Mick Hartley

A look at WellBN, the gender clinic in Brighton, referred to the General Medical Council for care which “fell far short of what could be considered safe or appropriate”. From Transgender Trend:

NHS England and NHS Sussex have just published the report of their independent patient safety investigation into the WellBN clinic Brighton. The investigation report is so shocking it’s difficult to know where to start to catalogue the list of failures, from the reckless disregard for safeguarding to the dangerous prescription of life changing drugs….

NHS England needs to ask why parents’ concerns and questions about the safety of the clinic were ignored for years. As the Brighton parents who have been fighting to be heard say “The children identified in the WellBN investigation cannot be given back the years in which these questions should have been asked.”

One thing we can say for certain from reading through the report of failings at the WellBN clinic is that this is not medical care. It’s not healthcare. What WellBN practised was “gender affirming care.”

The findings of this report show that the WellBN clinic was a model of the practice of gender affirming care.

In this model all that matters is that the child is affirmed as ‘trans.’ Normal professional standards of diagnosis, formulation, professional qualification, safe prescribing, record-keeping, safeguarding and informed consent are simply not taken seriously, if at all. It’s a model so heavily invested in one explanation and one outcome that normal duty of care is seen as either dispensable or a form of gatekeeping….

What matters in the gender affirming care model is that children are affirmed, socially and medically, as ‘trans kids’, proof if any were needed that it is ideology being served, not children. It is the activist narrative that was performed at WellBN: the assumption that children are trans and will become trans adults…

Activist clinicians will not change their beliefs because of the shocking findings of this report. They will dig in and dismiss the evidence as they did with the Cass Review. Brighton WellBN will happen again and more children and young people will be harmed unless NHS England rejects the gender affirming care model as unsafe and takes action to ensure this model is not being used in any NHS services.