BLACKLISTED For Having An Opinion! | Dr. Jon Mills
23 July 2026
With Jon Mills
Global
Dr Jon Mills, a Canadian philosopher-psychoanalyst, joins Beyond Gender to discuss being labelled a white supremacist and blacklisted from a psychoanalytic organisation after questioning social justice ideology. His experience illustrates a growing pattern of ideological enforcement inside professional bodies — one that Irish therapists and trainees are increasingly navigating.
Dr Jon Mills is a Canadian philosopher and psychoanalyst whose academic career spans decades of teaching, clinical practice and published scholarship. He came to wider public attention after becoming the target of a coordinated campaign within a psychoanalytic organisation, during which he was labelled a racist and white supremacist. The allegations, he argues, were not grounded in his actual work but arose from his willingness to question ideological orthodoxies that had taken hold inside the profession. In this episode of Beyond Gender, he describes the mechanics of that campaign and its consequences for his professional standing. The experience prompted Mills to edit a book titled Woke: A Critique of Social Justice Ideology, a collection examining how concepts borrowed from critical theory — originally a set of philosophical frameworks developed in the academy — have been transformed into enforceable norms inside institutions. The episode traces the timeline of this shift: how professional bodies that once prized independent analytic thinking began, from roughly the late 2010s onwards, to adopt positions on race, gender and identity that members were expected to endorse rather than debate. Mills draws a careful distinction between engaging with social justice as a topic for rigorous inquiry and imposing it as a condition of professional belonging. One of the episode's more substantive threads concerns how ideological conformity is increasingly embedded within accreditation and continuing professional development requirements in psychoanalytic circles. Trainees who raise questions about the evidence base for certain claims — whether around systemic racism or gender identity — risk being flagged not as intellectually curious but as professionally suspect. The effect, Mills suggests, is a chilling one: potential analysts self-censor during training and early-career years, precisely when open inquiry should be most encouraged. This matters in an Irish context because the same professional landscape — psychotherapy registration, accreditation bodies, university clinical training programmes — is not immune to these pressures. Irish therapists working with clients who question gender-identity frameworks have reported feeling isolated within their own professional communities. Whether Irish accrediting organisations allow the kind of internal dissent Mills describes being denied is a live question, and one the profession has not fully confronted in public. Mills is careful to distinguish criticism of ideological excess from opposition to the legitimate goals of equality. His argument is that the conflation of critical inquiry with bigotry — the move that led to his own blacklisting — is itself harmful to the analytical tradition. Psychoanalysis built its intellectual credibility on the willingness to say uncomfortable things, to interrogate assumptions and to resist the pressure of social conformity. When that tradition is turned against practitioners for doing exactly that, something clinically and professionally important is lost.
