A string of resignations from a team preparing for the launch of the new NHS children’s gender clinic has further complicated plans to open the services in April.
Sources close to the discussions said there was “no consensus” within the team and that their work was incomplete when members resigned.
In 2022, Dr Hilary Cass, the paediatrician charged with reviewing the NHS’s care of children with gender dysphoria, said a “fundamentally different” approach was needed because of rising referrals and a significant change in the case mix, with a sharp rise in adolescent girls presenting with gender incongruence in their early teen years.
She also noted that many children displayed a wide range of other complexities, including mental health needs. Her independent review highlighted uncertainties surrounding the use of hormone treatments. Interim NHS service specifications say the new clinics will take a multidisciplinary approach, offering psychological support.
Some clinicians working on the new training materials are understood to have felt it important to affirm a patient’s gender identity and believed patients could benefit from medication. Others, some of whom resigned their posts, stressed the need to adhere to Cass’s recommendations and take a holistic, “exploratory” approach.
Source: New NHS children’s gender clinic hit by disagreements and resignations
For God’s sake, each patient should be ‘assessed’ to work out their symptoms and thus needs.
‘Affirming care’ is just plain madness. To affirm some one based on their desire rather than their need is to throw away the entire medical model and become some kind of pseudo science.
If you are going to go down the ‘affirmation’ path, why not employ astrologists to work out their star signs and needs from that? Surely it would be just as good…
Good God but I despair at the anti psychiatry redo we see these days. It’s as though the concept of logic is passé.
The Emperor is clearly naked. Anyone who is not blinded by dogma should be able to see it…
Agree. To affirm is to hand out (potentially) permanently life-altering hormones without any questioning.
Considering that there’s been a 4000% increase in girls wanting to be boys over the last 15 years, this would be rash.
Some of these young people may have been swayed by trends. In the long term, some of these girls may come to realise they are simply lesbian or bisexual and are happy with their body just as it is.