Time to Think: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Tavistock's Gender Service for Children

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Meticulous, difficult, essential; three words I’d use to begin to describe this text. It will take some work to square up the repercussions of the information in the detailed documentation of the fall of GIDS, the UKs only gender specialist unit, with my continued and determined belief in Trans rights. I’m embarrassed to say I knew absolutely none of it prior to reading this and on finishing it I’m incredulous that I knew nothing. Where was NHS England in all this? How did the Care Quality Commission judge the service ‘good’ in 2016 when the following year so many concerns were relayed to David Bell? A blunter question may be: why did the GIDS and the Trust not care enough about teenage girls, autistic, gay and troubled children to provide them with a service in line with normal standards of paediatric health care? Additionally, only since 2018 has modern research with all the capabilities it has today – considered this a possibility. SEE here Maternal DES Exposure and Intersex Development in Males – Hormones Matter and here – Geneticists make a new discovery about how a baby’s sex is determined — ScienceDaily. As distinct from those who would have been genetically female, but were instead born male due to a problem occurring in the endocrine system during their sex development. Is that by the time puberty arrives, almost a decade will have passed, making social contagion an unknown factor that cannot be ignored?

Hannah Barnes “Time to Think: The Inside Story of the Hannah Barnes “Time to Think: The Inside Story of the

An absolute must read for anyone who has heard anything or been involved in the transgender debate. Unsurprisingly, it's always the principled few who push against the current and take all kinds of risks to get the word out.When one of the leaders of a service that helps children to access powerful, life-changing drugs comments that what they are doing is “mad”, there is clearly a very big problem.” This incredibly important book shows that we still don’t know how many children were damaged for life. I want every institution and every politician who pontificates about gender to read this book and ask what happened to all those lost girls and boys – and why they were complicit’ – Daily Telegraph Some who had come into the profession to do talking therapy did almost none, as patients were referred for drugs sometimes after two sessions. Meanwhile, some of the gay staff were wondering if this all just conversion therapy for gay kids. Some staff felt under surveillance; they had doubts but they were reticent as expressing them could lead to accusations of transphobia. To say that sex itself is immutable was clearly heretical.

Swift Press | Time to Think

It's really, really difficult. So I have experienced those issues before, but I think perhaps not to the scale here. A powerful investigation … The interviews with staff and children — some who have happily transitioned and some who have not — show how complex the issues are. Not a comfortable read but meticulous and thought-provoking’ – Camilla Cavendish, Financial Times, Best Summer Books of 2023 When things are sensitive, it is always difficult to persuade people to talk to you. And really often in journalism, there's not much in it for them to do so. To put your head above the parapet is difficult. And especially, as you will know from reading the book, there are people who have put their head above the parapet, who have been named, who are prepared to say ‘I got things wrong’ as well. And that's incredibly rare. As numbers increased, the caseload per clinician increased beyond safety levels. In 2015, in an attempt to calm the over-worked clinicians, an organisational consultant was called in. The subsequent report warned that GIDS was “facing a crisis of capacity to deliver effectively on an ever-increasing demand for its service” and recommended immediate action to cap referrals. This was ignored by GIDS director, Polly Carmichael. The caseloads continued to rise, first 50, then 70, , 90 or 100 patients each. One clinician reported an astronomical caseload of 140 patients. With some caseloads comparative to the size of a small primary school it is little wonder that clinicians had difficulties recognising their patients when they arrived for their second appointment. The testimonies in the book are raw, honest and moving. More than that they are a vital piece of evidence that shows – without prejudice – where things went right, where things went wrong and, remarkably, the thousands of cases of young people where we still don’t know’ Emily MaitlisWe were seeing very haphazard referrals from Irish psychologists operating mainly in the private sector, where somebody was going along, saying, ‘I think I have gender dysphoria,’ and there wasn’t really an assessment being carried out,” O’Shea says. “We began to see more and more disasters,” Moran explains. There were suicides; other people barely left their homes in years. To raise safeguarding concerns about children and young people who happen to be experiencing gender related distress should be viewed in the same way as it should be about anybody. It's not transphobic. Sonia was accused of being transphobic. But for what? For asking for data and for relaying concerns about some of the young people under GIDS’s care. It's striking. And some of those young people did seem to be in desperately difficult situations. And it seems that really anybody who raised concerns about the safeguarding of children was dismissed in some form or another. As someone who knew about this years ago, as people were writing to me asking my former newspaper to investigate it, it would suit my agenda to say this was all down to trans activism. But it’s not that simple. Arguably, GIDS moved from being a disorganised, ill-thought out service to being the centre of a medical scandal when, in the 2010s, numbers grew exponentially. The demographics also changed –across the world – as there came reports of an unexplained rise of teenage girls presenting at clinics with gender-related distress. In the gender identity literature there had never been significant numbers of teenage girls; pre-pubescent boys had always been the largest proportion of the paediatric cohort. In addition, the cases of these teenage girls appeared to be complex, happening within the context of wider identity confusion. One Finnish study showed that “Thirteen per cent were in care or living independently, and well over half had been ‘significantly bullied at school. But close to three-quarters of those had been bullied before they came to think about their gender identity. Most startling was that the fact that 75 per cent of the young people ‘had been or were currently undergoing child and adolescent psychiatric treatment for reasons other than gender dysphoria when they sought referral’.” MyHome.ie (Opens in new window) • Top 1000 • The Gloss (Opens in new window) • Recruit Ireland (Opens in new window) • Irish Times Training (Opens in new window)