by trans people whose voices were systematically excluded from it.
6. The UKCP Board stated that the removal of the trustees would destabilise the organisation and that many new developments would have to be ‘put on ice’, yet also claiming that the current Board is new. Irrespective of this seemingly contradictory rhetoric, it must be pointed out that the Board wouldn’t be replaced until new members of a trustee board (also potentially members with experience of being trustees) were in place.
In short: the narrative we have heard seems to be as follows.
They couldn’t tell members the truth, but they’ve also been transparent from the start.
They are against conversion therapy, but they support the Cass Review. This has been widely discredited by leading academics, and was created and managed by a government that explicitly and energetically attempted to destroy the rights of trans people in the UK. This government has refused to bring forward a ban of Conversion Therapy (the Minister who commissioned it celebrated the release of the final Cass report with excited claims of the defeat of the “militant gender lobby”) and the Cass report has been weaponised extensively within the political and media discourse since its release.
They believe in ‘healthy exploratory therapy’ but will not commit to a starting point of stating that trans identities are valid and are as legitimate as cisgender identities. Without this, so-called ‘exploratory therapy’ effectively becomes conversion therapy.
They want to create a new regulatory version of the MoU, but again, will not commit to the standpoint of the original MoU. They didn’t know that the MoU covered children (we ask, why would it not, and why did it take 8 years and having signed the document twice to bring this question – which could have been answered easily and quickly at any stage?) and state that children have age-specific needs. Our response to this? Of course they do, but why does this mean that a well-practised approach of supporting a child to explore their identity – trans, cisgender or anything else – is invalid?. And we point out again that the MoU does not state any particular way of working for either adults or children and young people.
Long version
1: In the interests of expediency, TACTT sent the list of signatures when we knew we had reached the number required. If the number had been higher, we would have continued to share the letter until the higher number was reached.
2: UKCP have withdrawn from the MoU2 and intend to create a regulatory document around conversion therapy. UKCP (Jon Levett, CEO) said in the meeting “We’ve got together a working group which is going to start to meet on a monthly basis to really start to get some momentum on this. So NCPS are very definitely involved, very definitely signed up to this.” Another trustee states “ [we have] form[ed] a working group led by our CEO John Levitt already we’re collaborating with a number of organisations including the British Psychoanalytic Council, the National Counselling and Psychotherapy Society and a number of others”
NCPS’s response is “Just to reassure you, the NCPS has re-joined, and is fully supportive of, the MOU as the right mechanism to ban conversion therapy, a ban which has been our consistent policy. We are not looking to create an alternative MOU […] I have raised this with UKCP and asked them to refrain from sending out these statements”
3: UKCP say that they didn’t have time to consider the potential fallout. We respect that the open letter went up the same day as the announcement. However, what this tells us is that the board just did not consider this, in advance of releasing such a huge statement. They also say in the same meeting that they DID consider that it might be seen as transphobic, but that none of them (it seems) considered the impact that might have. One cannot have it both ways.
“We didn’t have time to address the potential fallout before the petition came against us. So we have been and we are always against conversion therapy and the petition was based on incorrect information”
“To be totally transparent we considered that the withdrawal taken out of context could be experienced as transphobic and homophobic, but what we didn’t consider was the potential impact.” “We believe that as the existing board that we have the skills, the vision and the ethical sensitivity to take the forward and deliver on the charity’s strategic aims”
“We did discuss it with colleagues. We did discuss with some of the colleges, although we acknowledged we didn’t discuss with all of them”
4: From the MoU2: “conversion therapy’ is an umbrella term for a therapeutic approach, or any model or individual viewpoint that demonstrates an assumption that any sexual orientation or gender identity is inherently preferable to any other, and which attempts to bring about a change of sexual orientation or gender identity, or seeks to suppress an individual’s expression of sexual orientation or gender identity on that basis.” and “signatory organisations agree that the practice of conversion therapy, whether in relation to sexual orientation or gender identity, is unethical and potentially harmful.”
UKCP state concerns about children and not knowing that children were covered under ‘people’. What exactly *are* children, to UKCP, if not people? Jen Ayling stated: “you know, a child’s need is very different to an adult’s needs and I think that’s where there’s the need for additional guidance.” The MoU does not give guidance on HOW to work with people exploring their gender. It simply allows room for children to fully explore their identities from within a framework that believes “that neither sexual orientation nor gender identity in themselves are indicators of a mental disorder” (MoU2)
From the UKCP meeting: “Now we did an attempt to engage in dialogue but came to the point when faced with a significant increase in our insurance premium”
They suggest that “over the last few weeks we have endeavoured as a board to transparently communicate the reasoning and risk assessment process which underpinned our decision”, yet they have changed their story to being about insurance and explicitly state they couldn’t state this originally. What has legally changed that they now can?
5: From the meeting: “Any clinical guidance will be backed by robust research evidence. We’re supportive of the Cass review and it will form part of our ongoing considerations when creating new regulation and clinical guidance”. Cass has been discredited in many areas and by many voices since its publication. See Transactual the OSF Preprint paper, and Dr Ruth Pearce’s ongoing updates for just three of them.
They also state “You see what we urgently need to do is create new regulatory guidance for conversion practices that has good governance, transparency, consultation, the voice of psychotherapy and most importantly the voices of the LGBTQIA+ community”.
UKCP would not answer a question as to whether they were prepared to start any new version of an MoU from the point of view that a trans identity was as valid as a cisgender identity. They did talk about “healthy exploratory therapy”. Florence Ashley has a very useful paper on why ‘exploratory therapy’ within a framework that doesn’t accept trans (whether in adults or children) as a valid identity is conversion therapy. UKCP declined to answer to this question as well.
6: From the meeting: “The upheaval and cost implications to the charity of appointing an entirely new board would essentially make the organization non-functioning in terms of major future developments for a significant period of time. Conference planning, strategic development work and many of the other projects we’ve successfully launched would have to be put on ice.”
However they go on to list all the things they have achieved as a new board. Which seems to directly contradict their claims of destabilisation.
“There’s a lot done but not all of it will be directly visible to you. So we started to work preparing the relationship with colleges, which was a factor within the EGM core. We are managing legal claims. We relocated the offices. 17th June, I think was the D date. And estimated to save 150 K annually. We’re improving office performance. We’re guiding the NHS pathways, talking therapies pilots. We’ve reinstated the annual conference. We reinstated the ethics committee. And as many of you again will be aware, we’ve consulted on and a developing the new 3 year strategy. And I just want to say a little bit about that is that the three-year strategy and we’ve run 3 4 seminars on that already through 4 webinars on that already. And put up various polls just to gain attraction and interest. The Strategy Working Group is comprised of 2 chairs at the colleges and one vice chair of the colleges working with the board nominated board of trustees.”
UKCP is presenting a bundle of contradictions and obfuscations to its members. There is no real clarity and in removing themselves from the MoU they place their members in a very difficult position.
Therapists Against Conversion Therapy and Transphobia 