Chartered Organisational Psychologist at Lucent Psychology. Founder member of the Women’s Equality Party.
London, England
Joined February 2011
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Dr Claire Barnes retweeted
I have now formally written to the Chair and Members of the Conversion Practices Select Committee, asking them to include us in discussions on the Bill and its potential impact on detransitioners and organisations like ours.
Detransitioners must not be overlooked or excluded from decisions that directly affect our lives. Our voices, experiences and perspectives deserve to be heard and represented.
We urge the Committee to recognise the importance of including detransitioner voices and engaging with organisations that support our community.
We will update everyone once we receive a response. In the meantime, please continue to share our message and help raise awareness. The more visible our voices are, the harder they are to ignore.
@DPUK26 @oliviabaileymp @DannyBeales @mariecgoldman @NazShahBfd
Dr Claire Barnes retweeted
This article brings me back to something I’ve spoken about many times. In the 1980s I saw people who had taken overdoses after discovering that sex reassignment hadn’t cured their existing problems. They had changed their bodies but the problems were still there.
In those days, individuals were expected to spend two years living in their preferred gender role, with psychological assessment and psychotherapy before surgery. I think that time matters. We need to understand what the person thinks these interventions are going to do for them, and help them understand the limits of what transition can achieve.
The numbers have gone up exponentially and the demographic changed. We are seeing many more neurodivergent young adults presenting when they go to university, fearful of the adult world and not feeling they fit in. Questions start getting asked about intimate relationships, how they are going to manage independently and what contribution they might make to adult life.
The people I’m describing often feel detached from their body. They don’t really feel they own it, but they are also struggling to establish a mind of their own. It’s almost as if they believe they have to do something concrete and drastic to their body before they can claim it as their own.
Many are riddled with self-hatred feeling they don’t measure up to an ideal of who they should be. That hatred is often directed towards the body, particularly the aspects they cannot control and find intolerable. They are desperately looking for a solution that doesn’t involve understanding any of this. Thinking about it is resisted because it threatens to bring back the doubt and confusion they have projected out. They create a sort of avatar in their mind and believe that becoming this person through medical transition will cure their problems.
As I say in Identity and the Foundational Myth, over several years they can develop a belief system that explains their struggles through the idea that they were born in the wrong body. In the cases I’m talking about, I think this is a false explanation that provides cover for underlying anxieties and conflicts. We need to understand what is going on behind the belief.
I’ve also seen the casualties: people who have had medical interventions and regret them. They hadn’t appreciated that surgeons can imitate aspects of natural biology but cannot reproduce its full workings. Afterwards, they have to live with the problems they had before and the additional problems caused by medication and surgery. Turning 18 doesn’t suddenly mean someone understands what this might mean for the rest of their life.
And scandalously, the Levy review found that adult services didn’t have the outcome data needed to know how people were doing or properly assess the safety of their care. Why aren’t we following people up systematically and finding out?
We need to know whether these expensive, irreversible interventions help people live productive lives, have relationships and make the contribution to society they want to make. How are they getting on in middle age? What has happened to the problems they hoped transition would resolve?
The Finnish study found that psychiatric treatment needs did not subside after medical transition. It doesn’t answer the question about middle age, but it should make us want to find out more. We don’t seem very interested in what happens to people in the years afterwards.
This is why I think a period of psychotherapy before irreversible interventions is so important. It should help the individual understand their own motives and beliefs, so they are in a better position to think about what they want, what they hope treatment will achieve and the risks involved.
In the end, individuals have to decide how best to live their own lives. But a slow process, with time for reflection, can help them become more self-aware and make more informed decisions.
@BayswaterSG @Telegraph @NHSEngland @YvetteCooperMP
Taxpayers foot £6.5m bill for trans breast removal surgeries telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/10…
Dr Claire Barnes retweeted
“The gender capture is making a mockery of our profession… this approach is destroying lives.” ✍️ @bindelj
unherd.com/2026/10/how-trans…
Dr Claire Barnes retweeted
Instead, the state sanctioned message that young same sex attracted people will receive is that they were born in the wrong body, and in fact they are, in reality, deep down heterosexual.
You really could not make this shit up.
Dr Claire Barnes retweeted
No parent will want a social services or police investigation into their family due to "abusive" behaviour. Discussions about same sex attraction or autism in families will be chilled. Discussion will need to be gender affirmative in nature.
Dr Claire Barnes retweeted
No professional will counsel an effeminate young man, or a gender non conforming girl that they are perfect as they are, or that same sex attraction is natural. That will be a conversion practice. Gender affirmation practice will be official policy.
