British mental healthcare responses to adult homosexuality and gender non-conforming children at the turn of the twenty-first century

Abstract

The roots of the recent controversy about how mental health professionals should respond to gender non-conforming children are traced. To make historical sense, this paper distinguishes between epistemological (discursive) and ontological (non-discursive) aspects and describes their features, since 1970. This helps to clarify some of the confusions at the centre of the still heated debate about sexuality and gender identity today. In the concluding discussion, the philosophical resource of critical realism is used to interpret the historical narrative provided. It cautions against the anachronistic tendency to amalgamate the short-lived, and now defunct, experiment of aversion therapy for homosexuality with more recent defences of exploratory psychotherapy. The latter have challenged a different form of experimentation: the bio-medicalisation of gender non-conforming children.