Culture Tranny News Megathread - Hot tranny newds

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/ar...school-attack-caught-camera-says-bullied.html

A transgender girl accused of assaulting two students at a Texas high school alleges that she was being bullied and was merely fighting back

Shocking video shows a student identified by police as Travez Perry violently punching, kicking and stomping on a girl in the hallway of Tomball High School.

The female student was transported to the hospital along with a male student, whom Perry allegedly kicked in the face and knocked unconscious.

According to the police report, Perry - who goes by 'Millie' - told officers that the victim has been bullying her and had posted a photo of her on social media with a negative comment.

One Tomball High School parent whose daughter knows Perry said that the 18-year-old had been the target of a death threat.

'From what my daughter has said that the girl that was the bully had posted a picture of Millie saying people like this should die,' the mother, who asked not to be identified by name, told DailyMail.com.

When Perry appeared in court on assault charges, her attorney told a judge that the teen has been undergoing a difficult transition from male to female and that: 'There's more to this story than meets the eye.'

Perry is currently out on bond, according to authorities.

The video of the altercation sparked a widespread debate on social media as some claim Perry was justified in standing up to her alleged bullies and others condemn her use of violence.

The mother who spoke with DailyMail.com has been one of Millie's most ardent defenders on Facebook.

'I do not condone violence at all. But situations like this show that people now a days, not just kids, think they can post what they want. Or say what they want without thinking of who they are hurting,' she said.

'Nobody knows what Millie has gone through, and this could have just been a final straw for her. That is all speculation of course because I don't personally know her or her family, but as a parent and someone who is part of the LGBTQ community this girl needs help and support, not grown men online talking about her private parts and shaming and mocking her.'

One Facebook commenter summed up the views of many, writing: 'This was brutal, and severe! I was bullied for years and never attacked anyone!'

Multiple commenters rejected the gender transition defense and classified the attack as a male senselessly beating a female.

One woman wrote on Facebook: 'This person will get off because they're transitioning. This is an animal. She kicked, and stomped, and beat...not okay. Bullying is not acceptable, but kicking someone in the head. Punishment doesn't fit the crime.'

FB https://www.facebook.com/travez.perry http://archive.is/mnEmm

 

[squirreltail]

He goes by Rachel. Seems like he didn't legally change his name since the cops are calling him "Darren", but it's not unusual for trannies not to bother.

It's sometimes because they're that low effort, but some seem to like to use institutions calling them by their legal name to prove how "oppressed" they are. The political side of their "movement" has also used the name issue as a way to break down institutional record keeping. For example, there are now banks and credit card companies that let trannies use fake names on their accounts and don't do the usual security checks of asking why a "female" customer is calling in sounding like a man. I'm not sure what their objective is there except to fuck over others for their own comfort, but it seems that's like 99 percent of trannies' motivation on literally any issue. We all get to suffer so they stop questioning their shitty life choices.

Does this mean I can just use stolen credit cards, and say "my id doesn't match because trans"? hahahaha

 

[OttoWest]

Does this mean I can just use stolen credit cards, and say "my id doesn't match because trans"? hahahaha

Essentially, yes. I posted an article about this development (in this thread no less) about 3-4 years ago and at the time most of us were baffled that such a ridiculous violation of the usual anti-fraud safeguards were being waived so that some 50 year old AGP could buy pantries.

But apparently it’s a thing now.

 

[Mariposa2.0 LTE]

Reduxx dug up a couple of Mr. Glines' photos. He's a stout fellow.

Wayback

From normal looking attractive guy to overweight autistic sex offender. Path sounds right for most troons.

 

[Cloacan]

Mom fuming as daughter, 13, gets chest binder at school — and is urged not to tell parents

A 13-year-old Maine girl was given a chest binder, a gender-transitioning device, by a school social worker.

nypost.com

Mom fuming as daughter, 13, gets chest binder at school — and is urged not to tell parents​

Public School Worker Who Began Secret Gender Transition on 13-Year-Old Maine Girl Has Conditional License - The Maine Wire

A conditionally licensed public school social worker in Maine coached a 13-year-old girl into a gender transition without telling her parents.

www.themainewire.com

Great Salt Bay Community School Social Worker Samuel Roy

Lavigne learned from her daughter that Roy had encouraged her to conceal the binder from her parents, she said. She had no idea school staff were using masculine pronouns for her daughter.

Although Lavigne knew that her daughter was seeing a social worker through the school, she did not know that her daughter was reassigned to Roy in October. She has never seen or talked to Roy.

Less than two weeks after meeting her daughter, and just a few weeks after the girl turned 13, Roy supplied the chest binder, Lavigne said.

26 years old, yet looks 14. I assume ftm.

The Maine Wire has attempted to contact every school board member as well as district superintendent Lynsey Johnston with multiple phone calls and emails.

None of them have responded.

 

[teriyakiburns]

Mom fuming as daughter, 13, gets chest binder at school — and is urged not to tell parents

But don't call it grooming. That's literal genocide.

 

[frap]

THE TRANS GENOCIDE HAS BEGUN ON TERF ISLAND (although the media aren't reporting it that way).

16 year old 'girl' stabbed to death in Cheshire. L A

Their TikTok is entirely self-bimbofication shorts.
Instagram 1

Instagram 2

 

[BunchofMunch]

Does this mean I can just use stolen credit cards, and say "my id doesn't match because trans"? hahahaha

This needs to become a thing, truly hitting where it hurts should open some eyes I think. (Yeah yeah, I'll get rainbows for this I guess, but money is what most people and all government truly care about in the end)

 

[Geranium]

The Herald: Sandyford gender identity clinic closed to new patients

(www.heraldscotland.com, archive.is)

It appears this is for funding reasons. It remains to be seen if NHS Scotland will carry out the change in direction that NHS England is heading for (closing down the hormones & puberty blockers GIDS clinic in favour of psychotherapy-focused regional services).

 

[870EVO]

https://twitter.com/FreelyAshley92/status/1625518584293105672

 

[Jesus Goldstein]

Been seeing this on Twitter all day and haven’t seen it mentioned here yet; Arkansas chud politician asks troon doctor if he still has a dick; Twitter meltdowns ensue:

An Arkansas Republican lawmaker has come under fire for asking a transgender doctor an extremely personal question. Dr. Gwendolyn Herzig was testifying against a proposed bill that would allow minors who suffer ill-effects of pharmaceutical or surgical sex changes to hold their doctor liable when Sen. Matt McKee asked Herzig "do you have a penis?"

https://thepostmillennial.com/gop-l...-child-sex-changes-asks-if-doctor-has-a-penis

(sorry if already posted - I did a half-assed search and couldn’t find any mention of it)

 

[Positron]

An Arkansas Republican lawmaker has come under fire for asking a transgender doctor an extremely personal question. Dr. Gwendolyn Herzig was testifying against a proposed bill that would allow minors who suffer ill-effects of pharmaceutical or surgical sex changes to hold their doctor liable when Sen. Matt McKee asked Herzig "do you have a penis?"

Big Al melted down at the video, and plenty of trannies followed suit.

 

[OttoWest]

Been seeing this on Twitter all day and haven’t seen it mentioned here yet; Arkansas chud politician asks troon doctor if he still has a dick; Twitter meltdowns ensue:

An Arkansas Republican lawmaker has come under fire for asking a transgender doctor an extremely personal question. Dr. Gwendolyn Herzig was testifying against a proposed bill that would allow minors who suffer ill-effects of pharmaceutical or surgical sex changes to hold their doctor liable when Sen. Matt McKee asked Herzig "do you have a penis?"

https://thepostmillennial.com/gop-l...-child-sex-changes-asks-if-doctor-has-a-penis

(sorry if already posted - I did a half-assed search and couldn’t find any mention of it)

Gwendolyn Paige Herzig
Aka Gene Peter Dalton Herzig

Gene has attempted to halt trolls by posting his before and after pics right on his pharmacy’s website as well as showing off his deadname diploma.


Transitioned in 2020 after he “hit the wall” (I’m guessing dumped by a woman). Another boring AGP.