Dr Claire Barnes retweeted
There is a deep, dark irony that lies a the heart of the Conversion Practices Bill, that will play out.
If passed, the law will end up being the largest ever driver of conversion practices for gay and lesbian young people. It will have far more negative impact that Section 28.
Dr Claire Barnes retweeted
If an oligarch had used the Metropolitan Police and Carter Ruck to silence a journalist, would that be similarly brushed over and forgiven?
Dr Claire Barnes retweeted
This attempt to rewrite history by Stonewall's new leadership isn't going to work. If they truly want to reset the conversation, they need to reckon with the serious harms they caused both women and trans people by demanding no dissent whatsoever from gender identity ideology.
A lot of us were very willing to have a debate without heat, @stonewalluk, and the reason that never happened wasn't because gender critical feminists didn't want one.
While we were trying to get you to listen to our concerns, your former CEO was telling a BBC boss that gay people not wanting to include the opposite sex in their dating pool was 'sexual racism'. While we were pointing out the homophobia inherent in gender ideology, Stonewall ambassador Alex Drummond (a bearded, heterosexual man who'd had no surgery and taken no cross-sex hormones but liked wearing skirts), was going into schools to talk to students about his 'lesbian' identity. @BluskyeAllison, who actually is a lesbian, was subject to unlawful discrimination at her place of work for tweeting: ‘Stonewall recently hired Morgan Page, a male bodied person who ran workshops with the sole aim of coaching heterosexual men who identify as lesbians on how they can coerce young lesbians into having sex with them. Page called [it] “overcoming the cotton ceiling”.’
When the UK Supreme Court upheld women's right to single sex spaces, you issued a statement expressing your unhappiness about the ruling. In her report on your unhappy influence at the University of Essex, you were found by barrister @akuareindorf to have misrepresented the law as it related to women's rights: '[Stonewall have] stated the law as Stonewall would prefer it to be, rather than the law as it is’.
In 2018, you publicly advised schools to shred a research pack saying there were risks to puberty blockers, in spite of the fact that you aren't a medical charity and that there was already credible evidence that puberty blockers are neither irreversible nor harm-free. Meanwhile you produced your own educational packs, recommending a children's book, for ages 5-9, in which the parent 'is neither a man, nor a woman – they’re non-binary.' In July 2022, Stonewall sent out a tweet that read ‘Research suggests that children as young as two recognise their trans identity'.
@thetimes has reported how you've sought to control the language used by NHS trusts and government on their social-media accounts. Organisations would get points from you for replacing commonly understood words with ideologically approved terms, eg, 'birthing parent' instead of 'mother'. thetimes.com/uk/society/arti…
In short, you took a maximalist position on gender identity ideology, which you attempted to enforce by diktat. You refused to acknowledge that you'd hitched your wagon to a cause that, unlike civil rights, gay rights or women's rights, sought to strip rights from others. You sought to curtail everyone's right to freedom of speech and belief by controlling what it was permissible to think and say, through the management and political class. You have argued against women's and girl's rights to their own spaces, their sports and to assemble without men. Your former CEO tried to shame gay women/men into dating the opposite sex if the latter claimed to be female/male.
Your mantra was 'no debate' because, like all totalitarians, you preferred slogans, bullying and infiltration of powerful institutions to talking to opponents. You appear to have had no concern for the lowly people your ideology was harming: gender confused kids, female rape victims, female prisoners, regular people hounded and investigated at their places of work for refusing to accept the new mandates on sex and gender issued from on high.
Your 'activism' has been a disaster for those trans-identified people who really do just want to get on with their lives in peace. You have besmirched the name of an organisation many of us were once proud to donate to, the charity that was partly responsible for securing the legal right of gay people to marry, which a lot of us thought would never happen in our lifetimes. The milquetoast words quoted below do not erase a decade of gender activism that has been disastrous not only for individuals but for society as a whole.
There was once a debate to be had, but until you acknowledge the direct harm you've caused, it is no more possible to debate you than to persuade a person in the throes of a drug-induced psychosis that they are not, in fact, the reincarnated Christ.
Dr Claire Barnes retweeted
As you might have guessed, my blood, too, boils. I've seen up close the harm they've done, through my Women's Fund and through Beira's Place. They're stupid as well as shameless if they think a slight shift in rhetoric will make us all forget the last decade.
Dr Claire Barnes retweeted
No one wants to annihilate her son. We just want him to stay out of women's spaces.
