The Princess of Genderwoo

The Anna Freud Centre's Endorsement of Transgenderism

Britain's Catherine, Princess of Wales arrives to visit the Anna Freud National Centre for Children and Families in London, 1 May 2019. Photo credit: Toby Melville

In October, when the Charity Commission of England and Wales announced its investigation into the transgenderist children’s charity, Mermaids, gender critical campaigners were quick to point out that the Duke and Duchess of Sussex endorsed it in 2019. JK Rowling did not name names, but her criticism of “celebrities who ignored red flags” is widely understood to include them. Later in the same year, Meghan had showed further support for “trans visibility” by placing the trans identified male actor, Laverne Cox, on the cover of British Vogue. The story of Cox receiving a “surprise” telephone call, from the guest editor, was widely reported in the fashion press shortly after.

The narrative that many British gender critical campaigners seem to have adopted is that Harry and Meghan are out of British public life, in Los Angeles, where their self-interested promotion of “woke” causes can do little harm, while the current Prince and Princess of Wales sensibly “get on with the job.”

The reality is that William and Kate today are closely involved with charities, including their own, which probably enable and promote poorly evidenced “opposite sex imitation” drugs and surgery, and the entry of trans identified males into women’s spaces, more powerfully than Harry and Meghan’s endorsement of Mermaids and Cox ever did.

It seems to have been forgotten that current Prince of Wales publicly endorsed transgenderism even before Meghan appeared on the Royal scene. In 2016 he spoke of “The young gay, lesbian and transgender individuals I met through Attitude” magazine, many of whom were “going through terrible bullying right now.” A Tweet from the “Kensington Royal” official account contains a photograph of William sitting next to the trans identified campaigner Paris Lees. In late 2017, Lees Tweeted “Great to see Prince William recognising the life-saving support Mermaids offer trans kids and their families”:  the Mermaids Tweet that Lees linked to has been deleted.

In 2016, William urged everyone to “stand up to bullying wherever we see it.” Attitude’s editor informed readers that this bullying “too often comes from politicians or religious leaders.” Wisely, William did not go that far himself, given his father’s reputationally damaging track record of publicly endorsing homeopathy and alternative medicine, and privately lobbying for them.

William is patron of Centrepoint, the leading mental health charity for homeless young people. It is understandable that such charities tend to follow the lead of professional mental health groups, which continue to overwhelmingly endorse transgenderism, as do the largest mental health charities such as Mind.

A highly influential body in UK mental health is the Anna Freud Centre, which trains a large number of child psychotherapists, and conducts research. The Princess of Wales is patron (the website still refers to her as the Duchess of Cambridge). The Centre’s chief executive is clinical psychologist Peter Fonagy, whose work on evaluating different modalities of psychotherapy has made an international impact. He also holds the “Freud memorial chair” at University College London (UCL). The pharmaceutical industry is a major funder of research at UCL, and the leading health campaigning journalist Nick Ross, who refuses to discuss his own work for Pharma, has close links to senior academics there, as well as holding honorary professor status himself, in criminology.

Fonagy’s biography on the Anna Freud Centre website does not mention that he is also a psychoanalyst who, according to his lengthy entry on the British Psychoanalytic Council website, believes that “psychoanalysis is currently the best psychology we have.” Neither website makes any mention of the long history of exploitation and abuses by psychoanalysts who have colluded with extreme biomedicine, and their distortions of the historical record, some of which were perpetrated by Anna Freud herself.

The Anna Freud Centre has strongly endorsed transgenderism through its statements supporting a ban on so-called “conversion therapy” for trans-identified children and young people: “The Centre utterly rejects the implication that being trans is a form of distress that requires therapeutic intervention.” To underline this, two of the four organisations it recommended under its latest (April 2022) statement were Stonewall and Gendered Intelligence.

The Centre has also been silent about the Cass Review, which has been perceived as advocating a more psychosocial approach to transgenderism in children and young people. It is quite likely that Peter Fonagy is currently the most influential of all UK psychotherapists, and therefore that he has personally influenced the transgenderist responses of the Royal College of Psychiatrists and the British Psychological Society. The only major UK professional group to fully welcome Cass’s Interim Report is the recently formed Association of Clinical Psychologists.

The Princess of Wales is Patron of Place2Be, concerned with mental health in schools, and which promoted Stonewall as a resource for “LGBTQ+ young people” in July this year. Other patronages and associations include the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, which refers to “sex assigned at birth.”

The Prince and Princess of Wales @KensingtonRoyal

The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge joined @GiveUsAShout’s special #CrisisVolunteer celebration event, bringing together people from across the UK who volunteer around the clock with Shout to support people in crisis #Shout85258

In 2019 William and Catherine launched the text messaging support charity Shout 85258, which continues to list their Royal Foundation as a funder, and remains committed to “ban conversion therapy for trans people.” Shout 85258 is a key partner of many charities and groups which receive Royal support, including the partnership set up by William, Catherine and Harry in early 2016, Heads Together.

Many organisations may have toned down their trans affirmation in response to concerns about children being rushed into biomedical interventions, and women’s spaces being invaded by trans identified males, but none appear to have explicitly drawn back from transgenderist policy positions and statements. Only a few months after the Duke of Sussex’s widely publicised endorsement of Mermaids in 2019 (a record of which is still present on the Heads Together website), his brother visited a less high profile charity and spoke of his support for “the LGBTQ community.” Royal trans affirmation was not a temporary outbreak of woke madness, which will subside now that its best known sufferers have quarantined themselves in California: it is an expression of deep and wide institutional capture. It suits the corporate pharmaceutical and biotechnological interests, which want to see the transgenderism market grow, for gender critical campaigners to believe otherwise.