Kindness begins with an encounter between imperfect people. It requires attentiveness to another person’s vulnerability, but also some awareness of one’s own partial understanding, mixed motives and capacity to cause harm. In this sense, kindness is not simply compliance with a prescribed rule. It is a moral, ethical and civic judgement made under conditions of human frailty.
In recent gender-identity discourse, however, “kindness” has increasingly appeared as an institutional instruction. Governments, schools, employers, politicians and campaigners have used “kind”, “kindness” and “be kind” when introducing expectations concerning names, pronouns, social transition, records, facilities and participation.
Many of these uses have an intelligible and humane purpose: to discourage bullying, humiliation and social exclusion. Yet a Jungian approach invites a more difficult question. What happens when an institution ceases to present kindness as a demanding personal responsibility and begins to use it as the public emblem of an approved social position?
At that point, kindness may become a quasi-ideological structure: a collection of propositions and prescribed behaviours through which people demonstrate allegiance to a moral order. The important distinction is then no longer between kindness and cruelty, but between kindness as relationship and kindness as conformity.
The Moral Act and the Moral Persona
In Jungian psychology, the persona is the socially adapted identity through which a person presents themselves to the world. It is necessary: no one can participate in society without roles, conventions and public identities. The danger comes when the person becomes identified with the mask and mistakes an approved social presentation for the whole personality.
The same idea can be applied cautiously to institutions. A school, company or public body may construct a persona of being compassionate, inclusive and kind. That persona may express genuine commitments. It may also protect the institution’s reputation, communicate membership of a preferred social order and conceal conflicts that its public vocabulary cannot easily acknowledge.
This gives “virtue signalling” a more precise meaning than simply accusing somebody of hypocrisy. The relevant question is not whether an individual secretly possesses bad motives. It is whether the performance of an approved virtue has become a social signal which:
- establishes the speaker’s moral standing;
- demonstrates allegiance to a group;
- identifies which propositions may be questioned;
- separates morally acceptable people from suspect outsiders;
- substitutes visible compliance for difficult personal judgement.
A Jungian analysis should apply this question to everyone involved, including critics of gender-identity policies. Opposition can also become a persona, confer status within a group and allow people to project their own aggression or fear onto an adversary. The point is not to decide in advance which side possesses the shadow. It is to ask what each side’s moral presentation excludes from consciousness.
The Shadow of Institutional Kindness
The Society of Analytical Psychology describes the Jungian shadow as qualities that have been denied, disowned or excluded from the conscious personality. Jung called confrontation with the shadow a “moral problem” requiring considerable effort. The shadow does not consist only of reprehensible impulses: it may contain realistic perceptions, appropriate reactions and neglected capacities.
An institutional identity organised around kindness will therefore have a shadow. It may contain anger, coercion, rivalry, fear of reputational damage, desire for control and intolerance of dissent. It may also contain reasonable questions that the institution’s public persona cannot accommodate without threatening its image of moral certainty.
The more completely an institution identifies itself with compassion, the more tempting it becomes to locate cruelty entirely outside itself. Critics can then be imagined not as fallible people with mixed reasons but as embodiments of hostility, ignorance or prejudice. Coercive actions taken against them may remain psychologically invisible because they are carried out in the name of protecting others.
This is where kindness may acquire an authoritarian effect without an institution ever declaring an authoritarian intention. The authority lies partly in the moral classification:
The approved response is kind. Resistance to it is unkind. A kind person will therefore comply.
Such reasoning bypasses the questions that law and ethics ordinarily require. Is the demand lawful? Is it proportionate? Does it distinguish courtesy from compelled belief? What other rights are involved? What evidence supports the policy? Could a person decline to affirm a proposition while continuing to treat others humanely?
If raising these questions is itself taken as evidence of unkindness, the moral vocabulary has become self-sealing.
From Reciprocal Virtue to Institutional Instruction
Kindness is not normally an operative legal test. Equality laws use defined concepts such as discrimination, harassment, proportionality and reasonable accommodation.
Canada’s Kindness Week Act 2021, for example, promotes acts of kindness and greater inclusiveness. It creates no specific gender-identity obligation. This is kindness used as civic encouragement rather than enforceable doctrine.
The position changes when kindness is attached to detailed expectations about identity and language.
England’s statutory relationships and sex education guidance, applicable until 31 August 2026, presents kindness as a character virtue. The same guidance requires teaching about relevant law and issues including gender identity. These requirements are adjacent, but the guidance does not make agreement with a particular theory of gender the legal definition of kindness.
Local materials sometimes join the concepts more directly. Brighton and Hove City Council’s Trans Inclusion Schools Toolkit describes responding to children with “kindness, compassion and support”. It also addresses names, pronouns, records, uniforms, facilities and participation.
