We welcome the news that the Tavistock gender clinic is to be closed down and replaced with regional services by Spring 2023. The treatment of gender dysphoric children will be integrated within other paediatric mental health services to ensure the same standards of care as for any other child accessing mental health care services. The separation of gender dysphoria into a specialist area has led to the profound failings of a service which has replaced normal levels of care with a fast-track medical transition service for ‘trans kids.’
The separation of these children into their own clinic, away from other pediatric services, has helped to promulgate the idea at the heart of child transition activism: that these children are somehow ‘different’ to other children and fall outside normal understandings of child development and normal standards of safeguarding and patient safety. Separation from all other pediatric services has allowed lobby groups in unnoticed, to put pressure on an already ideologically captured management team and NHS Trust.
In no other area of pediatric care have unqualified political organisations been allowed to influence treatment protocols for children.
The separation of children struggling with gender-related distress has also served to frame the issue of ‘gender’ as a specialised area requiring the expertise of trained ‘gender doctors.’ This is another central tenet of the child transition lobby: ‘gender’ is complicated and clinicians and therapists must receive extensive training in the ‘new understandings’ of gender in order to work with ‘trans people.’ Together with the politicisation of children as ‘transgender’, this has led to the long waiting lists for the GIDS.
The ‘diagnostic overshadowing’ highlighted in the Cass interim report begins at the NHS CAMHS clinics. Therapists and counsellors confronted with an adolescent claiming to be ‘transgender’ will refer the child to the GIDS because they believe 1) they are not adequately trained in this specialist area and 2) because they are afraid of being accused of ‘transphobia’ or ‘conversion therapy’ if they apply the normal standards of care they are trained in to these children.
The result is that the waiting list for the GIDS grows longer, and meanwhile these children receive no support for the mental health issues ordinarily dealt with at CAMHS. As a result, as Cass points out, a child’s ‘gender identity’ may become solidified so that they arrive at the GIDS desperate for hormones. Meanwhile, self-harm and suicidal ideation may have increased due to lack of mental health support, and child transition advocates can use this as ‘evidence’ that children are more likely to consider suicide if they are denied medical treatment.
Shutting down the Tavistock GIDS is long overdue. From the first whistleblower, Susan Evans in 2005, through shocking revelations from GIDS clinicians in the Bell report, Keira Bell and Mrs A’s judicial review against the Tavistock and Sonia Appleby’s employment tribunal, the GIDS has remained firmly entrenched in its unassailable position. Arrogance and certainty in its ideological viewpoint has blinded the service to the harms of unethical, medical experimentation on children.
The NHS-commissioned review of the Tavistock GIDS revealed, in its devastating interim report, a service unconcerned with clinical research, data collection and evidence. The cavalier promotion of puberty blockers as a cure-all for troubled teenagers has led to irreversible harms to thousands of adolescents. The results of this experiment will not be known until this cohort grows up and maturation gives them the hindsight to reflect on decisions made in the maelstrom of adolescence. The affirmation of an adolescent’s self-diagnosis by the GIDS, with no attempt to explore underlying issues such as autism, trauma, internalised homophobia or mental health issues, has been a catastrophic failure of duty of care to young people.
In her letter to the NHS, Dr Hilary Cass specifies that:
“There should be a whole system approach to care across the network so that children and young people can access a broad range of services relevant to their individual needs, including supportive exploration and counselling.”
We are confident that the recommendations made to NHS England will achieve the aim of the Cass interim report to provide normal standards of care for children experiencing gender-related distress and we are very grateful to Dr Cass and her team for all their hard work to ensure that these children receive the best evidence-based care.
Questions now need to be asked about how a situation was allowed to develop within the NHS where children were put at such risk and given treatments causing lifelong harms:
- The influence of external lobby groups such as Mermaids, GIRES and Gendered Intelligence.
- Membership of the Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust in the Stonewall Diversity Champions scheme.
- The adoption by the GIDS of the WPATH standards of care.
- The development of NHS service specifications for children and adolescents.
- The role of the regulatory body, the Care Quality Commission, also a Stonewall Diversity Champion, in judging the GIDS to be ‘good’ in 2016.
Finally, there needs to be a public inquiry into the infiltration of gender ideologues into schools, youth organisations, charities and social services along with the NHS and the GIDS, how this was enabled, and the mechanisms by which we can prevent such a failure of safeguarding from happening again.
