A California therapist is cartoonishly devoted to progressive race and gender orthodoxies despite their lack of grounding in science. Naturally, Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) has just reappointed him to an important medical board.
John Sovec is a licensed marriage and family therapist (LMFT) currently practicing in Altadena. Since 2019, he has served on California’s Board of Behavioral Sciences, a state regulatory agency responsible for licensing and examining LMFTs, licensed clinical social workers, licensed professional clinical counselors, and licensed educational psychologists and for the enforcement of those groups’ professional standards.
Gov. Newsom’s press release makes note of Sovec’s years of private practice as an LMFT, his prior experience as an adjunct professor of postmodern studies, and his party affiliation (“Sovec is a Democrat”).
Unmentioned are Sovec’s radical pronouncements on transgenderism, natal care, and “whiteness,” declarations that ought to disqualify him from work overseeing evidence-based medical practitioners.
Among Sovec’s professional activities is a series of education modules offered by the LGBTQ+ nonprofit OutCare Health. These modules provide striking evidence of Sovec’s ideological commitment to wokeness.
In “Affirming OB/GYN Care for LGBTQ+ Patients – OutTalk,” for example, Sovec instructs participants to “imagine how dysphoric it might be for a trans man to walk into an OB/GYN clinic” and “see mostly females sitting there.” He further laments that “natal care … is one of the most gendered things” and that “having a baby is such a gendered social construct.”
Elsewhere, in “Access to Care for LGBTQ+ Communities of Color: Part III AAPI – OutTalk,” Sovec pledges, “as the host and a white male,” to “de-center [his] voice and … create room for our panelists of people with lived experience to learn and create together.”
Sovec’s LGBTQ+ Healthcare Directory page presents its own problems. There, Sovec promises patients “sophisticated psychological care from an openly queer therapist with lived experience.”
In addition to “clinical expertise” — a good thing — Sovec pledges to provide “embodied understanding” — modish quackery.
These gestures represent wokeness taken to an almost comic extreme. They have no place in a regulatory agency with significant authority over the practice of behavioral healthcare in the Golden State.
Nevertheless, Sovec’s renomination to the California Board of Behavioral Sciences is likely to be confirmed by the state senate, just as his first nomination was in 2019.
That bodes poorly for behavioral health practitioners who want to follow the science, not the politics.