A supportive interpretation is that a vulnerable child should not be humiliated or abandoned. A critical interpretation is that an incontestable moral virtue has been attached to practices about which there may be legitimate disagreement.
The central Jungian question is: does the adult genuinely encounter the particular child, including the child’s uncertainty and developing personality, or does the adult encounter an institutional image of what a gender-questioning child represents?
Kindness rooted in relationship would tolerate ambiguity. It would recognise that the child, parents, teachers and peers may all be anxious, imperfect and capable of misunderstanding. Ideological kindness is more likely to assign fixed roles: affirming ally, vulnerable identity, hostile sceptic and enlightened institution.
England’s revised statutory guidance is scheduled to take effect on 1 September 2026. It retains kindness as a general value but uses the Equality Act term “gender reassignment” more precisely, recognises public disagreement and advises caution concerning social transition. This may provide an opportunity to distinguish compassionate pastoral care from automatic allegiance to one interpretation of identity.
“Be Kind” as a Collective Formula
Ireland supplies the most direct institutional example. Its national anti-bullying procedures are named Bí Cineálta, meaning “Be Kind”. The procedures, in operation since September 2025, include bullying associated with gender identity.
The anti-bullying purpose is legitimate and important. Children should be protected from intimidation and degradation. But the title also frames the policy morally before questions about its application have been considered.
Who decides what “be kind” requires when children disagree about sex and gender? Does the instruction protect a child from personal abuse, or does it also regulate which beliefs another child may express? Are mistakes, questions, religious convictions, deliberate insults and persistent harassment distinguished from one another?
A repeated moral formula can act rather like a collective persona. Saying it demonstrates that one belongs to the community of acceptable people. Those who hesitate may appear morally deficient before their reasons have been heard.
New Zealand’s official School Leavers’ Toolkit tells pupils to respond to a disclosure of gender identity “with kindness” and to use the person’s pronouns.
This may be understood as ordinary consideration for somebody making a vulnerable disclosure. But it also links kindness with a prescribed linguistic response. The unresolved question is whether pronoun use is presented as a negotiable courtesy, a school rule, a claim about reality or a test of personal virtue.
When those different categories are fused, refusal can be interpreted simultaneously as discourtesy, misconduct, false belief and moral failure.
The Projection of Cruelty
Jungian psychology treats projection as the process by which people experience disowned aspects of themselves as qualities belonging principally to others. Projection does not mean that the other person possesses no objectionable qualities. It means that the intensity and certainty of the response may contain something belonging to the observer.
Gender-identity discourse frequently divides participants into protectors and aggressors. One side may view critics as animated by hatred or disgust. Critics may regard advocates as motivated by domination, narcissism or indifference to women and children. Both descriptions may occasionally contain truth. Neither should be elevated into a universal explanation.
Institutionalised kindness can intensify projection by giving one group possession of the morally positive role. If “we” are the kind people, coercion must originate with “them”. Restrictions imposed by our side are consequently reimagined as protection, education or safety.
This is one possible psychological foundation of virtue signalling. The signal does not merely say, “I support this policy.” It says, “I belong among the compassionate.” The corresponding shadow—aggression, uncertainty, self-interest or enjoyment of moral power—is displaced onto the dissenter.
A serious inquiry must nevertheless turn the same scrutiny upon gender-critical campaigning. A public identity built around courage, truth-telling or safeguarding can also conceal hostility, social rivalry or an unwillingness to recognise the vulnerability of gender-confused people.
Shadow analysis is not a weapon for diagnosing opponents. Its first demand is reflexive: what does my own moral certainty permit me not to see?
Courts and the Return of Complexity
British employment cases demonstrate why legal reasoning cannot be replaced by “be kind”. In Forstater v CGD Europe, the Employment Appeal Tribunal held that gender-critical beliefs could qualify for protection under the Equality Act. It also made clear that possessing a protected belief does not provide unlimited permission to mistreat others.
In Mackereth v Department for Work and Pensions, a doctor objected on religious grounds to using transgender service users’ preferred pronouns. His claims ultimately failed following an examination of workplace responsibilities and proportionality. The court did not establish a general doctrine that kindness requires pronoun use.
Higgs v Farmor’s School examined disciplinary action connected with social-media posts criticising the teaching of gender and sexuality. The questions concerned protected belief, its manifestation and the proportionality of the employer’s response.
In Wilkins v Defence Science and Technology Laboratory, an employment tribunal considered workplace conflict arising from statements about sex and gender. Such cases require attention to words, conduct, context, occupational duties and competing rights. “Kindness” cannot perform that analysis.
