BLACKLISTED For Having An Opinion! | Dr. Jon Mills
When a respected philosopher-psychoanalyst is branded a white supremacist and expelled from a professional body for holding dissenting views, the consequences extend far beyond his own career. Dr Jon Mills joins Beyond Gender to discuss the cancel campaign waged against him and his edited collection critiquing social justice ideology. For British clinicians and academics who recognise the same pressures inside NHS training programmes, university departments and their own professional registration bodies, this conversation arrives at a telling moment.
Dr Jon Mills is a Canadian philosopher, psychoanalyst, and prolific author whose work spans both continental philosophy and clinical practice. His appearance on Beyond Gender centres on an experience recognisable to many professionals in Britain: being targeted by a coordinated campaign that labelled him a racist and white supremacist, then blacklisted from a psychoanalytic organisation he had long been part of. The trigger was not any act of discrimination but the expression of views that challenged the prevailing ideological consensus inside his profession. The episode draws on Mills's edited volume, Woke: A Critique of Social Justice Ideology, which grew directly from that experience. He discusses when the ideological shift took hold within intellectual and clinical institutions, and how genuine concern for equality transformed, in his reading, into political conformity enforced through social and professional sanction. His perspective as a practising psychoanalyst gives him a particular lens on the psychological dynamics involved — the group pressures, the silencing mechanisms, and the way dissent gets pathologised rather than debated. For British listeners, the parallel with domestic professional bodies is hard to ignore. The BACP, the UKCP and the British Psychological Society have all faced criticism for adopting ideological positions on gender — positions that some members argue are presented not as debatable policy but as settled ethical requirements. Therapists working in the NHS have reported informal pressures to affirm gender identities in ways that conflict with their clinical judgement. The Cass Review itself noted that staff working in or around gender services felt unable to speak freely, a finding that sits alongside Mills's account of what institutional ideological capture actually looks like from the inside. Mills discusses the role of training in embedding ideological compliance, describing how candidates entering psychoanalytic programmes encounter a culture in which certain questions cannot safely be asked. This resonates in Britain, where some clinical training courses have incorporated gender-identity affirmation as a competency, and where trainees who raise questions risk being seen as lacking the required values. The Cass Review's finding that affirmation-only approaches lacked an adequate evidence base has shifted the official landscape somewhat, but the cultural pressures Mills describes remain live within many training environments and supervision relationships. What makes this episode valuable is that Mills is not a culture-war commentator but a working clinician and philosopher with decades of scholarship behind him. His account of being labelled and expelled illuminates how institutions that claim to value human complexity can, under ideological pressure, become intolerant of the very ambiguity and open inquiry that good therapeutic practice requires. The conversation also raises the question — timely in Britain, where the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act has had a troubled passage — of whether institutional cultures that enabled these dynamics are genuinely changing, or simply becoming more discreet.
