Excellent news for those concerned about the state experimenting on children! The Tavistock Gender Clinic, the only NHS clinic specifically for ‘trans’ children is to be shut down! This is a huge win. The NHS has been ordered to close down the Tavistock clinic after a report had found that the clinic was failing to adequately care for children under 18, some as young as four. The Tavistock clinic has been at the centre of the ‘trans’ children debate for quite some time. I myself first became aware of the clinic whilst researching for a video I made about the charity Mermaids, three years ago.

The Tavistock clinic has been under fire over the past three years thanks to various whistleblowers and its links with the Mermaids charity. Over the years nurses and doctors have resigned from the clinic, one such high profile case being that of Marcus Evans, Associate Clinical Director of Adult and Adolescent Service at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust. He outlines in a Quillette article why he resigned from his post at the NHS’ only trans clinic for children. Evans has a great deal of experience treating mental health issues and notes that a number of suicidal patients, who had gone through gender-reassignment surgery, “often were angry at the loss of their biological sexual functioning”. 

Having taken on the role at Tavistock in 2018, Dr. David Bell conducted a review of the clinic after one fifth of the clinic’s staff expressed ethical concerns. These ethical concerns included fast tracking children onto untested hormone blockers, treatment plans being influenced by special interest groups, such as Mermaids, and children deemed likely to grow up to be homosexual having been put through transitional treatment. Evans personally witnessed the management of the clinic attempt to dismiss and undermine Dr. Bell’s reports. As a result Evans resigned in 2019, becoming one of 35 psychologists to have resigned during a three year period. A number of these  resignations cite the overdiagnosis of gender dysphoria.

This was not the end of the problems for The Tavistock Clinic,  in 2019 a legal complaint was made against the clinic  concerning the provision of misleading advice regarding hormone therapy. In early 2020 Keira Bell became one of their victims. Bell, who had undergone transition procedures from the age of 16, including a double mastectomy at 20, became infertile as a direct result of this treatment. She regrets the ‘therapy’ she received and wished for the High Court to make a ruling such that those under 16 would be permitted to consent to the same hormone therapy. Originally the High Court ruled that children under 16 could not consent and that for those between the ages of 16 and 18, authorisation of the Court must be sought as the treatment is experimental. This was good news until, in early 2021, The Tavistock Centre and Mermaids filed for appeal which was granted, overturning the previous decision later that year. Marina Wheeler QC reacted to this judgement by stating that from 2009 Tavistock had 97 referrals and in 2019 2,519, so it would only be a matter of time before a clinical negligence claim is made and won.

In the period leading up to 2021, despite all the ethical complaints made by staff regarding, what I view as, the child abuse within the Tavistock clinic, referrals only increased and hormone therapy continued to be legally administered to children. 

This is why today’s news is good news, as the move comes after the conclusion of the latest review of the clinic, by Dr Hilary Cass, commissioned in September 2020. The review makes the following points about the clinic:

• The rapid increase in the number of children requiring support and the complex case-mix means that the current clinical model, with a single national provider, is not sustainable in the longer term. 
• We need to know more about the population being referred and outcomes. There has not been routine and consistent data collection, which means it is not possible to accurately track the outcomes and pathways that children and young people take through the service.  
• There is lack of consensus and open discussion about the nature of gender dysphoria and therefore about the appropriate clinical response. 
• Because the specialist service has evolved rapidly and organically in response to demand, the clinical approach and overall service design has not been subjected to some of the normal quality controls that are typically applied when new or innovative treatments are introduced.

In short the centralised clinic has been overwhelmed with referrals over the past few years at levels that cannot be sustained,  despite being overwhelmed there is limited consensus on treatment among doctors  and the clinic has not had the adequate quality controls or outcome oversight that is expected in an NHS trust. The suggestions moving forward are that:

• Children and young people with gender incongruence or dysphoria must receive the same standards of clinical care, assessment and treatment as every other child or young person accessing health services.  
• The care of this group of children and young people is everyone’s business. Our initial work indicates that clinicians at all levels feel they have the transferable skills and commitment to support these children and young people, but there needs to be agreement and guidance about the appropriate clinical assessment process that should take place at primary, secondary and tertiary level, underpinned by better data and evidence.  
• Addressing the challenges will require service transformation, with support offered at different levels of the health service.
• The Review’s research programme will not just build the evidence base in the UK but will also contribute to the global evidence base, meaning that young people, their families, carers and the clinicians supporting them can make more informed decisions about the right path for them.    

