‘Change the tide of history’: Psychiatrist fired for anti-woke views finally vindicated!
Dr. Allan Josephson risked his career to become one of the first psychiatrists to publicly oppose the “transitioning” of children. When he spoke out, his employer, the University of Louisville, demoted him, harassed him, and ultimately fired him. Now, after a six-year legal battle to defend his First Amendment rights, Dr. Josephson stands vindicated. The university recently settled his case for nearly $1.6 million.
While that amount is significant, the real lesson of this story is how one man had the moral and intellectual courage to outlast the umbrage of a university faculty swept up in the tide of gender ideology.
Dr. Josephson had served nearly 15 years at the University of Louisville Medical School when the controversy broke. All in all, he spent almost 40 years in academia, receiving the prestigious Oskar Pfister Award honoring outstanding contributions in psychiatry and religion. At Louisville, he led with distinction. Serving as head of the Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Psychology, he turned around the once-struggling department and revived its reputation.
That pedigree made him a prime voice to speak in 2017 on a Heritage Foundation panel titled, “Gender Dysphoria in Children: Understanding the Science and the Medicine.” For several years, Dr. Josephson became increasingly concerned about the way doctors were treating children with gender dysphoria. Today, there is a growing scientific consensus around the world that rushing minors to embrace a new gender identity, puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and sterilizing surgeries is a bad idea. But when Dr. Josephson spoke out, he was virtually the only one doing so.
His comments at Heritage were calm, measured, and straightforward: “[G]ender dysphoria is a socio-cultural, psychological phenomenon that cannot be fully addressed with drugs and surgery,” he said. “Thus, doctors and others should explore what causes this confusion and help the child learn how to meet this developmental challenge.”
When word of those comments reached campus, his failure to endorse radical attempts to change children’s sex was apparently beyond the pale. Activists at the university’s LGBT Center asked the dean to step in, sparking a witch hunt. A few colleagues demanded Dr. Josephson “cease and desist” expressing his views as long as he remained at the university. Others demanded he apologize for his remarks or issue a disclaimer, something no professor had ever done, even though faculty regularly share their views. After weeks of agitation, university officials demoted him from his leadership position.
They then hatched a plan to get him fired. Acknowledging in e-mails that they would need “strong documentation” to “avoid Allan’s reappointment,” they worked to create that pretext. One supervisor started an “Allan tracking document” to log anything she thought could be used against him. Another sought complaints against him from alumni and instructed them what to say. Finally, in the spring of 2019, they terminated his employment by not renewing his contract.
All this effort was expended to punish a renowned scholar for merely expressing his views on his own time—all despite his decades of outstanding work and performance reviews.
Thankfully, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit recognized the importance of protecting professors’ First Amendment rights. Last year, the court ruled that Dr. Josephson’s case should proceed to trial, declaring public university officials can be held personally accountable for censoring professors or retaliating against them for presentations like Dr. Josephson’s.
The arc of Dr. Josephson’s eight-year ordeal tracks almost exactly with our nation’s tumultuous experience with gender ideology. In those years, we’ve been forced to ask two questions: What does it mean to be a man or a woman? And how should we treat children who are confused about their sex?
Americans have answered. Today, 27 states have passed laws to protect kids from life-altering experiments. Seven in 10 Americans support those laws. Courts and international medical organizations have also recognized that the science supports Dr. Josephson, as it always did.
Dr. Josephson was one of the first voices in medicine to express publicly an informed view on these questions. At a time when cultural pressure to self-censor became enormous—particularly in medical circles—Dr. Josephson stood firm for his patients and for biological reality. This, the university could not countenance. Dr. Josephson’s career was ended as a warning to others.
The cultural tipping point we now see—the return to biological sanity and a renewed appreciation for free speech—would never have arrived if not for people like Dr. Josephson, who challenged this now-cratering ideology when it was on the ascendance.
Heroes like Dr. Allan Josephson, who bravely stand in the gap to declare truth at great personal cost, are a rare treasure. They remind us that with courage, fortitude, fidelity to truth, and love for our neighbors, we too can change the tide of history.