Sexual offence, diagnosis, and activism: A British history of LGBTIQ psychology

This article charts the historical period from the 1950s to the 1990s, focusing on the role of Psychology in the lives of lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, intersex and queer (LGBTIQ) people in Britain. Psychology has been, and is, central to the social, legal, and medical understandings of biological sex and how best to understand diversity in gender and sexuality. Likewise, gay liberation and liberationist politics also had an effect on Psychology. For the 1950s to 1960s, we outline how psychologists influenced the law in relation to the Wolfenden Report (1957) and how expertise was centrally located within the 'psy' disciplines. Following this, in the 1960s to 1970s, activists began to challenge this expertise and became increasingly critical of pathologization and of 'treatments' for homosexuality. They did not reject Psychology wholesale, however, and some groups engaged with queer affirmative psychologists who had similar liberatory aims. Finally, for the 1980s to 1998, we highlight the establishment of the Lesbian and Gay Section of the British Psychological Society, which signaled institutional recognition of lesbian and gay psychologists. This is explored against a backdrop of a specific British history of HIV/AIDS and Section 28. The past 50 years have been a battleground of categories in which LGBTIQ people were conflated, compared, and confused. We demonstrate that psychologists (not all of whom adopted a pathologizing perspective), alongside politicians, lawyers, doctors, journalists, and activists, all played a role in the boundary-making practices of this period. Across this entangled history, we demonstrate varied and significant shifts in the legitimacy of professional and personal expertise. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).