 

[Geranium]

Another story about the pediatric gender clinic at Washington University in St Louis, where whistleblower Jamie Reed worked.

Emails show doctors from St Louis transgender clinic telling teachers to 'affirm' fifth graders | Daily Mail Online (archive)

EXCLUSIVE: Doctors from St Louis transgender clinic told teachers to 'affirm' an entire group of fifth graders - despite fears they were being influenced by their friends​

• The teacher contacted staff in October 2021 with concerns about a group
• They said multiple children came out as trans after a classmate did
• The clinic is under investigation after a bombshell whistleblower report

(Text of the article below; check out the actual article because it includes screenshots of the actual emails.)

Spoiler: Text

Doctors from the St. Louis gender clinic now under investigation following bombshell whistleblower claims advised teachers to 'affirm' an entire group of fifth graders, emails

The Washington University Transgender Center at the St. Louis Children's Hospital was shamed last week by whistleblower Jamie Reed, a former employee who wrote a bombshell article for The Free Press describing the 'medically and morally appalling' scenario at-play.

Her claims sparked two investigations - one by the Missouri AG's office, and another by the office of Senator Josh Howley.

Now, DailyMail.com can reveal the clinic's emails to a concerned elementary school teacher from Parkway Schools, a district on the outskirts of St. Louis.

The teacher contacted doctors in October 2021 seeking help when a group of fifth graders - girls aged 10 or 11 - claimed they were all transgender.

'I wondered if I can ask you a quick question about a situation we're experiencing at one of our elementary schools.

'The short story is that one of the students in the 5th-grade class is coming out as Trans.

'She has told several of her friends and now several of them are also saying they are Trans.

'We do not want to discourage them if this is the case, but we're also suspecting there could be other reasons they are doing this than that this is actually the case

'Is this common? Are there resources for handling this type of situation? Again, we do not want to discourage kids if this is actually the case, but we also do not want to diminish the actual experience of trans folks.'

In response, a doctor said: 'There are schools of thought that have documented this as an issue of significance, in that a student coming out as transgender, becomes a 'contagion'.

'This language isn't affirming and the few studies on phenomenon are, in my personal and professional opinion, invalid.'

The doctor then suggested that all of the girls were genuinely transgender, and that it simply took their friend to realize it for them to as well.

'The other end of the spectrum is that this is normal in that when one person realizes who they are and shares it, others realize they are similar.

'I believe there is a middle ground where we allow for some nuance. For younger folks and some adults too, it is easy to latch on to a new concept or idea and make it yours.'

The doctor then compared it to 'fad diets, workout types and marketing plans and even ADHD,' and appeared to admit that it was not always genuine.

'I have seen this happen with mental health diagnoses as well ("You have ADHD? Me too!")

'However, it may still be a valid experience, and for some, it may be genuine exploration of gender.

'I will try to find some resources for you, after filtering through resources that may invalidate transgender folks.

'In general, I'd recommend as much support and discussion as possible around their gender exploration.'

In a follow up email, the doctor quoted Dr. Sarah Garwood, saying: 'The best we can do is affirm, validate and allow for exploration.'

She also said 'no harm' would be done affirming a child who decided they were not trans.

'If in a few weeks or months, a student wants to go by their legal name and pronouns that match their sex assigned at birth, no harm was really done in affirming them before.'

Neither the teacher nor the doctor who advised them can be identified.

The emails were released as the result of a Freedom of Information request filed by Parents Defending Education.

Nicki Neily, the president and founder of the group, told DailyMail.com: 'The utter lack of curiosity about the underlying causes of such a trend among ten-year old children by medical professionals is immoral at best and an abdication of professional responsibility at worst.

'These children and their families have been let down, both by the school and the hospital - so it's little wonder that trust in these institutions have declined precipitously over the past few years.'

The clinic is now under investigation from the Missouri Attorney General's Office, and Senator Josh Howley's office.

None of its staff members have commented on the controversy.

Jamie Reed worked at The Washington University Transgender Center at St. Louis Children's Hospital and was responsible for patient intake between 2018 and November 2022.

In an article for The Free Press, she says she took the job with the intention of 'saving' trans kids, but that she believes what is happening amounts to 'permanent harm' on young, vulnerable children.

'The doctors I worked alongside at the Transgender Center said frequently about the treatment of our patients: “We are building the plane while we are flying it.”

'No one should be a passenger on that kind of aircraft,' she wrote.

 

[870EVO]

https://twitter.com/libsoftiktok/status/1626416529750347776

 

[Trianon]

@Geranium Whew, lads.

In response, a doctor said: 'There are schools of thought that have documented this as an issue of significance, in that a student coming out as transgender, becomes a 'contagion'.

'This language isn't affirming and the few studies on phenomenon are, in my personal and professional opinion, invalid.'

The doctor then suggested that all of the girls were genuinely transgender, and that it simply took their friend to realize it for them to as well.

Downplaying the idea of a "contagion," and claiming that kids can suddenly "realize" what is really happening to them when they didn't express anything close before, is very similar to the recovered memories fad that led to the Satanic Panic. I really find it ironic when people say the right-wing response is a Satanic Panic 2.0, because in truth, the panic couldn't have happened the way it did, with the horrific impacts it had on families, if doctors, therapists, and police weren't implanting ideas of abuse in kids who had never experienced it. It would have been laughed at if there wasn't a medical "hook" that convinced people they were dealing with a real phenomenon.

 

[AfghanBlue]

@Geranium Whew, lads.



Downplaying the idea of a "contagion," and claiming that kids can suddenly "realize" what is really happening to them when they didn't express anything close before, is very similar to the recovered memories fad that led to the Satanic Panic. I really find it ironic when people say the right-wing response is a Satanic Panic 2.0, because in truth, the panic couldn't have happened the way it did, with the horrific impacts it had on families, if doctors, therapists, and police weren't implanting ideas of abuse in kids who had never experienced it. It would have been laughed at if there wasn't a medical "hook" that convinced people they were dealing with a real phenomenon.

and this time around, kids really are having their bodies cut up for weird sexual reasons!

 

[Bland Crumbs]

@Geranium Whew, lads.



Downplaying the idea of a "contagion," and claiming that kids can suddenly "realize" what is really happening to them when they didn't express anything close before, is very similar to the recovered memories fad that led to the Satanic Panic. I really find it ironic when people say the right-wing response is a Satanic Panic 2.0, because in truth, the panic couldn't have happened the way it did, with the horrific impacts it had on families, if doctors, therapists, and police weren't implanting ideas of abuse in kids who had never experienced it. It would have been laughed at if there wasn't a medical "hook" that convinced people they were dealing with a real phenomenon.

The reality of how much of a negative impact psychiatry has had on society needs to be addressed. The entire industry is full of complete or borderline retards clinging to anything they can to make a living.

Hey here is some cocaine! You'll be fine!
Hey your daughter is too high spirited? Lemme jam this ice pick into her brain and jiggle it around.
Hey you son has behavioral problems? We have these electrodes and electricity is magic so let's nuke his eggs!
Hey your kids feel weird? They are probably just repressing memories of being tormented by satan worshippers!
Hey your kids are acting up? Here is some meth for them!

How many times does this cycle have to happen?

 

[870EVO]

https://twitter.com/jordanbpeterson/status/1627571297940119553

 

[Geranium]

Here's a round-up of reviews of Time to Think by Hannah Barnes, a new book about the GIDS children's gender clinic in the UK.

Most recent first. If people want a fairly detailed overview, maybe go straight to The Australian's review, it appears to be the longest (though I've not yet read it.)

Irish Independent, by Stella O'Malley​

February 19 2023, A modern medical scandal: What really went wrong at the UK’s controversial Tavistock gender clinic? - Independent.ie (archive)

The journalist Hannah Barnes first learnt about issues at the Gender Identity Development Services (Gids) in the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust in London when she was a journalist reporting on the issue for Newsnight at the BBC.

