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.
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.
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 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.
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”.
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.
Source: A Review of Time to Think : the book that tells the full story of the Tavistock’s trans scandal
It is simply disgusting that these practices have been gone on for years just because it is a male privilege to declare themselves ‘women’! As if that has anything to do with with the sexual body and the sexual identity of teenagers who have no idea about the life-long effects of their belief of themselves as being in ‘the wrong body;! There should be a juridical indictment of the GIDS organisation, which will not been put up for the infiltration if and play with children’s sexual beliefs, which are probably going to be better understood once they are adults!