These suggestions are good for the protection of children and help provide the high standard of care they need. Tavistock has gotten away, for years, with experimenting on children and encouraging children with complex health  issues to obtain treatment for gender dysphoria, rather than through a holistic approach. These changes will make sure there is greater oversight of these children and their treatment. Instead of being sequestered at a secretive clinic, where complaints and reviews are dismissed, the children will be treated across  the country by a greater number of clinicians, paediatricians and psychoanalysts, all involved in determining a more broadminded approach to ascertaining the most beneficial treatment for each individual child. 

Mermaids have made a twitter thread in response to the report, trying to focus on the delays caused by the huge number of referrals to Tavistock. They conveniently ignore the review's findings “that other mental health issues were ‘overshadowed’ when gender was raised by children”. Conversely, Mermaids appear happy with the suggestions from the Cass report as “Dr Cass also directly writes to young people reassuring them that services will not be reduced or stopped.” This may be a deflection from the report’s claim that “there is still a lot we don’t know about the long term effects” of hormone blockers, which Mermaids is in favour of giving to children. As time goes on Mermaids is the charity to keep an eye on as they are the organisation that is most heavily involved in  pushing for children to go through experimental treatment, as the CEO Susie Green did with her own child. Green took her child to Thailand at 16 to have gender reassignment surgery, as it is illegal to do so in the UK. If she was willing to experiment on her own child it is not hard to imagine what experimentation she is willing to try on others.

Mermaids presentations don’t paint them in a good light either, above is a photo of their take on the gender spectrum. This spectrum implies that unless you are a complete Barbie girl or G.I. Joe, then you might be transgender. Below is a screenshot from their website which aims to explain to children what gender dysphoria is. Although on the surface it might appear relatively harmless, authoritatively informing children that gender dysphoria is simply an “uncomfortable feeling when one’s gender is different from the one at birth”, having already told them that unless  you’re exactly like Barbie or G.I. Joe you may be transgender, you can see how this might be confusing to young children.

It will be important over the next few years to keep an eye on what transgender clinics for children are up to. With Tavistock at least it was centralised, making it easy to catalogue the controversies. With the NHS planning to close it down next spring and build  two others, in London and the North West, this might dilute the focus despite the increased levels of professional scrutiny. Eyes will need to be kept on these new clinics at all times, from professionals, journalists and, of course, parents.

Of course these aren’t the only places that  people are using to groom children into thinking they are transgender. At schools in Scotland, children as young as four are being allowed to change gender at school without parents knowledge, and the government advice is that teachers must support and listen to what these children are saying. Given that the only option available to teachers is to support the child’s apparent belief and that this support is provided without parental knowledge, how can it be anything other than grooming? Mermaids were of course in support of this grooming guidance.

Scotland isn’t the only place where trans identity is encouraged in students and, in fact, a lot of progressive teachers seem to be openly encouraging it in America. You can see plenty of examples of this on the Libs of TikTok twitter account. 

Closer to home, there seems to be cause for celebration when the subject of ‘trans’ children comes up in progressive circles. A delegate at the Labour conference seems proud of the fact that 15% of his students, most of whom were autisitc, in a special needs learning centre were apparently also trans. Bear in mind that the total population of trans people in the UK is anywhere between 0.007% of the population (4,910 people) as of 2018 and roughly 1% of the population (500,000 people max) so 15% is quite the over representation.

When it comes to ‘trans’ children, there needs to be more safeguards, more reviews on treatment and many, many, more discussions between doctors, paediatricians and psychoanalysts on guidelines for treating children. A rise of 2,600% in referrals over 10 years is clearly due to more than just the mere acceptance of transgender people. I dearly hope that these professionals improve how those children that are referred to transgender clinics are treated. I would also encourage all parents to keep an eye on those people who are given privileged, often unsupervised, positions of authority in relation to their children, i.e. teachers and counsellors, their very lives could depend on it.