As she delved into the details, she felt compelled to write Time to Think: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Tavistock’s Gender Service for Children, an exposé that brings us deep inside the murky world of psychologists who fast-tracked thousands of children onto a potentially unnecessary medicalised pathway.

Barnes opens the book with a gripping timeline of events that details a series of raised concerns, complaints, court cases and missed opportunities.

There was a fundamental flaw within the service as it was never clarified whether clinicians should operate from the basis of a belief in gender identity theory, which argues that adults should facilitate the transition of every child who wants it, no matter what age, or if they should take a developmental model of understanding, where medical transition is just one of many ways to alleviate gender-related distress.

The first concerns about Gids were raised by the psychoanalyst Sue Evans in 2005, however the subsequent report was filed and ignored for 15 years.

Then, roughly ten years ago, the demographics suddenly changed and all across the world there came a sudden, unexplained and unprecedented influx of teenage girls presenting with gender-related distress.

As the numbers grew, Gids became a major source of income for the Tavistock and, from initially being a tiny outlier operating out of not much more than a broom cupboard, by 2020-2021, combined adult and child gender services accounted for a quarter of the Tavistock’s income. One clinician described how it was run more like “a tech start-up” than a clinical care centre.

Considerable pressure was exerted on Gids by lobby groups such as Mermaids, which was quick to level accusations of ‘transphobia’ whenever reluctance was shown.

Ultimately, over a thousand children were prescribed puberty blockers. Puberty blockers stop all sexual development in a growing child and promise, as the title of the book suggests, “time to think”. However this is experimental treatment and the first results of the research carried out at Gids showed that puberty blockers demonstrated a statistically significant increase in statements about self-harm and suicidal ideation, and an increase in behavioural and emotional problems for natal girls.

Moreover at least 98pc of children on puberty blockers move on to cross-sex hormones. Critics believe that blockers effectively ‘lock in’ children to a medicalised identity. In one case study, ‘Harriet’ shows how she experienced a “honeymoon period” when she first came out as trans.

It is often noted that a diagnosis of gender dysphoria can inappropriately overshadow all other issues and, even though Harriet was self-harming, experiencing suicidal thoughts and had a difficult relationship with food, her referral to the Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (Camhs) was dismissed in favour of her appointment at Gids.

Although she didn’t ask for them, Harriet was offered puberty blockers at the first appointment, and then twice more across five appointments.

At 18 years old, she was approved for testosterone at her first appointment in the adult services. Her voice deepened and hair started to grow on her jaw and elsewhere. She underwent a double mastectomy aged 19. Then some doubts crept in. As is often the case for females who take testosterone, sex was painful and she became prone to urinary infections.

Harriet came to realise she was a female and a lesbian.

She subsequently stopped taking testosterone and detransitioned. She now has to shave daily and has a permanently deep voice. She describes the experience like “waking up from a nightmare or regaining control of my body after someone else took over”.

Barnes devotes an entire chapter to Gids in Ireland. In 2012, Gids first started seeing Irish children as part of the ‘Treatment Abroad Scheme’. The numbers quickly catapulted and it was decided to stop flying children over to London; instead, from 2015, Gids ran monthly clinics in Crumlin Children’s Hospital. Curiously, the scheme continues to fund this service.

The waiting lists in both Ireland and the UK became unconscionably long as lobby groups promoted the idea that only gender specialists could work with gender-distressed children. Gids clinicians became overwhelmed, with some complaining about a caseload of as many as 140 patients each.

A series of raised concerns, meetings, formal and informal complaints were summarily dismissed. Sonia Appleby, child safeguarding lead at the Tavistock, ended up lodging a whistle-blowing claim against Gids which she subsequently won in November 2021.

In August 2018, an extensive report submitted by Dr David Bell, consultant psychiatrist at the Tavistock, branded Gids “not fit for purpose”. By then, some children were being prescribed puberty blockers within the first 20 minutes of their first session.

Many staff left. In July 2019, the psychologist Dr Kirsty Entwistle left the service by publishing a 2,700- word open letter to Gids director Polly Carmichael expressing concerns about traumatised, deprived, and sexually or physically abused children being inappropriately referred for puberty-blocking treatment.

Finally, in July 2022, 17 years after the first whistle was blown, the NHS announced that Gids would be closed by spring 2023 and replaced by regional centres with a greater focus on mental health. Barnes notes that Sweden, Finland and France have also recently concluded that the perceived benefits of puberty blockers do not outweigh the risks.

The situation in Ireland replicates the whistle-blowing that happened at the Tavistock. Barnes describes how clinicians at the adult National Gender Service first raised concerns in 2018 about the “clearly mentally unwell” patients transferring from the children’s services in Crumlin to the adult services in Loughlinstown.

In 2019, Dr Paul Moran and Professor Donal O’Shea, both highly experienced clinicians who have helped adults medically transition for over two decades, conducted an audit of 18 referrals of Gids patients that offered accounts of young people presenting with self-harming behaviour, depression, suicidality, eating disorders, traumatic life circumstances, and a disproportionately high number of people with autism.

Dr Moran expressed his concern to Crumlin that the Gids service was “unsafe and substandard” and called for the contract to be “terminated with immediate effect”. Crumlin is currently “exploring the availability of the service in other EU jurisdictions”, however according to Prof O’Shea, the current situation is “awful” and he blames “institutional laziness”.

Barnes’s compelling account of the downfall of Gids demonstrates how pressure groups can lead well-meaning clinicians to make increasingly ill-advised decisions. Time to Think is a devastating and shocking read, a salutary tale that shows how medical scandals can happen in plain sight and complaints are ignored when nobody is quite sure about their actual position on the issue.

The Observer, by Rachel Cooke​

February 19 2023, Time to Think by Hannah Barnes review – what went wrong at Gids? | Society books | The Guardian (archive)

Hannah Barnes’s book about the rise and calamitous fall of the Gender Identity Development Service for children (Gids), a nationally commissioned unit at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust in north London, is the result of intensive work, carried out across several years. A journalist at the BBC’s Newsnight, Barnes has based her account on more than 100 hours of interviews with Gids’ clinicians, former patients, and other experts, many of whom are quoted by name. It comes with 59 pages of notes, plentiful well-scrutinised statistics, and it is scrupulous and fair-minded. Several of her interviewees say they are happy either with the treatment they received at Gids, or with its practices – and she, in turn, is content to let them speak.

Such a book cannot easily be dismissed. To do so, a person would not only have to be wilfully ignorant, they would also – to use the popular language of the day – need to be appallingly unkind. This is the story of the hurt caused to potentially hundreds of children since 2011, and perhaps before that. To shrug in the face of that story – to refuse to listen to the young transgender people whose treatment caused, among other things, severe depression, sexual dysfunction, osteoporosis and stunted growth, and whose many other problems were simply ignored – requires a callousness that would be far beyond my imagination were it not for the fact that, thanks to social media, I already know such stony-heartedness to be out there.

Gids, which opened in 1989, was established to provide talking therapies to young people who were questioning their gender identity (the Tavistock, under the aegis of which it operated from 1994, is a mental health trust). But the trigger for Barnes’s interest in the unit has its beginnings in 2005, when concerns were first raised by staff over the growing number of patient referrals to endocrinologists who would prescribe hormone blockers designed to delay puberty. Such medication was recommended only in the case of children aged 16 or over. By 2011, however, Barnes contends, it appeared to be the clinic’s raison d’etre. In that year, a child of 12 was on blockers. By 2016, a 10-year-old was taking them.

Clinicians at Gids insisted the effects of these drugs were reversible; that taking them would reduce the distress experienced by gender dysphoric children; and that there was no causality between starting hormone blockers and going on to take cross-sex hormones (the latter are taken by adults who want fully to transition). Unfortunately, none of these things were true. Such drugs do have severe side effects, and while the causality between blockers and cross-sex hormones cannot be proven – all the studies into them have been designed without a control group – 98% of children who take the first go on to take the latter. Most seriously of all, as Gids’ own research suggested, they do not appear to lead to any improvement in children’s psychological wellbeing.

