A powerful interview by Nick Wallis at GenderBlog with Anna, who worked at an NHS adult gender clinic between 2016 and 2019.
“My concerns were that somebody could meet the diagnostic criteria for gender dysphoria or transsexualism, but it wasn’t about gender. Somebody I remember very, very clearly, was a young woman, who was identifying as a man. She had very large breasts, and she wanted cross-sex hormones. She wanted testosterone and she wanted her breasts to be removed. Okay. But her history was that she had been sexually abused for many years by her father, and the sexual abuse was around her breasts. It’s so bloody obvious. I could stand next to somebody at a bus stop and say “What do you think of that?” And they’d say, “Of course you’d need to think about the sexual abuse.” Of course you would. But at the gender clinic, she met the diagnostic criteria for gender dysphoria. So she went through.”
Anna also quickly became aware that “about 50%” of the clinic’s referrals had a diagnosis of autism. “But I would guess a further 20%, maybe more, had undiagnosed autism or something very similar. They had very fixed beliefs, eg if I feel uncomfortable in my body, then I need to be somebody else. Things were expressed in a very concrete way: If I become a man, if I become a woman, if I get this such-and-such removed, that’s going to solve my problems.“
Anna thought her job was “exploration”, but this was “hardly done at all. It was done a bit, but hardly at all. The overriding thing was, do they meet the diagnostic criteria? And I suppose I kept saying, till I was blue in the face, you can meet the diagnostic criteria, but it’s not about gender. It’s about other things.”…
Another chilling example Anna gave was her experience of dealing with 18 year olds who had been put on puberty blockers whilst at the Tavistock children’s gender clinic. “Because they’d been on puberty blockers, it felt like being in the room with a 13 or 14 year old. Cognitively and emotionally, it felt like somebody much younger to the point where, as a team, it felt like we were working in an adolescent service. But we were an adult service. I’d never worked with adolescents. It’s a different field. So I suppose we were… I wouldn’t say out of our depth, but it was uncomfortable.”
I pick Anna up on the point about cognition. Was she saying that these teenagers’ mental development had slowed?
“Totally, yeah. Totally. And I can remember we had a training session with some of the endocrinologists from the Tavistock children’s gender identity service. And I put that to them and they went, “No, no, no. There’s no evidence for that.” I said, “well, that’s what I’m seeing”, but they were just: “No, no, no. That’s not a thing”.”
Worth reading in full.
As some commenters point out, this is the disaster we’ll return to if the government’s conversion practices bill becomes law.
Leave a Reply