Mick Hartley

At last the NHS is getting to grips with the Tavistock Clinic:

The Tavistock clinic faces a complete overhaul after a review found that its gender identity services are “not a safe or viable long-term option” for children and young people.

The report has been hailed as a victory for whistleblowers who warned that the gender identity development service (GIDS) clinic in north London was operating outside of typical NHS safeguarding and clinical standards.

Dr Hilary Cass, a retired paediatrician, was commissioned by NHS England to investigate services at the clinic, which has been sending children as young as ten for experimental hormone treatment.

The clinic, run by the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust, is England’s only specialist service for children and young people who identify as transgender.

It has been overwhelmed by a sudden increase in referrals from across the country, particularly among young girls who are distressed about their gender and youngsters on the autism spectrum.

In 2009 the clinic received about 50 referrals — typically from males who had suffered gender dysphoria from an early age. By 2020 there were 2,500 referrals, mostly from females who started suffering gender identity issues in their early teens, with a further 4,600 young people on the waiting list.

About one third of children and young people referred to GIDS have autism or other types of neurodiversity, while there is also an over-representation of “looked after” children in local authority homes or foster care.

It has also lost many senior staff who have clashed with the leadership over the best way to treat vulnerable young people with complex histories who are requesting experimental hormone therapies to change gender. The long-term outcomes of such therapies in this age group are still unknown.

Critics have accused the clinic of abandoning NHS best practice in its alleged readiness to offer life-changing medical treatments to children who declare themselves transgender.

Cass concluded that a “fundamentally different service model is needed” in an interim report released yesterday.

Her report calls for the end of the clinic’s current monopoly over treatment of young people wishing to change gender.

She recommended that treatment be redistributed to regional hubs across the country, to reduce the burden on the north London clinic and to ensure that young people in crisis are seen more quickly, by a broader range of health professionals.

A broader range of health professionals will hopefully include counsellors and therapists, rather than the Tavistock system of rushing these troubled young girls into an irreversible regime of puberty blockers, hormone replacement therapy, and then surgical intervention in the form of double masectomies and the lie – all in the name of a discredited trans ideology fuelled by social media and campaigning groups like Stonewall.

The report concluded: “A fundamentally different service model is needed which is more in line with other paediatric provision, to provide timely and appropriate care for children and young people needing support around their gender identity. This must include support for any other clinical presentations that they may have.

“It is essential that these children and young people can access the same level of psychological and social support as any other child or young person in distress, from their first encounter with the NHS and at every level within the service.”

The Tavistock has been accused by Dr David Bell, a former governor, of treating girls who don't like pink ribbons or playing with dolls as transgender. With proper treatment many of these girls, he believed, would go on to become lesbians. Instead they're turned into grotesque caricatures of men: a transformation which many, like Keira Bell, go on to regret.