There is also a massive campaign on the internet to convince vulnerable children that their problems stem from being in the wrong body. This is why there is a much higher percentage of neurodiverse teenagers claiming to be LGBT.
CAMHS aren’t fit for purpose in their current form. They can’t even identify girls with ASD and ADHD, causing longterm issues for these children. How are they going to help confused teenagers.
I often wonder if I wouldn’t have been targeted for transition were I a teenager now. I’m nearly 60 years old and the 1970s were a hell of their own for a girl labeled a “tomboy”, a term I hate and rejected. I always told people “my name isn’t Tom and I’m not a boy.”
Despite my proclamations that I wasn’t a boy, I still think I would have been targeted. I was mildly gender nonconforming, preferring pants to dresses. Even when I wore dresses, I wore shorts under them so I could run and play without worry that stupid boys were going to be trying to peek at my panties.
I had ADHD, which is something I didn’t figure out until I was in my 50s. I was labeled “borderline retarded” and always scolded as being spacy, flakey, selfish, lazy, and admonished to “stop daydreaming.” I was diagnosed as a “hysterical neurotic” at 16 when I made superficial cuts to my wrists after being assaulted sexually by an older boy and being bullied every day for being weird. I was later misdiagnosed as having type 2 bipolar disorder and “borderline personality disorder,” another term that I reject. The “borderline personality disorder” label is overwhelmingly applied to women and girls. It is a form of PTSD. Many women and girls this label is applied to have unresolved sexual trauma.
I know that many girls on the autism spectrum develop rapid onset gender dysphoria. However, it seems one need not even have gender dysphoria to be targeted by these ghouls. I never had gender dysphoria, but there were many times when I didn’t like being a girl because of how society treats girls and women.
Yup
You sound awesome! We could be friends ahah
You’ll be happy to hear, at least, that most Catholic girls’ schools in the U.S. and Brazil have moved to official uniform skirts with a built-in inner layer of dark-colored athletic shorties.
Realistically, this actually came to fruition less because of the safeguarding concerns than because athletic-apparel companies realized an easy coup opportunity—in a market with a large captive audience!—but, regardless, it’s an example of the rare phenomenon where capitalist incentives end up benefiting pretty much everybody.
So a question out there, how does one bring a public inquiry about the infiltration of gender ideologies etc etc, into our schools, how do we get a public to look at these things that are being pushed into the educational system etc. Anybody???
Wonderful! This seems to be a step in the right direction. I am cautiously optimistic.
Thank goodness for this report into the Tavistock. Long overdue. Hopefully it will put an end to more confused young people being damaged irreparably.
A huge thank you to the authors of the report.
This is an excellent summary. Thank you so much for all you do.
Thank you Trnsgndr Trnd for your tireless work. This is an incredible breakthrough, a breaking of the spell of political genderism that has colonised child care and child education. There must be an inquiry to clear the air, to allow those responsible to account for this debacle. We owe you and other courageous campaigners a debt of gratitude,
Thank you for your tireless campaign. The fight is not over yet. Our children are still irreparably damaged, mostly still under a spell, maintained by cross sex hormones and mass public delusion. Public bodies must be accountable for what has effectively been an experimental sterilisation program for disturbed youth. It is not politically correct to use the word eugenics yet that is truly what it is. The adults did not care enough to offer counselling, so offered fertility destroying hormones and surgery instead.
I realise this is a very contentious comment, but I can’t help but remember that one J. Savile was put in charge of Broadmoor and even addressed as ‘Doctor Savile’ by staff. His ‘qualification’ for this was being a keen charity fundraiser. So unqualified people influencing care in the NHS has happened before.
Thank you for sharing your mindful voice of reason. Thank you for all of your work. I value how you have pointed straight at the heart of this matter: children are denied their rights to the full range of services they need, and instead have been hived off to a narrow, single-track system. I’ve been reading all of the reports this week. I saved yours for the nuggets of sense and wisdom I knew I would find. So appreciated.
worrying are doctors in other trusts qualified to give a diagnos
NHS England is owned by the transes. It has published information declaring that men can give birth. It can’t be trusted to free itself from the pernicious control of the gender ideologues and ensure that practitioners won’t have their lives ruined for not submitting to the trans mantra.