So why did they continue to be prescribed? As referrals to Gids grew rapidly – in 2009, it had 97; by 2020, this figure was 2,500 – so did pressure on the service. Barnes found that the clinic – which employed an unusually high number of junior staff, to whom it offered no real training – no longer had much time for the psychological work (the talking therapies) of old. But something else was happening, too. Trans charities such as Mermaids were closely – too closely – involved with Gids. Such organisations vociferously encouraged the swift prescription of drugs. This now began to happen, on occasion, after only two consultations. Once a child was on blockers, they were rarely offered follow-up appointments. Gids did not keep in touch with its patients in the long term, or keep reliable data on outcomes.

A lot of this is already known, thanks largely to a number of whistleblowers. Last February, the paediatrician Dr Hilary Cass, commissioned by the NHS, issued a highly critical interim report into the service; in July, it was announced that Gids would close in 2023. But a lot of what Barnes tells us in Time to Think is far more disturbing than anything I’ve read before. Again and again, we watch as a child’s background, however disordered, and her mental health, however fragile, are ignored by teams now interested only in gender.

The statistics are horrifying. Less than 2% of children in the UK have an autism spectrum disorder; at Gids, more than a third of referrals presented with autistic traits. Clinicians also saw high numbers of children who had been sexually abused. But for the reader, it is the stories that Barnes recounts of individuals that speak loudest. The mother of one boy whose OCD was so severe he would leave his bedroom only to shower (he did this five times a day) suspected that his notions about gender had little to do with his distress. However, from the moment he was referred to the Tavistock, he was treated as if he were female and promised an endocrinology appointment. Her son, having finally rejected the treatment he was offered by Gids, now lives as a gay man.

As Barnes makes perfectly clear, this isn’t a culture war story. This is a medical scandal, the full consequences of which may only be understood in many years’ time. Among her interviewees is Dr Paul Moran, a consultant psychiatrist who now works in Ireland. A long career in gender medicine has taught Moran that, for some adults, transition can be a “fantastic thing”. Yet in 2019, he called for Gids’ assessments of Irish children (the country does not have its own clinic for young people) to be immediately terminated, so convinced was he that its processes were “unsafe”. The be-kind brigade might also like to consider the role money played in the rise of Gids. By 2020-21, the clinic accounted for a quarter of the trust’s income.

But this isn’t to say that ideology wasn’t also in the air. Another of Barnes’s interviewees is Dr Kirsty Entwistle, an experienced clinical psychologist. When she got a job at Gids’ Leeds outpost, she told her new colleagues she didn’t have a gender identity. “I’m just female,” she said. This, she was informed, was transphobic. Barnes is rightly reluctant to ascribe the Gids culture primarily to ideology, but nevertheless, many of the clinicians she interviewed used the same word to describe it: mad.

And who can blame them? After more than 370 pages, I began to feel half mad myself. At times, the world Barnes describes, with its genitalia fashioned from colons and its fierce culture of omertà, feels like some dystopian novel. But it isn’t, of course. It really happened, and she has worked bravely and unstintingly to expose it. This is what journalism is for.

Private Eye​

February 17 2023 (No 1592)

Agenda clinic​

Time To Think​

Hannah Barnes
(Swift Press, £20)

Scratch the surface of a medical scandal, and you'll often find pure intentions — and pure arrogance. Doctor knows best. This spring, England’s child gender clinic will close, with its signature treatment model largely discredited. That clinic is the Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) at the Tavistock and Portman Clinic in north London, and that treatment is a class of drugs known as “puberty blockers.”

These were originally prescribed for children going through precocious puberty; but from 2011 they started to be used at GIDS as a much-hyped “pause button” on sexual development for gender non-conforming kids. The drugs, it was claimed, would give them “time to think”.

Sadly, they did no such thing — and so that phrase gives former Newsnight reporter Hannah Barnes’s sober, damning book its title. In practice, virtually everyone on blockers progressed to cross-sex hormones, and many went on to surgical interventions too. The blockers became so mythologised by activists and parents as the answer to children’s very real unhappiness that they took the place of careful, exploratory therapy into the other issues — trauma, autism, eating disorders or internalised homophobia — suffered by many GIDS patients.

In Barnes’s account, the other group of people with no “time to think” were the doctors at GIDS, who were wholly unprepared to deal with the explosion in case numbers at the clinic. In 2009, there were 50 referrals; by 2020, there were 2,283. And something else had changed: this new cohort of patients was much more likely to be female, and much more likely to have suddenly developed discomfort with their gender, rather than reporting it consistently from childhood.

As the waiting list ballooned, doctors doled out more and more referrals for puberty blockers, which were then supplied by outside endocrinologists. Sometimes, the clinic saw youngsters just twice before signing off on their lifelong medicalisation.

If you’ve been following the debates over “trans kids” — a loaded phrase, since no one can reliably distinguish between, say, a future butch lesbian and trans boy — then the outline of Barnes’s story will be very familiar. But it is still a shock to be hit with it all at once. Yes, many patients were happy with their transition — Barnes speaks to youngsters with a range of experiences at the clinic — but how did puberty blockers come to be seen as so obviously lifesaving that even questioning the extent of their use was denounced as transphobia?

One of Barnes’s themes is quite how often inconvenient facts failed to make the GIDS leadership reconsider. A 2006 report described blockers as “untested and unresearched”, but that wasn’t enough to slow the clinic down. Whistleblower after whistleblower contacted David Bell, the staff representative on the board of governors, but the scorching report he produced was treated as a sign of disloyalty rather than personal integrity.

As the questions grew, the clinic reassured sceptics that the treatments worked, but never bothered to collect the data to back that up. (In 2021, the Care Quality Commission rated GIDS “inadequate”.)

In 2016, Barnes records, one of Britain’s most prominent experts in surgical vaginoplasty, James Bellringer, warned the clinic that boys who did not go through male puberty before starting on female hormones lacked enough genital tissue for him to work with. Instead, he had to use a portion of the colon to construct a vagina, which was prone to complications, could leak muscus and might cause an “unwanted smell”. Bellringer has devoted his career to helping trans women feel happy with their bodies. Despite this, his warning was still disregarded — as was the revelation by a leading doctor (herself a trans woman) that youngsters whose puberty is blocked early in development will never have an orgasm.

Barnes finds all the sins of modern bureaucracy here. There is a lack of accountability: Polly Carmichael, who started as the director of GIDS in 2009, has faced no professional consequences over the failure of the clinic. There is groupthink: the charity Mermaids, which had preferential access to Carmichael and other GIDS leaders, relentlessly pressured the service to pursue a more “affirmative” model and the doctors yielded to the activists. And at the centre of this vast machine, there are the individual victims: children in real distress failed by the NHS.

The Australian, by Christine Middap​

February 17 2023, How spotlight shone on a gender crisis in Britain | The Australian (archive)

When British investigative journalist Hannah Barnes began looking at the British National Health Service’s flagship gender service for children, she started with a simple question, the sort of query that could reasonably be asked of any other health service: what’s the evidence base?

It was 2019 and Barnes was aware that some clinicians at the Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS), based at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust in North London, were worried that vulnerable and distressed children were having their puberty halted by medication after often rushed assessments that failed to explore other factors in their lives

She had read a leaked report from David Bell, a consultant psychiatrist at the trust, who described the care as “woefully inadequate’’. Some staff who had approached him were “extremely distressed’ and one “felt that they’d done damage”.

If this were any other health service, such as a paediatric cancer ward, media and political interest would have hit overdrive at this point. Children potentially being harmed by medical intervention is a big story by any measure.

But this wasn’t getting much attention and so Barnes, an investigations producer at the BBC’s Newsnight program, started asking questions, interviewing staff, patients and their families. She quickly learnt that this was no straightforward medical investigation. She had waded into a highly contested battleground.

“Every film we put out and every online article we published, we had complaints,’’ Barnes says. “Because it’s so hard to cover – you get grief and complaints all the time – it means that people haven’t looked at this area properly, and that’s part of the problem. Once this word ‘gender’ gets thrown in, it muddies the waters.”

