When Ethics Become Tyranny: How the ACA Code Strips Therapist Integrity - Part 3
The ACA’s ‘ethics’ code isn’t about ethics—it’s about control.
Julie’s gut churned as her new court-ordered client—a convicted rapist—smirked across the desk. A devout Christian, the last three years she’d dodged cases like this, but practicing in a small town she couldn’t avoid mandated clients forever. Now here he was, flaunting a halter top and flipping between a deep growl and a girly giggle, claiming a fresh gender identity to get himself into the women’s prison.
As a sexual assault survivor, Julie knew the havoc he’d wreak there. Autogynephile or sociopath, his intentions were clear. Julie wanted him back in the men’s facility, not humoring his “rapid onset gender dysphoria.” But the ACA Code of Ethics didn’t back her up. Her instincts, her integrity, and the female inmates’ safety are lost in the multicultural sauce.
Therapists nationwide face this dilemma: They must choose between good practice, personal convictions, and the American Counseling Association’s (ACA) muddled rules, with licenses on the line—while states lose lawsuits to transgender inmates. The ACA Code promises ethical guidance but shackles autonomy and integrity, offering no tools to weigh benefits against harms. Its multicultural lens trades reality for relativism, twisting autonomy, nonmaleficence, and beneficence into an incoherent agenda that turns counselors into pawns, not protectors.
Crippling Therapist Agency and Integrity
The ACA Code demands conformity at the expense of a therapist’s agency. Sections and directives that contradict each other limit therapists' ability to act as independent, reasoning professionals. Take Julie: Passages like A.11.b, which prohibits transferring clients based on conflicts with the therapist’s values and beliefs, pressure practitioners to tolerate and tacitly condone things they may abhor.
While it can be argued that a therapist should withhold judgment as a general guideline for good therapy, this is not always appropriate.
Worse, A.4.b commands her to “avoid imposing” her values—here, her Christian belief in two sexes. Her integrity, rooted in faith and experienced practice, is deemed a liability, not an asset.
This isn’t guidance; it’s coercion. The Code’s nondiscrimination clause (C.5) further binds her, implying that questioning a transgender identity could be labeled bias. Meanwhile, A.2.c’s multicultural mandate pressures her to accede to a trendy narrative, not challenge it.
Under this code, a therapist isn’t a partner in care but a servant to an orthodoxy. Her integrity is forfeited when she is forced to act against her deeply held beliefs and clinical experience.
No Metrics to Weigh Benefits Against Harms
To make matters worse, the Code doesn’t offer any way to assess potential benefits against potential harms. Consider the National Institutes of Health and their quantitative approaches, which encourage comparisons that look to systemic reviews of different treatment types. A similar approach can help in ethical decision-making.
Guidance on how to weigh the competing interests, as you would with a Multicriteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) model, would help separate the needs of the public, family members, good practice, or current law vs multicultural goals, providing some sense of priority. Therapists like Julie could navigate through conflicting directives with some assurance they are considering all sides appropriately.
Without a system, she’s stuck guessing, does she follow her clinical judgment that her client, a rapist, is faking gender dysphoria to get into a women’s prison or does she follow the popular orthodoxy and support his presumed culture?
While it’s not clear if the code intended to favor dereliction of duty under a mask of flexibility, making that argument isn’t hard.
Multicultural Worldview: Ignoring Reality, Prescribing Relativism
At its core, the Code’s multicultural worldview—enshrined in A.2.c, and the preamble’s “honoring diversity and embracing a multicultural approach”—rejects objective reality for a relativistic quagmire. Therapists like Julie must affirm a client’s “cultural context,” a vague directive that here means swallowing a progressive enclave’s gender ideology whole.
Her Christian faith, screaming that there are two sexes and that signing off on this request is releasing a predator in the hen house, is irrelevant. The Code’s emphasis on “uniqueness within social contexts” trumps common sense—like allowing rapists in a women’s facility—prescribing a relativism where feelings outweigh facts, and one marginalized person’s feelings trumps everyone else's.
This isn’t diversity; it’s denial. Section E.5.c’s caution against “historical prejudices” in diagnosis sounds fair until it silences Julie’s suspicion of rapid-onset gender dysphoria, a poorly supported concept at odds with both social contagion theory and known techniques for manipulation. The Code’s multiculturalism bends to cultural fads—here, affirmation as dogma—ignoring reality’s hard edges. The result? A therapist forced to nod at a violent criminal’s whim, not the female inmates’ safety—relativism run amok.
The Deeper Agenda
These flaws aren’t accidents; they reflect the ACA’s mission to “enhance society” (Purpose 5), a collectivist goal that prioritizes ideology over individuals. Social justice and multiculturalism aren’t neutral values—they’re directives, as Julie’s case proves. The Code supports this agenda, not client welfare, turning therapists into tools of a worldview that divides (e.g., race-based “antiracism” guidelines, 2021) and dictates (e.g., trans affirmation).
Like similar documents, sometimes the most revealing text is hidden in the glossary. While you can see some carefully shrouded red-flags in how the Code defines Multicultural Competence and Counseling, especially if you’ve read textbooks covering these topics, the entry for Social Justice really says it all:
Social Justice – the promotion of equity for all people and groups for the purpose of ending oppression and injustice affecting clients, students, counselors, families, communities, schools, workplaces, governments, and other social and institutional systems.
That’s the same ‘social justice’ listed as a core professional value at the top of the ACA Code of Ethics.
Conclusion
The ACA Code of Ethics promises ethical clarity but delivers shackles. It strips counselor agency with rigid rules, erodes his integrity by gagging his expertise, and offers no compass to weigh benefits against its harms. Its multicultural lens ignores common sense and psychology, prescribing a relativism that bows to trends over truth. Therapists aren’t empowered—they’re ensnared, their humanity sacrificed to an incoherent, ideologically driven mess. Until the Code changes or the state steps in, cases like Julie’s will multiply—ethics reduced to a hollow echo of what they should be.
Since all indicators point to the ACA doubling down on multiculturalism and social justice, and action by the state or federal government will be slow, it’s time to explore new options.
Further Reading
The ACAs Vision for the Future of Counseling
Help Keep This Conversation Going!
Share this post on social media–it costs nothing but helps a lot.
Want more perks? Subscribe to get full access to the article archive.
Become a Paid Subscriber to get video and chatroom access.
Support from readers like you keeps this project alive!
Diogenes in Exile is reader-supported. If you find value in this work, please consider becoming a pledging/paid subscriber, donating to my GiveSendgo, or buying Thought Criminal merch. I’m putting everything on the line to bring this to you because I think it is just that important, but if you can, I need your help to keep this mission alive.
Already a Premium subscriber? Share your thoughts in the chat room.
About
Diogenes in Exile began after I returned to grad school to pursue a Clinical Mental Health Counseling master’s degree at the University of Tennessee. What I encountered, however, was a program deeply entrenched in Critical Theories ideology. During my time there, I experienced significant resistance, particularly for my Buddhist practice, which was labeled as invalidating to other identities. After careful reflection, I chose to leave the program, believing the curriculum being taught would ultimately harm clients and lead to unethical practices in the field.
Since then, I’ve dedicated myself to investigating, writing, and speaking out about the troubling direction of psychology, higher education, and other institutions that seem to have lost their way. When I’m not working on these issues, you’ll find me in the garden, creating art, walking my dog, or guiding my kids toward adulthood.
You can also find my work at Minding the Campus