The forthcoming Supreme Court appeal in Bailey v Stonewall Equality Ltd, listed for March 2027, will provide a further test of responsibility for alleged detriment following complaints about gender-critical speech. Its outcome should not be presumed.
From a Jungian perspective, courts can serve a psychologically valuable function when they interrupt collective moral simplification. They oblige institutions to distinguish emotional disapproval from unlawful conduct and public virtue from legal duty. Courts are not free from collective assumptions, but formal reasoning at least requires competing claims to be articulated.
Kindness and the Reality of Sex
The Equality Act 2010 distinguishes sex, gender reassignment and religion or belief. “Gender identity”, although common in policy discourse, is not the statutory name of a UK protected characteristic. In For Women Scotland in 2025, the Supreme Court held that the terms “sex”, “woman” and “man” in the Act refer to biological sex. The judgment did not abolish protections against gender-reassignment discrimination.
The EHRC’s revised services, public functions and associations code came into force on 5 August 2026. It uses the defined Equality Act categories and provides statutory guidance that courts and tribunals must consider where relevant. This precision matters psychologically as well as legally. Dogmatic thinking tends to compress distinctions. Individual kindness, professional courtesy, compelled speech, legal protection, empirical claims and institutional policy can be presented as though they were one indivisible moral commitment. They are not.
A person may recognise the distress or vulnerability of a gender-nonconforming individual while questioning a policy. Someone may use a requested name from personal consideration without believing that identity determines sex. Another may defend sex-based provision without wishing humiliation or exclusion upon anyone.
The capacity to hold these tensions is closer to Jungian individuation than compulsory collective certainty. Individuation involves differentiation from the social persona and from the suggestive force of collective images. It asks the individual to assume responsibility for judgement instead of borrowing moral identity from a group.
Kindness as Relationship
Kindness grounded in an awareness of human frailty begins from a different position. It does not divide the encounter into a morally complete protector and a morally defective opponent. It recognises that everyone involved may be frightened, defensive, mistaken, wounded or seeking belonging.
This form of kindness does not require moral relativism. Boundaries can still be set. Bullying can be prohibited. Discrimination can be remedied. Institutions can require professional behaviour. But relational kindness should possess several characteristics:
- It remains reciprocal, including towards people who dissent.
- It distinguishes the dignity of a person from agreement with every proposition that person advances.
- It allows questions to be asked without treating inquiry as evidence of hatred.
- It acknowledges conflicts rather than concealing them beneath therapeutic language.
- It is attentive to motives, circumstances and consequences.
- It recognises the possibility of shadow and projection within every group.
- It leaves room for forgiveness, revision and human error.
- It does not make public demonstrations of virtue a substitute for personal conduct.
Rapport is built partly through the recognition that neither person is morally invulnerable. It depends upon listening, negotiation, humour, restraint and the ability to survive misunderstanding. A prescribed vocabulary may sometimes assist that process, but it cannot manufacture it.
Questions for Public Institutions
The question is not whether governments and schools should encourage kindness. It is whether kindness remains a moral relationship once an institution defines its required content.
The following questions deserve to be asked:
- Who has the authority to decide what kindness requires?
- Is kindness being used to protect individuals from abuse, or to protect an ideology from scrutiny?
- Does “be kind” invite moral reflection, or demand allegiance to an approved position?
- Is kindness expected reciprocally, or principally from those who question policy?
- When does courtesy become affirmation of a disputed proposition?
- Are people judged according to their conduct, or according to their membership of an approved moral category?
- Does the institution recognise aggression and coercion within its own practices?
- Which reasonable perceptions have been consigned to the institutional shadow?
- Can a person change their mind without being expelled from the moral community?
- Are safeguarding, sex-based rights, religious belief and freedom of expression considered substantive concerns or symptoms of unkindness?
- Does the policy cultivate individual ethical judgement, or reward visible compliance?
- What happens when kindness to one person produces an injustice towards another?
- Can institutions admit uncertainty without fearing the loss of moral authority?
The deepest danger is not kindness itself. It is the inflation of kindness into an identity of moral innocence.
Once an institution imagines that it represents kindness, opposition can be interpreted as proof of cruelty. Its own exercise of power becomes difficult to recognise because that power is experienced as benevolence. Human frailty is assigned to the dissenter, while the institution presents itself as psychologically and morally complete.
A Jungian approach challenges this division. No person, movement or institution stands outside the shadow. Kindness worthy of the name must therefore include self-questioning, reciprocity and an awareness of the damage that can be done by people convinced of their own virtue.
The alternative to authoritarian kindness is not indifference. It is a more demanding kindness: one that protects vulnerable people without demanding ideological conformity; permits disagreement without encouraging humiliation; and recognises that civic relationships are built not by displays of moral purity, but by imperfect people learning how to remain in relationship with one another.
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