Barnes pressed on, trying to ignore the growing personal attacks. “It’s not very pleasant being accused of wanting to kill children … But the reason our work at Newsnight was taken seriously by people in the healthcare sector in particular is because it was calm, thorough and evidence-based and we tried to take those external pressures out of our coverage,’’ she says.

She contacted close to 60 clinicians who worked at GIDS and collated a damning dossier that grew into a book, Time To Think: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Tavistock’s Gender Service for Children, a sober account of a medical scandal that’s been unfolding for years while authorities looked away.

Despite her meticulous work and the clear public interest, it was difficult to find a publisher willing to take it on – none of the big publishing houses would touch it.

But the power of the book is that she doesn’t rely on activists or fringe observers with an ideological bent. Well-meaning but often overwhelmed GIDS clinicians spoke to her of their regret in referring young people for puberty-blocking and cross-hormone treatment without solid data to support this pathway and in the absence of broader mental health assessments.

“These children often had a multitude of other issues they were dealing with: anxiety, depression, traumatic backgrounds in some cases, a high incidence of autism, homophobic bullying and sometimes very chaotic living conditions,’’ Barnes tells The Weekend Australian.

She notes that, as early as 2005, David Taylor, the Tavistock trust’s then medical director, wrote a report (that remained hidden for years) that raised a fundamental problem. Staff didn’t agree on exactly what they were treating. “Were they treating children distressed because they were trans, or children who identified as trans because they were distressed? Or a combination of both?’’

In the event, Barnes says GIDS wasn’t funded to provide the psychotherapies it was felt many of these young people needed. “Consequently, most of these young people would eventually proceed on to the medical pathway,’’ Barnes wrote. “If they met the diagnostic criteria for gender dysphoria, which they invariably did, then the only real treatment GIDS was commissioned to provide was a referral for puberty blockers.’’

GIDS was essentially providing a “one size fits all” intervention based on an affirmative model that viewed the young person as the expert on themselves when it came to gender, Barnes says.

“If anyone of any age self-identifies as the other gender, then they are affirmed as trans,” she says.

And while puberty blockers – administered to provide patients with “time to think” before embarking on irreversible treatment – were shown to help some children, they did not ease the distress felt by others.

“The evidence base isn’t strong; there’s pretty much universal agreement on that,’’ Barnes says. “Yes there are studies that show benefits to mental health but they’ve all been heavily critiqued … and once they’re scrutinised, they’re never shown to be as strong as claimed.”

Some studies have reported high satisfaction from children and their families. “The vast majority of clinicians I spoke to, even those most critical of the way the service was run, would say they did see young people thrive on the blocker,” Barnes says. “But it was overused and wasn’t appropriate for many other patients.”

She points to one internal study that identified no changes in psychological function, quality of life or degree of gender dysphoria in the young people prescribed puberty blockers. In some cases, gender-related distress and general mental health worsened.

And there were doubts around whether the treatment did provide the vital pause-time – in one internal report almost every patient who started on puberty blockers progressed to cross-sex hormones, a treatment with irreversible consequences.

Barnes stresses that this is not a story that denies trans identities nor suggests that trans people deserve anything other than to lead happy lives, free of harassment, with access to good healthcare. Being transgender is not in and of itself a mental illness.

“This is a story about the underlying safety of an NHS service, the adequacy of the care it provided and its use of poorly evidenced treatments on some of the most vulnerable young people in society,” she says.

Worrying trends​

Burdened with exploding case numbers, clinicians at GIDS began noticing some unexplained trends as the service grew out of the small unit that began in 1989.

Where once it was mostly boys who were referred, by 2019-20 girls outnumbered boys by a ratio of six to one in some age groups, most markedly between the ages of 12 and 14.

In 2015, Anna Hutchinson, a senior clinical psychologist at the service, had noticed something else. She told Barnes that self-diagnosed adolescent trans boys – natal females – started to fill up the waiting room and they had similar stories, haircuts, even names.

“They’d talk about their favourite trans Youtubers, many having adopted the same name, and how they aspired to be like them in the future,” Barnes says.

“Given how complicated these young people appeared to be, could something else be going on that explained this, something other than them all being trans?”

Hutchinson said that from her earliest days working at the service she was struck by the incredibly complex cases that landed on her desk. She recounted the story of one young person who claimed not just to identify as a different gender to their sex, but also to have three different alter egos, two of whom spoke in an Australian accent.

“It later transpired that the young person had never visited Australia,” she said.

Clinicians were also concerned about the levels of autism and neurodiversity they were seeing. It wasn’t that anyone thought that it was not possible to be both autistic and trans, Barnes says, but clinicians openly questioned whether the over-representation of autistic young people in the service required further examination.

“Some staff feared that they could perhaps be unnecessarily medicating autistic children,’’ she says, noting that fewer than 2 per cent of children in the UK are thought to have an autism spectrum disorder yet at GIDS about 35 per cent of referred young people presented with moderate to severe autistic traits.

There were young people presenting to the service who didn’t just identify as another gender, but as another ethnicity too. “There were several cases in the service where a young person identified as a different nationality, usually East Asian, Japanese, Korean, that sort of thing,” according to former clinician Matt Bristow. They would have “quite specific ideas about transitioning and then taking on this East Asian identity as well as a different gender identity’’.

Despite the obvious complexity of all these cases “the answer was always the same,’’ Bristow said. “That the young people eventually get put on the blocker unless they themselves say they don’t want it.’’

Other concerns were also coming to the fore: overburdened staff taking on more and more patients (numbers increased at a rate of 50 per cent per year since 2009); staff who spoke up about being forced out; and what some felt was the undue influence of patient support groups on GIDS’s clinical practice.

Barnes says a significant number of clinicians were also worried that sexuality, like much else, wasn’t being adequately explored in assessments.

“I think there was a lot of ignorance about sexuality,” Hutchinson told her.

Homophobia on show​

Matt Bristow was an openly gay man when he joined GIDS in 2013 and considered himself a trans ally. “I was very sympathetic,’’ he told Barnes.

But he soon came to view the service he was working for as “institutionally homophobic’’.

Another clinician, Anastassis Spiliadis, said the homophobia presented in different ways. “It could be completely silencing people who are gay,” he said. “It could be dismissing the reality that sexuality can play a role in how someone identifies.”

He told Barnes of families who remarked: “Thank God, my child is trans and not gay or lesbian.’’

Some young people were repulsed by the fact that they were same-sex attracted. “They did not identify as gay, because they did not see themselves as of their birth-registered sex,’’ Barnes says.

A large proportion of the teenage girls seen by GIDS were same-sex attracted. “Initially, some of them had identified as lesbian. And some of them had experienced a lot of homophobia and then started identifying as trans. It was almost like a stepping stone,’’ Spiliadis explained.

Barnes notes that some in the trans community find the suggestion that they might be gay, rather than trans, deeply offensive as it is for them to say how they identify. “Clinicians would never dream of telling a young person that they weren’t trans, or that they were gay instead,’’ she wrote.

“But where a young person had spoken explicitly about same-sex attraction or experiences, some felt it was only right to ask about this.”

Especially given that older studies of gender nonconforming children had “highlighted that the majority of young people would not medically transition but would grow up to be gay, lesbian or bisexual adults”,” she added.

“So it seems surprising that sexuality wasn’t at the forefront of GIDS clinicians’ minds as a possible outcome for the young people they were seeing.’’

Bristow told Barnes that some heterosexual members of staff didn’t realise that many gender nonconforming behaviours in childhood applied just as much to children who grew up to be gay, lesbian or bisexual, as to children who would grow up to be trans: things such as cross-dressing, feeling different, not necessarily fitting in with other children of their own sex, or having friends predominantly of the opposite sex.

“Some things which … are fairly normal for many LGB adults were read as being indicative of a trans experience,” Bristow said. Controversially, he came to feel that GIDS was performing “conversion therapy for gay kids”. Barnes notes this is a serious claim but said some clinicians had darkly joked “that there would be no gay people left at the rate GIDS was going’’.