The name alone – ‘Gender Identity Development Service’ (GIDS) – is a clue as to the real aim of the founder of the clinic. It was set up to normalise the unscientific and spurious concept of a person’s ‘gender identity’
This is an excellent summary of the issues , bookmarked so I can easily link to it and show others who may not quite ‘get it’ yet. There’s much misinformation and misunderstanding on social media with some trans activists failing to acknowledge just how much of a failure the Tavistock has been and they are spinning it as a ‘win’ as there’ll be more clinics for, as they see it, gender questioning children to be transitioned. They don’t want to see the harm they have colluded in. But thanks to you and others we are slowly undoing the harm.
Yes, I noticed that spin as well. We can’t afford to relax yet.
This means that children will be able to access trans healthcare more easily and quickly though
It’s interesting that parents who are supportive of their trans children are also pleased that the NHS is moving to the new system. I wonder why that is?
Something very significant and positive happened recently. England’s women football team won the Euros. I don’t think the effect on girls being proud of and accepting being girls can be underestimated.
The damage this will do to out of date ideas of gender stereotypes will be immense.
Wow, absolutely brilliantly written. It is well past time this ideology was ended, exactly the same political pro ‘trans kids’ sorts of groups are being bought in by the education system to ‘advise’ on policy etc and these policies then create a foot in the door ‘jobs’ for these people, who then set about indoctrinating teachers, who in turn indoctrinate the children (from 4 years of age in Scotland) they are being brainwashed the ‘they may not be a little boy (or girl) and can ‘wear a skirt to school if they wish’ ‘choose their ‘new name’ and ‘pronouns’ etc and the ‘the parents do ‘not’ require to be informed’ so that by the time the parents become aware their child has been brainwashed, it is often too late and these children are convinced, then, due to the same lobby groups within ‘services’ such as the BBC and Netflix etc, parents belive they simply must abide by their child wishes, or they may drive their child to suicide or at the least be labels ‘transphobic’ so whisk their child off to Stonewall, Tavistock etc for the ‘process to be completed. We obviously need to close ‘all’ of these places, but we also must urgently end the use of ‘pronouns’ in education environments, as this is the thin edge of the wedge where the brainwashing begins.
Recently when my 10 year old Grandson came in from school and I asked him how his day had gone ,instead of his usual happy litany of who did what in football and excited chatter about some astonishing facts he had been taught about the nature of the universe he said
“Grandad I just want to tell you I am perfectly happy being a boy” in a flat monotone .
Where on earth did that suddenly come from I thought and why would a ten year old boy feel the need to reassure his grandad of this. What on earth had triggered my grandsons need to reassure me of something that was so blindingly obvious to me and his wider family .Thanks to this blog I now know .Thank you so much Stephanie for your pioneering efforts to counter this pernicious and destructive ideology of which folks of my older generation know so little about .
What worries me is the demonising of people who try help transgender/transsexual people, young or older. It’s bad enough transgender people being demonised by the ‘anti transgender brigade’ but now to say that puberty blockers are ‘experimental’ snd causing harm when they have been used for other purpose is hype. Yes of course one has to be careful with young people as they can latch on to ideas from social media and the like and yes we need specialised clinicians to help those ones but not to close down the specialist centre that has experience in helping transgender people. The knowledge about transgender peopke has come to the fore simply because people are more aware of transgender people. My own story is I’m a 75 year old ‘transgender’ woman who, thankfully had treatment from the NHS decades ago and surgery in a London hospital and gone on to lead a happy and full life mostly helping others including transgender people. When I had treatment there wasn’t all the demonising of transgender people or mixing in with LGB. Unfortunately it seems so much controversy has been whipped up by others accusing transgender women, mainly, of trying to harm non transgender women, molesting children and so on. Yes there are a few individuals who have committed such crimes claiming to be transgender but in my humble opinionI would have serious doubts as to their claim to be ‘transgender’ and those need to be weeded out. I’m extremely worried that transgender people are going to be further demonised and services removed or non experienced medical personnel treating and denying help for genuine young people that need help. Yes if there was problems by some clinicians at the Tavistock tgen of course this needed to be investigated and corrected. Transgender people are not out to convert the world by the way merely to get treatment. As for children yes we have to be careful and not rush through any treatment until that child is old enough know their own minds and clinicians absolutely sure. No child should go through any surgery or given treatment poste haste but a careful regime of analysis should be carried out over a period of time before treatment of any kind started. My treatment was not rushed and I survived but I’m grateful for tge doctors and surgeons that treated me. Please no knee jerk reactions and don’t leave vulnerable youngsters out in the cold.