Editorial

At the heart of this special issue is a complex and impassioned debate about what gender means both for the individual and for society. Although we rarely receive correspondence at the JCP, a ‘call for papers’ on this topic generated daily emails from members, several of these instructing us on what must be included in this editorial! I encouraged all to write up their experience and concerns into a piece we could publish, and yet only one felt able to do so.

In order to try to describe our difficulty, we need to re-examine what we understand by real: Twenty years ago, child therapists working with fostered or adopted children might routinely refer to the child’s biological parents as the real parents. Bodily facts of life were taken to be a ‘reality’ which should not, could not, be avoided. Since then, our understanding of the primacy of meaningful attachments in the psychological development of the child has been transformed. We understand that attuned nurturing alters the brain, and can promote recovery from complex developmental trauma, and so many of us actively use dyadic therapy or parent-infant psychotherapy as a part of our approach. So nowadays, when children manage to attach to new adults, we often refer to these foster carers or adoptive parents as the real parents and the biological players become something else – possibly even ‘ex-parents’ (Lanyado, 2016, 2017). Though they did not conceive or carry or labour to give the child’s body life, these attached, attuned carers are psychologically the real parents because this is what they are to the child, they are the ones who have done the parenting – vital to psychological conception, holding and development. This does not involve a denial of the biological reality but it does involve a privileging of the relational reality as the most significant in terms of psychological wellbeing. From this perspective, it is not such a big step to agree that gender too is a matter of subjective reality: if I identify as