“I don’t think that all of the children there were gay, by any means,’’ Bristow told Barnes. “But there were gay children there … who were being pushed down another path.’’

Hutchinson said: “Were people deliberately going into this field to convert gay people? Absolutely not. But the fact is the outcome might be the same.’’

Formal investigation​

By September 2020, the bells were ringing so loudly that the NHS commissioned leading paediatrician Hilary Cass to review the service.

In March last year, her interim report found that the “single specialist provider model is not a safe or viable long-term option’’.

Four months later, the NHS announced that GIDS would close and be replaced by regional hubs staffed by doctors with a range of specialties and with a greater focus on mental health.

Other countries have made similar moves, Barnes says. Sweden is limiting access to puberty blockers for those under 18 to only “exceptional cases” and in research settings. In Finland, the guidelines state that psychotherapy rather than puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, should be the first-line treatment for gender-dysphoric youth.

So nearly a year on from Cass’s report, how are things going in the UK, I ask Barnes. She lets out a long sigh. “No new service is up and running. GIDS is still open,’’ she says. “It was meant to close in June but that won’t happen because there’s nothing to replace it yet.’’

Meanwhile, more than 7500 young people are sitting on a waiting list where they will be likely stuck for years. “And that’s the tragedy,” she says.

“Wherever anyone stands on the best way to help them, no one can think it’s a good idea that thousands of young people sit on a waiting list getting no help whatsoever from anybody. It’s terrible.”

The Times, by Janice Turner​

February 14 2023, Time to Think by Hannah Barnes review — exposing the collapse of Tavistock’s gender clinic | Saturday Review | The Times (archive)

In 2016, James Bellringer, an eminent consultant urologist, visited the Tavistock child gender identity development service (GIDS) to issue a warning. A specialist in creating “neo-vaginas” in adult trans women, he had noted that natal boys were being given puberty-blocking drugs so young that their penises hadn’t yet fully developed. With insufficient skin for surgery, he was having to construct vaginas with stretches of bowel tissue, a more hazardous, expensive operation, prone to infection and an “unwanted smell”.

Senior GIDS clinicians, including its director, Polly Carmichael, listened to Bellringer and afterwards one psychotherapist proposed writing a leaflet to forewarn parents of boys contemplating blockers. She drafted this, then emailed it to Carmichael for approval. No reply ever came.

This striking vignette in Hannah Barnes’s book encapsulates why GIDS was deemed unfit for purpose and finally closed last year. Here was an institution that knew the treatment it prescribed to more than 1,000 children was experimental, yet instead of mitigating risk, it ploughed on. Carmichael, according to the many whistleblowers Barnes talks to, feared this leaflet would reach Mermaids, a trans charity that is gung-ho for medical intervention in children, which would then accuse her of fear-mongering and transphobia.

Time to Think shows what happens when the exponents of an ideology, so certain of its righteousness, capture a field of medicine, silencing critics, refusing even to collect follow-up data on whether its treatments actually work. Barnes, a journalist with the BBC’s Newsnight, has followed the GIDS story since the clinic began to implode in 2017. Her account is sober, rhetoric-free and meticulously researched, with 70 pages of notes and references. It is a police procedural, analysing every piece of evidence, from internal documents to quashed external reports and the ensuing legal battles, until the full scandal is laid bare.

But threaded throughout, reminding us of the human cost, are vivid stories of GIDS patients. There’s Alex, so stricken with obsessive compulsive disorder that he couldn’t attend school and took five showers a day, yet GIDS doctors, ignoring his underlying conditions, visited him at home to suggest hormones. There’s Jacob (a natal female who still identifies as trans), who was put on puberty blockers for four years, suffered ill health and stunted growth and, at 19, has never felt sexual desire. And there’s Harriet, a “detransitioner” who regrets being rushed down the pathway to an irreversibly deep voice and amputated breasts.

GIDS began in 1989 as a tiny outfit in St George’s Hospital, south London. It was founded by Domenico Di Ceglie, a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, who saw just a few dozen children a year with gender dysphoria. Coaxing out their often complex histories via open-ended therapy, he acknowledged that in 80 per cent of cases, this unease with their sexed body would resolve itself. A small number (about 5 per cent) would grow up to be trans adults, but the rest were mainly gay men or lesbians and, crucially, no doctor could predict a child’s outcome. In 1994 Di Ceglie’s service was absorbed into the Tavistock, the mothership for “talking cures”.

But therapy is costly and labour-intensive, and gender dysphoria can cause deep psychological distress. What if a quick fix could be found? In 1998, Amsterdam’s child gender clinic reported a female patient, “B”, who at 13 had her puberty blocked by off-label drugs, at 16 was given testosterone and at 18 had her ovaries and breasts removed. This “Dutch protocol” was greeted as a miracle: not only did B’s dysphoria apparently disappear, but the idea of skipping natal puberty and thus being able to “pass” as the opposite sex appealed to many adult trans people. The right to blockers became a political demand.

Barnes documents how slowly, then very quickly, the availability of a drug “cure” changed GIDS. At first Di Ceglie tried to steer a course between his old “watchful waiting” and new activist demands. But in medicine, as elsewhere, egos grow and empires are built. He feared that without prescribing blockers, GIDs would dwindle into irrelevance.

So he capitulated and the deluge began. Over a decade, referrals reached the thousands, and the number of female patients soared from a tiny number to two thirds of cases. Meanwhile, underfunded child and adolescent mental health services began to offload to GIDS any patient with depression or anxiety who happened to mention gender. With GIDS clinicians bearing 100-strong caseloads, proper therapy became impossible. GIDS became a mere assessment service: the choice was puberty blockers or goodbye.

The Erin Brockovich of this book is Dr Anna Hutchinson who, as a young clinical psychologist, asked her superiors the book’s underlying question: “Are we hurting children?” Her “holy f***” moment was the publication of GIDS’ tiny and flawed “early intervention study”. This showed that puberty blockers were not, as doctors were told, a “pause button” since the majority of patients went on to opposite sex hormones. It also showed that these drugs didn’t actually improve patients’ reported psychological wellbeing.

This book is a testament to the moral courage of Hutchinson and colleagues who sought to expose the chaos and insanity they saw while practising by stealth the in-depth therapy they believed young people deserved. None was anti-transition per se, but their managers were weak, soused in unscientific postmodern theory and too afraid of activist venom to ask basic questions. Why was GIDS suddenly full of mentally ill girls? How could 12-year-olds consent to future infertility and anorgasmia? Why were the worries of gay clinicians, that GIDS was in effect practising conversion therapy on gay children, ignored? How could senior psychiatrists jettison everything they ever knew about child development?

Barnes coolly leaves us to our own conclusions. But there’s one factor I’d never fully considered: money. Of course US private clinics and pharmaceutical companies, greedy for lifelong patients, are monetising “trans kids”. But what of the sainted NHS? As GIDS expanded, it became the Tavistock Trust’s golden goose: going from representing 5.9 per cent of its income in 2015-16 to 28 per cent in 2020-21. No wonder its leaders refused to cap referral numbers or slow the out-of-control conveyor belt to the endocrinology clinic, and reassess its purpose and ethics.

But thankfully there were braver souls, determined to expose the biggest medical scandal of our age. And Hannah Barnes has honoured them with her dogged, irreproachable yet gripping account.

The Telegraph, by Suzanne Moore​

February 14 2013, Time to Think review: the book that tells the full story of the Tavistock’s trans scandal (archive)

Whenever medical scandals happen, we look back and wonder how well-intentioned people ended up doing bad things. Do No Harm is surely the ethical cornerstone for medics. There will always be cutting-edge procedures or drugs but the trialled patients will be consenting adults. Not children.

This was not the case at the Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) that became part of the prestigious Tavistock clinic. The “Tavi” was once considered the premier psychodynamic outpatient unit in the country. Many of the greats worked there, from Bion to Bowlby to Laing.

In 1994 GIDS became part of The “Tavi” and by 2009 had a new director, Dr Polly Carmichael. Yet by July 2022, following Dr Hilary Cass’s report, GIDS was deemed neither a safe nor viable option for young people with gender-related stress and it was closed down.

