A trans-identified male academic who was previously criticized for stating that it “would not matter” if women were killed as a result of gender identity policies has been appointed to devise ethical guidelines for therapists. Sophie Grace Chappell, a Philosophy professor at the Open University, is now playing an integral role on the core team tasked with reworking the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy’s (BACP) national ethical framework, reported The Daily Mail, despite apparently lacking qualifications in psychotherapy or counselling.
News of his role prompted criticism from therapists. James Esses, co-founder of Thoughtful Therapists – an organization of clinical psychologists and psychotherapists from across the UK and Ireland “with a shared concern about the impact of gender identity ideology on children and young people,” said that Chappell should be “nowhere near devising therapeutic ethics.”
An unnamed female counsellor told The Daily Mail: “Professor Chappell is completely unsuitable to be deciding what form our ethical framework should take. I fear this person will insert gender ideology into our professional guidelines.”
Chappell first drew outrage from critics in 2021 when, during an interview for Radio Scotland, he told host Kaye Adams that it “wouldn’t matter” if gender self-identification policies led to a “slight spike” in the murders or rapes of women.
“I think we can rightly dismiss that as scare-mongering. It doesn’t matter… It wouldn’t matter if there was a slight spike in those statistics,” he said.
In the online community Mumsnet, women discussed Chappell’s comments with reactions ranging from anger to shock.
“Sophie laughed while making the point, and then rambled about human rights, seemingly forgetting women have human rights too, one of which is not to be murdered,” said one commenter.
Still others took to X (formerly Twitter) to express their outrage. Some pointed to Chappell’s habit of dressing in a style resembling a young girl.
Aspects of blouses and skirts worn by Chappell share similarities with a genre of pornography wherein men dress as and pretend to be little girls. In some cases, men practice “sissification” in public and record their interactions with others as a type of user-generated pornography.
In a 2022 article on the topic of “being transgender” and “growing up,” Chappell wrote, “Secret time spent dressed feminine was time off from public [sic] being masculine. And that was always a huge relief. Dressing masculine was a weariness to the spirit: it made me feel tired, ugly, constrained, trapped, suffocated, awkward, wrong. It still does. But dressing feminine was, simply, a delight: it brought a sense of serene, calm, happy, relaxed, floating-away euphoria that nothing else gave me, a simple and straightforward innocent childlike joy; just a sense of rightness. It still does.”
Chappell added that the future of feminism, in his view, should focus on concepts such as “live and let live,” “play nicely,” “love is all you need,” and said that he believes women should not “forbid or condemn anything at all unless you really need to.”
In June 2020, Chappell wrote an open letter in response to renowned author JK Rowling’s essay addressing her concerns regarding the gender identity movement. In it, Chappell refutes her expressed concerns on issues involving safeguarding, and advocates for sex self-identification.
“Perhaps you, Ms. Rowling, think that there’s something dark and terrible – and monstrous? – about trans women. You certainly seem to frame us as a threat,” Chappell wrote. “Trans people are one of the most discriminated-against groups in the world!”
He continued to undermine the position that allowing men to access women’s intimate spaces would result in harm. “Women of every kind should be and feel safe in the public toilets. Of course they should; everybody should. But trans women are simply not a threat to women’s safety,” Chappell admonished.
“If we google hard enough, we can find bad anecdotes about trans women attacking other women in the toilets; the tabloids go to town on such anecdotes whenever possible, and so do some trans-unsympathetic feminists. But anecdotes aren’t data.”
He then recommended that JK Rowling seek out educational materials from a trans activist organization which creates “transgender toolkits.”
Previously known as Timothy Chappell, he began claiming to identify as female in 2014 after marrying a woman and fathering four daughters.
He has also been known as Christian Sophie Grace Chappell, and served as the director of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP) from 2015 to 2018.
But Chappell is not the only trans-identified male with an apparent affinity for age regression and sissification who has been associated with the BACP.
As previously revealed by Reduxx, a prominent psychologist within the Gender Identity Clinic at Tavistock has called for normalizing “age play,” “infantilism,” and “sissification.” Dr. Christina Richards, a trans-identified male and an Accredited Psychotherapist with the BACP, is responsible for a publications which seek to rebrand extreme fetishes as “further sexualities.”
In 2013, Richards co-authored a professional guide on sexuality and gender, in collaboration with Meg John Barker, a senior lecturer in psychology at the Open University. In the writing, Richards places extreme and violent sexual practices on the same spectrum as heterosexuality, homosexuality, and bisexuality.
In the guide Richards introduces age play, which involves “an adult identifying as a baby or young child, and is also known as adult baby/diaper lover (ABDL) or infantilism. There may be a sexual aspect… associated with humiliation.”
Richards goes on to describe how adults who engage in ‘age play’ accumulate various objects and apparel associated with childhood, including children’s clothing. Often one adult will roleplay as being any age from infancy to teenage years, while another adult participates in a dominant sexual role.
“Terms which may be encountered here include daddy’s little girl (DLG) in which an older male top treats a younger female bottom as a nurtured child,” Richard elaborates. “The term ‘sissification’ intersects with age play as it is where an adult male is consensually ‘forced’ to don the clothes of, and behave as, a young girl as part of a BDSM scene. The humiliation the adult male feels at being dressed as a young female is the source of the eroticisation.”
He boasts several other affiliations and titles, such as serving on the Executive Board of the European Professional Association for Transgender Health (EPATH), and as Board-Member-at-Large of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH).
Before becoming a board member, he was selected by the executive board of the WPATH to be Lead Chapter Author for Adult Assessment in the Standards of Care Version 8 (SoC v8) revision, the drafts of which were finalized in the fall of 2022.
In addition to his work with the Gender Identity Clinic, Richards serves as the chair of the British Psychological Society and oversaw guidelines that advise mental health professionals that it can be acceptable to refer to a client as a “slut.”