Mick Hartley

A grim tale, which shows how irresponsible gender cultists, like GenderGP’s Helen Webberley, can ruin the lives of vulnerable children:

The father of a child who was prescribed a potentially fatal dose of testosterone by the online clinic GenderGP has described his anger at hearing the clinic’s founder deny knowledge of the case.

Family court documents show that GenderGP prescribed a 15-year-old such a high dose of testosterone that she was at risk of sudden death. Asked about the case by Jo Coburn on Times Radio, GenderGP’s founder, Helen Webberley, said: “I don’t know this case and it’s not my patient.”

John has never spoken publicly before now. His name has been changed to ensure his daughter cannot be identified.

He describes how — in his view — his ex-wife weaponised gender medicine to cut him out of his daughter’s life, how his daughter went from being sectioned for anorexia to being affirmed in her trans identity by all the adults in her life except him, how she was given a prescription for testosterone after one online session with a counsellor, and how this was injected by her local NHS GP with no blood tests or clinical evaluation.

An independent expert, the endocrinologist Dr Jacqueline Hewitt, told the court that the teenager — known as J in the documents — was “at risk of sudden death” because of the thickening of the blood caused by testosterone.

She said that in 20 years she had never before seen such a massive dose of testosterone administered to a young person. John points out that the risks were exacerbated by a family history of heart disease.

All around John’s kitchen there are pictures of a little girl, grinning at her father at different ages. “We got on like two peas in a pod,” he says. “Behind every one of those pictures of her smiling and laughing, that’s me joking around. That’s gone.”

He has lost contact with his daughter — he does not even know what she got in her GCSEs — and now that she is 18, he no longer gets court-ordered medical updates. In the final one he learnt that she was booked in for surgery imminently.

J was diagnosed with autism aged 13. At 14 she was sectioned because she had become severely malnourished. John suggested the patients on the anorexia ward should not be allowed phones but was told by a psychiatrist that it was their human right.

“One of the main reasons they’re in there is because they picked up all this stuff on social media,” he says.

He describes how the young people there would order weights to sew into their clothes. They would also link up online with “ana-buddies” who would give them targets. If, for example, they failed to avoid eating for three days, they would be given a forfeit.…

Before she was sectioned, J had told her parents that she was a lesbian, and then she and her best friend said that they were in fact boys in a gay relationship. “These are two autistic girls who were ostracised in school,” says John. After J came out of hospital, she ate nothing for a week. Then her mother made a deal with her: if you start eating, I will let you take the gender drugs.

“That was it,” John says, “Full fat, Big Macs, you name it, she was eating it.” He was told about the plan after the appointment had been booked.

“I was foolishly under the belief that being under 16, she couldn’t access this stuff. There’d be due process.” Within three months she was having her first deep muscular injection from her NHS GP, after GenderGP issued a prescription.

John went to court to try to stop it. In May last year, the court issued a warning about GenderGP. The judge ruled that as there were no suitable NHS services for J, she should be assessed by another private clinic, Gender Plus. John went along with this reluctantly on legal advice.

He wanted to establish a principle that where parents disagree on an issue of such magnitude, both would have a say. “In all of this, I’m up against my ex-wife,” he says. “She absolutely hates me.”

Now he drives over with birthday presents but is not allowed in. He remembers the last time he saw her, after she had started taking testosterone. Looking at his photographs, he remembers dropping her home: “When she said goodbye, her smile was the same girly shy smile she had as a little girl. Somewhere in there is my daughter.”

From the nightmare of anorexia to the nightmare of the gender cult. Without knowing the details, it’s possible perhaps to sympathise with the mother: getting her daughter away from anorexia by the promise of agreeing to the gender drug treatment. But where were the responsible professionals in all this – the medics?