It took 30 years for Dr Allan Josephson to establish himself as one of America’s leading child psychiatrists but only seven weeks for a savage mob of woke critics to destroy him.
His story is all too common. The professional who dared to violate groupthink – cancelled. A career ruined. A life stalled.
For Josephson there is – at least – a bittersweet ending. Though, in an exclusive interview with Daily Mail, he confesses he still wishes it wasn’t his tale to tell.
‘As a human, I would like someone to apologize,’ he said. ‘They did things that were wrong, were hurtful, weren’t right, weren’t ethical, weren’t moral. But, as the phrase goes, I’m not holding my breath.’
Josephson’s saga began with an invitation from the conservative Heritage Foundation to speak in Washington DC, at an event entitled ‘Gender Dysphoria in Children: Understanding the Science and Medicine’ on October 11, 2017.
As a University of Louisville professor and Distinguished Life Fellow of the internationally recognized American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Josephson, now 73, had served as a consultant to the surgeon general of the United States and earned world renown for his research.
From 2014 onwards, he had been invited to courtrooms and classrooms to discuss his views on the psychological impacts of administering hormone treatment and gender-altering surgery to children.
The Heritage Foundation invitation was in no way out of the ordinary.
It took 30 years for Dr Allan Josephson (pictured) to establish himself as one of America’s leading child psychiatrists but only seven weeks for a savage mob of woke critics to destroy him.
From 2014 onwards, Josephson had been invited to courtrooms and classrooms to discuss his views on the psychological impacts of administering hormone treatment and gender-altering surgery to children. (Pictured: Trans protestors in Washington DC).
Josephson spoke for a little over 10 minutes, arguing it was necessary to take a cautious approach to treating ‘gender-dysphoria’ among minors.
He was ‘stunned,’ he told the audience, that some doctors in his field were prioritizing a child’s ‘feeling of gender identity’ over the hard reality of ‘chromosomes, hormones, internal reproductive organs, external genitalia and secondary sex characteristics.’
‘Why should we listen to a nine-year-old about the time they want to go to bed? We don’t let them vote, we don’t let them drive,’ he added. ‘So we are going to let them, at the age of eight or nine, decide they are no longer male or female?’ he asked.
Josephson also pushed back against the idea that medical professionals should not critically analyze the beliefs that a child holds about themselves, explaining: ‘Absolutely you judge: not in a moral sense, but in a clinical sense.’
‘[These children] need treatment and help, not someone advocating for their civil rights,’ Josephson concluded, alluding to the ranks of those who practice medicine through the prism of social justice.
To this day, Josephson feels his comments were measured. ‘All I basically said was that we should be careful,’ he told the Daily Mail. ‘We should take time before we make drastic decisions. It struck me as a fairly reasonable position.’
Yet that is not how his detractors – many of whom Josephson had no reason to know he had – took his remarks.
On returning to Louisville, Kentucky, he discovered that trans rights activists had seized on the Heritage event.
The director of a campus LGBT center informed a professor within Josephson’s division of his appearance and demanded that disciplinary actions be taken against him. That professor then informed Charles Woods, the chair of the university’s department of pediatric psychiatry and psychology.
And Josephson’s three decades career was precipitously cut short.
By early November, Josephson had been told by colleagues that there was unease at his views.
Josephson thought little of it.
‘I’d been through disagreement,’ he recalled. ‘University departments are interesting places, and usually, if they’re run well, the debate, the disagreements are out in the open. You people think and you take time to reason with them.’
However, Josephson was surprised at how petty the argument became: on asking his assistant to get a rainbow sticker from the LGBT center, which many of his colleagues had taken to displaying, the assistant was told he could not have a sticker because ‘he refutes the existence of transgender identity’.
On November 15, Josephson held a regular meeting of his 12-person team, at which he was assailed by four colleagues who said they were ‘offended’ by his views. He later suspected many had not even watched the talk online.
Still, he was confident that he could resolve the issues.
Then, the day after Thanksgiving, he was told that there was a letter for him, which needed to be collected from the secretary at the University of Louisville.
The correspondence, signed by his department chair Woods, told Josephson he had to resign as division chief – or else he would be fired. Josephson was blindsided.
‘I had to read it several times,’ Josephson told the Daily Mail. ‘To realize how serious this was.’
Woods told Josephson he was being demoted because a ‘majority’ of his colleagues at the university ‘disagrees with your approach to management of children and adolescents with gender dysphoria.’
By February 2019, he was told his contract at the university was not being renewed.
On November 15, Josephson held a regular meeting of his 12-person team, at which he was assailed by four colleagues who said they were ‘offended’ by his views. He later suspected many had not even watched the talk online.
Devastated at his dismissal and angry at events, he contacted a lawyer with the Alliance Defending Freedom, which ‘advances every person’s God-given right to live and speak the truth’.
Them, last week, Josephson saw some semblance of justice: the university, which he had sued for violating his right to free speech, agreed to a $1.6 million payout – the first settlement of its kind.
‘I’m glad to finally receive vindication for voicing what I know is true,’ said Josephson, in a statement issued immediately after. ‘In spite of the circumstances I suffered through with my university, I’m overwhelmed to see that my case helped lead the way.’
Were the Heritage Foundation discussion held today, Josephson does not think he’d face the same outcry.
‘I think we’ve made our point – we meaning the conservative side,’ he said. ‘Many of the scientific statements are in our favor, and the other side’s on the run. I think it would be very different now. I don’t think I would have lost my job over this.’
Though now he is reluctant to return to academia – ‘I’m not sure where I would go or who would want me,’ he laughs.
‘My wife asks me all the time what I’m thinking of doing next,’ he says. ‘When you’ve just been hammered, and are recovering from that cognitively, it takes a while to sort through your thoughts.’
‘I do want to speak the truth to parents and children to try to help them and use my background to do that. I do have a lot of things that I think I could say that would benefit the field.’
Perhaps, his lived experience is lesson enough.