And if he's claiming that will kill him, that makes him dangerous.
Dr Claire Barnes retweeted
Stonewall are trying some fawning puff piece rehabilitation in the Guardian.
Allow me please to remind you of Baroness Ruth Hunt, a person who lied to parents and told them if you don't give (mainly gay and/or autistic children) puberty blockers 50% attempt to kill themselves.
Dr Claire Barnes retweeted
🚨 BREAKING: The Committee for Academic Freedom (CAF) has written to Queen Mary University of London (QMUL) on behalf of two senior academics who are refusing to complete mandatory training requiring assent to contested theoretical propositions about “unconscious bias”, potentially jeopardising their career progression and professional opportunities.
The dispute concerns an assessment within What is Unconscious Bias? — part of QMUL’s Introducing Inclusion course, which is “mandatory for all staff”.
The assessment requires participants to affirm that “unconscious biases help us to react quickly but can cloud our judgement”, and to identify accepting that “we have unconscious biases” as helpful. The accompanying feedback declares that such acceptance is “the first step to combating their negative effects”.
Informed by their scholarly research, the academics we’re supporting dispute these propositions and have refused to complete the assessment rather than give answers contrary to their convictions.
Under the assessment’s all-or-nothing marking system, refusing to affirm both propositions caps a participant’s score at 60%, below the 80% pass mark. Yet passing is a condition of eligibility for promotion, professorial review, including decisions on remuneration, and participation in recruitment and promotion panels.
Although influential in social-justice-oriented scholarship, the concept of unconscious bias is contested within psychology, with researchers disagreeing about what it means, whether the processes in question are necessarily unconscious, and whether they exert a causal influence on judgement. Peer-reviewed research also questions whether acknowledging such biases improves behaviour.
QMUL is of course entitled to provide training on its preferred theory of bias. But it remains just that: a theory. When such training is mandatory, requires staff to pass an assessment, and is tied to professional opportunities, there is a clear risk of compelling academics to affirm propositions they simply don’t believe.
That’s why we’ve proposed a simple solution: amend the assessment so that academics who don’t all think alike can demonstrate understanding without having to endorse its underlying assumptions.
Should QMUL decline to address these concerns, CAF is prepared to fund legal counsel to assist the academics, should they wish, in pursuing an internal grievance and subsequent complaint to the OfS.
We believe there are strong grounds for such a complaint, given that such training may breach QMUL’s statutory duties to secure freedom of speech and academic freedom. Consistent with Article 10 protections against compelled expression, the Office for Students has also warned that universities “should not require training or induction that imposes a requirement on the person completing the training actively to endorse any viewpoint or value-judgement”.
Sadly, this isn’t an isolated case. As CAF knows from its casework, universities often impose mandatory training in which the distinction between “understanding” and “endorsing” contested ideas becomes blurred.
That’s why we hope this intervention marks the beginning of a wider pushback against compelled intellectual conformity on campus.
If you’re an academic with similar concerns about mandatory training at your institution, get in touch. CAF can assess your case and, where appropriate, secure specialist legal advice and raise the matter with your university on your behalf.
Contact us at [email protected]
Full story via The Telegraph:
telegraph.co.uk/gift/1060b26…
Dr Claire Barnes retweeted
Good point. You’d think @stonewalluk might note and celebrate the lesbian intervenors’ success in the Supreme Court in defining and defending what it means to be a lesbian.
But it’s the opposite - it seems like the exclusion of men is never ok for Stonewall nowadays. Not even from the definition of lesbian.
Dr Claire Barnes retweeted
I really hope I never go through the kind of education that makes me defend the indefensible like you are. Copying other people’s work isn’t acceptable scholarship and shouldn’t be accepted by the academy. You are making your discipline look very bad.
Dr Claire Barnes retweeted
James Acaster supports trans identified men in women’s rape crisis centres and women’s sports.
You will always be a traitor son…
#CelebrityTraitors
Dr Claire Barnes retweeted
Yes, I'm biased, but god Dennis Kavanagh, Helen Joyce & Dermot Kehoe are a breath of fresh air. The contrast between them and the 3 previous witnesses is really something. Straight-talking, practical, evidence-based. None of your "um this is abstract" fluff. #ConversionPractices
Dr Claire Barnes retweeted
Everyday conversion practices 1
When a child is taught that they can change their sex, but that they have a fixed gender identity.
(There is no reputable evidence that supports the existence of an immutable, inherent gender identity in children. That is a belief)
