Mick Hartley

We've heard from James Esses before: dismissed from his job at Childline for questioning their Stonewall-friendly attitude to the troubled young children who rang the helpline in the belief that puberty blockers and gender reassignment surgery would solve all their problems. Instead of a calm steadying voice counselling caution, they were – according to Esses – encouraged, with breathtaking irresponsibility, along the pathway of irreversible medical intervention.

Now here he is again:

A former barrister has won the right to sue an institute of higher education that allegedly ejected him from a course over his “gender critical beliefs”.

A judge has ruled that James Esses’s claim that he was treated unlawfully as a result of his beliefs should be tested at a full employment tribunal.

The trainee therapist has alleged that the UK Council for Psychotherapy ordered the Metanoia Institute in Ealing, west London, to have Esses thrown off his masters course.

It is alleged that the council issued that edict after Esses had raised concerns about the institute’s attitude to transgender issues, particularly relating to children.

At a preliminary hearing Esses set out the beliefs that he said should entitle him to legal protection. According to the judgement, these include “that sex is binary, immutable and biological, and gender is a question of identity based upon a variety of factors, including culture and socialisation”.

And this is controversial? 

His view was that “psychotherapists should explore by way of open-ended discussion the context and possible causes of a person’s gender dysphoria, which may in some cases lead to the person desisting from a course of potentially irreversible and potentially damaging medical intervention such as puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and sex reassignment surgery”.

The hearing in London was told that after Esses began his studies at the Metanoia Institute — which awards degrees and provides psychology, psychotherapy and counselling training — he applied for trainee membership of the UK Council for Psychotherapy in 2020.

And last year Esses sent an email to the council expressing his “concern with a lack of balance in the discussion and debate around treatment of gender dysphoria, particularly for children”. But the next month he received an email from the council’s registrar warning him that if he wished to apply for full membership he would have to abide by the body’s “ethical framework”.

Later an email was sent by the council to the chief executive of Metanoia, which stated “we are greatly concerned by this situation”.

Esses’s contract with the Metanoia Institute was then terminated and three weeks later he was informed that as he was no longer a student. His trainee membership of the council was also terminated.

Esses has now claimed that he was discriminated against, harassed and victimised because of his beliefs.

In his ruling, the employment judge Beyzade Beyzade said that Esses’s allegations should be tested at a full hearing, saying: “This is a fact sensitive exercise that the tribunal at a final hearing will be best placed to carry out.”

Thank goodness for prickly awkward bastards like Esses, not prepared to submit to the blind unthinking acceptance of gender nonsense.