This NHS service was said to be using “poorly evidenced treatments on some of the most vulnerable people in society”. As shocking as this is, the bigger shock is the number of people who knew about this and did nothing.

Hannah Barnes’s well-researched book delves into how this situation arose. She speaks to over 60 clinicians: psychologists, psychotherapists, nurses, social workers. It is this forensic approach that makes her findings so devastating. Barnes is not coming at this from an ideological viewpoint. Some of her interviewees are happily transitioned. Others are not. They feel that the risks of the medical pathway they were put on were never explained to them or that they were too young to understand the full implications. One girl asked if when given testosterone she would be able to produce sperm.

These patients were all distressed young people, often with complex problems: autism, eating disorders, self-harm, depression. Gender was often only one of their issues, yet somehow at GIDS, it came to override everything else. The clinic’s “affirmative model” meant affirming a child’s belief that they were transgender and giving them “time to think” by referring them for assessment for puberty blockers. The leadership of GIDS were following the “Dutch Protocol”, so-called as the Dutch had used these drugs since the late 80s, though the data was sketchy and did not support their use. There was no reduction in depression or self-harm.

These drugs are not new; they had been used on male prisoners to chemically castrate them. As to the long-term effects on children, the research is poor. Some studies show they affect bone density, brain development and sexual function. France, Sweden and Finland have all paused their prescription until more longitudinal studies are done.

Dr Anna Hutchinson, one of Barnes’s main interviewees, became increasingly alarmed that children as young as 10 were being referred for blockers, which were spoken of as reversible – though they nearly always lead to the use of cross-sex hormones for life.

The whole issue of gender dysphoria had by the mid-2000s become highly politicised. Stonewall declared in February 2015 that it was extending its remit to campaign for trans equality alongside lesbian, gay and bisexual (LGB) equality. The previous year GIDs moved to a “stage not age” approach on blockers so kids younger than 12 could be referred with a view to receiving a prescription.

In 2007, 50 kids a year had been referred to GIDS, but by 2020 there were around 5000. As a result, GIDS faced huge waiting lists, with junior shrinks having caseloads of 100, instead of 30 which would be the standard NHS practice. Many clinicians left.

The workload was increasing so trainee psychiatrists were brought in. The atmosphere was said to be intense but familial, yet the problems presented were complex. If a girl had been sexually abused, for instance, she may have had good reason to hate her female body. Why would blockers be appropriate?

Concerns about autism or parental pressure were allegedly dismissed by Carmichael. Children were turning up identifying as other ethnicities such as Japanese. By 2017, three quarters of their patients were girls, a dramatic shift from the years up to 2010, when the majority were boys. Were they not asking why?

Some who had come into the profession to do talking therapy did almost none, as patients were referred for drugs sometimes after two sessions. Meanwhile, some of the gay staff were wondering if this all just conversion therapy for gay kids. Some staff felt under surveillance; they had doubts but they were reticent as expressing them could lead to accusations of transphobia. To say that sex itself is immutable was clearly heretical.

Lone voices did speak. Someone darkly referred to the Mid Staffs scandal, where poor care had led to hundreds of deaths. Sonia Appleby whistle-blew. Dr David Bell whistle-blew. The silence began to break. Keira Bell – who was referred for blockers by GIDS at 16 and had a double mastectomy at 20, then regretted transitioning – took the Tavistock to court. The High Court’s judges were damning about the lack of long-term follow-up for patients and the lack of interest in detransitioners.

Keira Bell, who was referred for puberty blockers, took the Tavistock to court

The court expressed its surprise repeatedly that GIDS could not say how many kids has been referred for blockers between 2011 and 2020 nor their ages. Data had not been collated on numbers of those with an autism diagnosis or those who progressed on to cross-sex hormones. The judges referred to “the experimental nature of this treatment and the profound impact it has”.

Though their judgement was overturned on appeal in 2021, the Tavistock’s image was irreparably damaged. It was almost as if this whole institution had been hijacked by the explosion of a dubious political ideology. Insiders simply described the situation as “mad”.

As someone who knew about this years ago, as people were writing to me asking my former newspaper to investigate it, it would suit my agenda to say this was all down to trans activism. But it’s not that simple.

Barnes illustrates that this was a massive institutional and leadership failure of safeguarding. Junior staff did not confront their blinkered managers. Some of the 10,000 children who went through GIDS were helped, for sure. As for the others? This incredibly important book shows that we still don’t know how many were damaged for life.

I want every institution and every politician who pontificates about gender to read this book and ask what happened to all those lost girls and boys – and why they were complicit.

The Daily Mail, by Sarah Vine​

February 14 2023, SARAH VINE: The Tavistock scandal shows what happens when debate is stifled | Daily Mail Online (archive)

A few years ago, when Keira Bell won her case in the High Court against the Tavistock and Portman’s gender identity service (GIDS), I remember thinking: this is just the start.

Aged 16, Bell had been prescribed puberty blockers to ‘pause’ her physical development. Six years later, having undergone irreversible treatment, including a double mastectomy, she realised it had been a monumental mistake. She wasn’t trans at all, just — as she herself put it — ‘very mentally ill’.

Together with the mother of an autistic girl on the waiting list for similar treatment, Bell brought her case to highlight what she and others, including several professionals at the Tavistock, believed amounted to medical malpractice.

This, they suggested, was being driven by ideology — and supported by a culture of intimidation that acted as a barrier to proper assessment and treatment of children like her.

The court in Bell’s case found the Tavistock’s policies and practices were not unlawful. But that does not detract from the concerns I and many others have about how the clinic treated her and other children.

Children who, yes, had complex needs and issues, who were struggling with problems such as body dysmorphia and eating disorders, but for whom the answer wasn’t necessarily gender reassignment.

Needless to say, Keira Bell was branded a ‘traitor’ to the trans cause. Whistleblowers at the Tavistock were immediately tarred as transphobic.

But the truth is, she’s heroic. Because it’s in no small part thanks to her that the wider conversation around gender identity ceased being so one-sided, and that the prevailing ‘rainbows and unicorns’ narrative has, at last, been challenged.

Of course, some children really are trans — and benefit hugely from getting help with transitioning. Ironically, they have now lost a clinic designed to assist them, thanks to the stupidity and short-sightedness of ideologues.

We are now approaching — albeit cautiously — a place where politicians and professionals should at the very least be able to question certain practices without being dismissed as bigots.

That said, as we have seen from the recent debate around Nicola Sturgeon’s ill-thought-out self-identification legislation, a lot of people are still afraid of tackling the gender ideologues. And understandably so: the activists are very powerful and some are very persuasive.

They dominate social media, targeting the young and impressionable, casting themselves as the enemies of old-fashioned and outdated values; pioneers of a newer, more progressive age of self-expression and tolerance.

Some present themselves as harmless entertainers. Others have a more direct agenda, proffering gender reassignment as an easy, fun and, in some cases, lucrative lifestyle choice.

Provided no one challenges them, they are all sweetness and light. Express even a bat-squeak of concern, however, and they can be utterly vicious. Witness the recent ‘decapitate Terfs’ placards at pro-Sturgeon rallies in Scotland.

Terf — or trans-exclusionary radical feminist — is the trans fanatic’s (misogynistic) preferred acronym for anyone, be they concerned parent or cautious professional, who dares question the wisdom of not merely allowing but, like the Tavistock, actively assisting young and vulnerable children to start altering their gender.

By demonising all opposition, trans ideologues have, over the years, skilfully and successfully shut down almost any debate on the issue.

Finally, however, the tide is turning. As a result of Bell’s bravery, and of a damning interim report by Dr Hilary Cass, a former president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health — who was commissioned by NHS England to independently review gender identity services for young people — the Tavistock will close this spring.

Dr Cass’s full report will be published later this year; but next week an equally damning assessment of what went on comes out in the form of a book by the Newsnight journalist Hannah Barnes.

