A renowned psychologist had his invitation to speak at a conference revoked after someone complained about his social media activity. The organisers refused to speak with him about the exclusion or even to identify the offending posts.
Dr David Pilgrim has had a long career working as a clinician in the NHS and as a researcher on mental health policy. He has published several books in the fields of psychology and sociology, one of which won BMA’s Medical Book of the Year prize. Now semi-retired, he retains a position as Visiting Professor of Clinical Psychology at the University of Southampton.
Towards the end of last year, Pilgrim received an email from the British and Irish Group for the Study of Personality Disorder (BIGSPD), inviting him to speak at its 2025 conference. Although not familiar with the group, Pilgrim decided to accept the invitation, even rescheduling his holiday to make time for the event.
For the next few months, everything went as expected: Pilgrim prepared an outline for the paper to be presented at the conference, and eventually shared the presentation with the organisers as well. However, in late April of this year, Pilgrim received a message thanking him for the draft, and alerting him the Executive Committee had “had some communication coming in from BIGSPD from some of our lived experience members”.
Leaving aside the question of what other kinds of members the Group could have had; the email went on to ask Pilgrim to confirm his “twitter handle” because there had “been some concern expressed around the nature of some comments made” on the social media platform. The sender reassured Pilgrim that the organisers at BIGSPD “just need to consider how to respond to them should they surface”.
The email did not mention which “comments” were considered a potential liability, but merely mentioned that it was “largely around trans/gender debate”. This initial message did not imply that Pilgrim’s invitation to speak was at risk, but seemed to suggest that the Group just needed to prepare a PR strategy in case someone kicked up a fuss about his appearance at the conference.
However, a few days later the same person contacted Pilgrim again, alerting him to the fact that “the complaint was going to be discussed at an Executive Committee meeting”. Notably, the Committee does not seem to have intended to inform Pilgrim directly. Instead, Pilgrim’s contact, who was not going to be present at the meeting, independently decided to alert him “for transparency and to keep him aware of the situation”.
On 12 May, less than a month before the conference was set to begin, Pilgrim received another email, this time from the Co-Presidents of BIGSPD, Gary Lamph and Fiona Kuhn-Thomspon. After thanking him for agreeing to speak at the conference, and assuring him that the they had “spent a significant amount of time looking through your posts”, they informed Pilgrim that the Committee had “no other option than to withdraw our invitation”.
Specifically, the Co-Presidents were concerned about “a number of posts that we felt were antagonistic in tone and unprofessional in language and aggressively targeting a marginalised group”. There was still no reference to specific tweets or comments, nor even a mention of which “marginalised group” Pilgrim had allegedly targeted. Nevertheless, Pilgrim was to be banished. After all, as the Co-Presidents wrote, the views expressed in Pilgrim’s posts were “not in accordance with our publicised values and would not be conducive with our organisational responsibility to provide a safe space for all our delegates”.
Dr Pilgrim’s X profile seems unlikely to make anyone “unsafe”. Firstly, he does not command the influence of a JK Rowling, managing a modest 77 followers. Moreover, his feed consists almost entirely of reposts, the latest original tweet being made back in January, and that was just a link to a story about the “wall of secrecy around [Julian] Assange’s persecution”. This is noteworthy because the BIGSPD Committee specifically mentioned that his posts were “antagonistic in tone and unprofessional in language”, but since they’re all retweets, neither the tone nor the language was actually his.
Understandably surprised and displeased by the disinvitation, Pilgrim wrote back to the Co-Presidents, criticising them for not giving him “any opportunity to offer a defence against your unspecified charges made by an anonymous accuser or accusers, whose account and opinion I could neither challenge nor confirm”. Indeed, the record of the correspondence between Pilgrim and the conference organisers confirms that he was only given a chance “to talk it through more fully if that would help” after the decision to disinvite him had already been made. Nevertheless, Pilgrim closed his email with an invitation to “talk in a mutually respectful way about lessons learned, to support your laudable academic aspirations and organisational goals”.
This was met with a curt response, apologising “for the upset caused” and promising to “take your comments on board” and “reflect and review the points you have made”. For anyone unfamiliar with the language, this is email-speak for ‘bugger off’.
In the end, the conference went ahead without Pilgrim’s presence. The case remains concerning for several reasons: the Committee’s decision to issue a disinvitation without ever speaking to the accused; its refusal to identify the offending posts, despite multiple requests for them do so by both Pilgrim and CAF; and, most fundamentally, its willingness to disinvite an academic based on his expression – or rather, implied endorsement – of legitimate views which had nothing to do with the subject of the conference.
As noted in the very first alert to Pilgrim that trouble might be coming, the Committee was primarily focused on the “trans/gender debate”. Indeed, most of the reposts in Pilgrim’s feed are related to this debate. It certainly looks like the organisers decided to exclude a more-than-qualified academic from their conference because they did not agree with his views on this contentious but entirely unrelated subject.
This is about more than just a single researcher being unfairly treated. As Dr Pilgrim told CAF: “I’m more or less retired; I’ll be fine. I worry about the junior academics, who have a lot to lose.” If experienced researchers are being disinvited from conferences over their views, it is not difficult to imagine that their younger colleagues might shy away from controversial topics in order to shield their careers. This would be a great loss to all of British academia.
CAF has reached out to BIGSPD, Gary Lamph, and Fiona Kuhn-Thompson for comment, but none of them have responded.