BLACKLISTED For Having An Opinion! | Dr. Jon Mills
Canadian philosopher-psychoanalyst Dr Jon Mills was labelled a racist and blacklisted from a psychoanalytic organisation — not for clinical wrongdoing, but for holding an unfashionable opinion. His response was a book. In this episode he and the Beyond Gender hosts trace how professional institutions, including those in psychoanalysis and psychology, have become sites of ideological enforcement. For European clinicians already feeling similar pressures in their own training programmes and professional bodies, his account is uncomfortably familiar — and his willingness to speak on the record about it remains rare.
Dr Jon Mills is a Canadian philosopher and psychoanalyst whose career spans decades of clinical practice, teaching, and writing. When a coordinated campaign labelled him a racist and white supremacist and led to his removal from a psychoanalytic organisation, he responded not with silence but with scholarship — editing a volume that examines the ideology behind such campaigns. That book, Woke: A Critique of Social Justice Ideology, and the professional ordeal that prompted it form the backbone of this conversation with Stella O'Malley, Mia Hughes, and Dr Bret Alderman. What makes this episode resonate far beyond North America is how recognisable the mechanisms are. Psychoanalytic and psychological institutes across Europe — in France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Scandinavia — have faced their own versions of the same pressure: training programmes reshaped around ideological commitments, candidate evaluations that include conformity to specific political frameworks, and senior practitioners quietly self-censoring to protect their standing. Mills names these dynamics plainly, which is itself a meaningful act. The episode traces how psychoanalysis — a discipline built on the free exploration of the unconscious, including its most uncomfortable contents — has in some quarters been conscripted into a form of political advocacy. The irony is not lost on Mills: a tradition that demands honest encounter with what is repressed now risks becoming an enforcer of new repressions. For European clinicians trying to hold clinical space open for patients with complex presentations, including gender distress, this tension is far from abstract. Mills also addresses the claims around systemic racism that were weaponised against him, and the broader pattern of ideological compliance in professional training. In many European countries, similar frameworks have entered psychology and psychotherapy curricula with little public debate. Whether trainees can raise empirical objections without jeopardising their careers is a question that European professional bodies have largely avoided, even as the evidence base for various ideological assumptions continues to be challenged in the scientific literature. Europe gave the world critical theory. What Mills describes is something different — not the rigorous interrogation of power that the Frankfurt thinkers pursued, but a flattening of inquiry into orthodoxy. When critical theory stops being critical and becomes a membership test, the institutions it inhabits tend to stop being places where difficult questions get worked through honestly. That matters especially in clinical settings, where the patient's reality — not the clinician's ideological formation — must remain the point of departure. Whether this wave is receding, as the episode also explores, is a genuinely open question in European universities and professional associations. The willingness to ask it publicly — at real professional cost, as Mills has done — is precisely what the broader conversation about gender medicine and therapeutic integrity needs more of: not anonymous dissent, but credentialled practitioners and thinkers prepared to put their names to an argument.