Based on years of meticulous research as well as hours of interviews with clinicians and patients, Time To Think really gets into the guts of what went on at the Tavistock, charting how well over 1,000 children, some as young as ten, were prescribed puberty blockers, opening a pathway to medical transition, often without follow-up or supervision.

It exposes how concerned clinicians were marginalised and dismissed and how pressure groups such as Mermaids and Gendered Intelligence were allowed to influence practices.

It reveals how some children presenting with complex psychological issues — from autism to depression to simple worries about going through puberty or experiencing same-sex attraction — were all funnelled into the same diagnosis of gender dysphoria. Perhaps most disturbingly, there is evidence of latent homophobia.

One of the psychologists interviewed, Dr Matt Bristow, told Barnes how he feared the clinic was acting as a kind of ‘conversion therapy for gay kids’, as those who simply fancied their own sex were encouraged to start transitioning.

Psychotherapist Anastassis Spiliadis, who joined the clinic in 2015, said he believed homophobia was ‘everywhere’. He added that some young people would be ‘repulsed’ by the fact that they were attracted to their own sex. Another anonymous clinician said some parents ‘appeared to prefer the idea that their child was transgender and straight rather than gay’.

All this amounts to a scandal on a truly titanic scale, one that affects not just the lives of individuals such as Keira Bell, who will have to suffer for ever from the after-effects of the treatment she underwent, but also for everyone who has ever been made to feel like a bigot in this toxic debate.

Because this is not just a catastrophic betrayal of thousands of vulnerable children and their families by a taxpayer-funded institution that allowed itself to be infiltrated and influenced by a highly politicised ideological agenda.

It’s also an example of what happens when all debate is stifled, and of the harms that occur when free speech is shut down and legitimate questioning of motives and methods is sacrificed on the altar of wokeness.

In many ways, I see it as analogous to what happened with the Rotherham grooming and sexual-exploitation scandal. Sure, the clinicians at the Tavistock didn’t mean to harm the confused young people who came through their doors — and they weren’t breaking the law.

But the victims in both cases were vulnerable children. Only in Rotherham, it was fear of being branded racist, rather than transphobic, that prevented the authorities from acknowledging what was going on beneath their very noses.

Between 1997 and 2013, more than 1,400 girls were variously raped, gang-raped, trafficked and abused, predominantly by British-Pakistani men who deliberately targeted care homes and schools.

The situation was exacerbated by contemptuous and sexist attitudes towards the mainly white working-class victims, as well as cultural sensitivities around the perpetrators’ religion, which was mainly Muslim.

And, as with the Tavistock, it was only the courage of whistle-blowers brave enough to stomach the inevitable barrage of abuse that eventually allowed justice to prevail.

History teaches us that wherever good people are silenced, bad things happen. I have no doubt that in years to come, when we look back on what happened at the Tavistock and at the whole situation surrounding the trans debate in general — such as convicted rapists being allowed to declare themselves female and serve jail time in women’s prisons — people will shake their heads in disbelief that such things were ever allowed to happen.

But happen they did, and not because no one saw what was going on.

They took place because the rest of the world was too busy covering its own sorry backside — too busy being woke, too busy painting pointless rainbows on pedestrian crossings, too busy organising ‘inclusivity seminars’ and paying trans activists to teach primary-school children that biological sex is a ‘construct’ — to see that many vulnerable children were being consigned, like Bell, to a lifetime of ill-health and regret.

In short, too busy paying lip service to a bunch of politically correct bullies, while ignoring those who really need society’s protection. It is, I’m afraid, the story of our times; and, as many of us warned and Hannah Barnes’s book shows, it’s a shameful one.

The Spectator, by Julie Bindel​

February 13 2023, How did the Tavistock gender scandal unfold? | The Spectator (archive)

Another week, another blast of evidence as to why putting kids on hormone blockers is an abomination. Time to Think: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Tavistock’s Gender Service for Children by BBC journalist Hannah Barnes, which is released on 16 February, is dynamite. The revelations it contains are horrifying: former clinicians at the Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS), part of the Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust in London, detail how some children were placed on medication after one face-to-face assessment, despite many having mental health or family issues. More than a third of young people referred to the service had moderate to severe autistic traits, compared with under 2 per cent of children in the general population.

Much of the detail in the book has been known for some time, but has been denied, ignored or dismissed. Finally, action is being taken: the Tavistock clinic is due to close this Spring. But why did it take so long for this scandal to fully emerge?

My own dealings with GIDS – and the backlash faced by those who have dared call into question the practice of giving kids hormone blockers – goes some way to explaining what has happened. Even back in 2003, when I first contacted the clinic, I was horrified by the approach to transparency. I was writing an investigative piece on the diagnosis of ‘transsexuality’ in relation to children. I explained the angle I was taking (critical and sceptical) and that I was hoping for a response from the service, refuting (I assumed) my allegations. Instead, I was sent on a wild goose chase, from clinician to clinician, and ended up speaking with an administrator who was spectacularly unhelpful.

I couldn’t quite believe the diagnosis made of trans people, which, in my view, effectively amounted to being ‘trapped in the wrong body’. As far as us feminists were concerned, this view of gender and sex looked like the most insidious type of sexism and promotion of 1950s gender roles. How could this perspective still be so prevalent so long after the women’s liberation movement had made its mark?

The ‘girls like pink, boys like blue’ sex stereotype nonsense should surely have been dead in the water by the turn of the millennium. But it seemed that some medical professionals who thought they knew best – and believed there is something like a ‘sexed brain’ – were keeping it alive and well.

Back in the 1980s, when I first encountered Claudia, who, as a gay man aged 26, was given irreversible cross-sex hormones – and underwent full sex change surgery two years later – it was plain to see that something was already wrong with the debate surrounding ‘transexuality’. When we met, Claudia told me that, despite ‘passing really well’ as a woman, they had always deeply regretted transitioning. ‘If only I had been supported to live in the body I had, I am certain I could have had a good life,’ Claudia said.

Today, there are many more people like Claudia who regret transitioning, and who feel their mental health problems were ignored when their condition was put in a neat box marked ‘gender dysphoria’. Some of these people will have passed through the doors of GIDS. As Barnes outlines in her book, when it comes to children arriving at the clinic, mental health issues were sometimes overlooked. As well as claiming to be trapped in the body of the opposite sex, some young patients claimed to be of a different ethnic background, such as Japanese or Korean. One young person had, as Barnes details, ‘three different alter egos, two of whom spoke in an Australian accent’.

It’s true that not everyone who worked at GIDS was happy with what was unfolding: some mental health professionals were deeply concerned with the medicalisation of children. They believed these children required talking therapies, not irreversible hormonal and surgical interventions. But these staff were in a difficult position: they were under pressure from ‘powerful lobbies’ to opt for medication, as a report from 2005 revealed:

‘…it is the consistent impression of a number of GIDU (Gender Identity Dysphoria Unit) staff that the service was coming under pressure to recommend the prescription of drugs more often and more quickly, and that the independence of professional judgement was also coming under increasing pressure. Young patients may threaten suicide if their anxieties are not immediately addressed. Parents and others may threaten to complain and there are powerful lobbies from older patients pressing for the use of medication, which even more worryingly, is now available without regulation via the internet. Clinicians will differ in their ability to resist the pressure to comply.’

Clinicians feared the consequences if they refused to comply with what patients, and their parents, wanted. Sonia Appleby, a former safeguarding lead, told Barnes that those who spoke out against the transition of children were ‘demonised’.

The resulting scandal is now plain to see: children damaged for life having been placed on medication that should not have been given to them. Some of those who worked at GIDS compare what unfolded at the clinic to the Mid Staffs hospital scandal of the 2000s, or the doping of East German athletes in the 1960s and 1970s. They’re right to do so – and it’s vital that lessons are learnt. If we fail to review what went so wrong, those that were instrumental in creating such devastation will be allowed to get away with it.

 

[AnOminous]

https://twitter.com/jordanbpeterson/status/1627571297940119553

So basically trannies not only shouldn't be in women's prisons, they should all be in protective custody in male prison. Not to protect them, to protect everyone else.