UK: NHS to close Tavistock child gender identity clinic

[Shiloh]

Source: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-62335665

NHS to close Tavistock child gender identity clinic
By Jasmine Andersson & Andre Rhoden-Paul
BBC News
Published 1 hour ago

The NHS is to close the UK's only dedicated gender identity clinic for children and young people.

Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust has been told to shut the clinic by spring after it was criticised in an independent review.

Instead, new regional centres will be set up to "ensure the holistic needs" of patients are fully met, the NHS said.

The trust said it supported plans for a new model due to a rise in referrals.

The changes will take place after an independent review, led by Dr Hilary Cass, said the Tavistock clinic needed to be transformed.

She said the current model of care was leaving young people "at considerable risk" of poor mental health and distress, and having one clinic was not "a safe or viable long-term option"...

 

[Shiloh]

Source: https://www.segm.org/GIDS-puberty-blockers-minors-the-times-special-report

July 1, 2022
What Went Wrong at the Tavistock Clinic for Trans Teenagers?
The following Special Report from the Times Magazine (June 17th, 2022) has been reproduced fully, with permission

For me it began with a graph. In 2017, I was shown a chart of children referred to GIDS, the Tavistock and Portman Trust’s Gender Identity Development Service clinic in northwest London. Overall case numbers had risen – from just 72 in 2009-10 to 1,807 in 2016-17 – but there was something more puzzling. Female referrals, once a fraction of males, now made up 70 per cent: from 32 to 1,265. The number of teenage girls with gender dysphoria (ie profound discomfort with their biological sex) had risen by 5,000 per cent in 7 years.

My journalistic curiosity was sparked, more so when I could find no mention of this in the mainstream press. The only people collecting data and testimony were online parents’ groups in Britain and the US. Moreover, their stories revealed a distinct pattern, repeated worldwide from Australia to Sweden.

The stories all began with a daughter who rejected “girlie” clothes and toys for “boyish” pursuits like skateboarding, comics or video games. At primary school she was mainly happy, and parents quietly assumed (and accepted) she would grow up a lesbian. But then puberty loomed. Now at secondary school she was bullied for looking “butch” or having same-sex crushes. She was often mentally vulnerable, prone to anxiety, mood disorders, ADHD, depression or self-harm. She was horrified by her emerging female body: breasts that brought unwanted sexual attention; periods she found disgusting. Retreating into online forums, she emerged convinced she was really a boy.

Still parents were mainly unfazed: they didn’t care if their daughter had short hair or wore only jeans. They weren’t much concerned “she” asked to be called “he” and chose a male name. When a daughter, typically at 12-14, was referred to GIDS they assumed the Tavistock, world famous for its psychodynamic therapy, would explore a child’s myriad underlying issues. Instead, sometimes after only two sessions, their daughter was recommended for the puberty-blocking drug Lupron – a “pause button”, they were told, while s/he explored gender identity and decided whether to progress to testosterone at 16.

Many parents, informed by trans activist groups their child may commit suicide if they went through the “wrong puberty”, signed the consent form. Others did research: they discovered that Lupron, while used to chemically castrate sex offenders or treat prostate cancer, is unlicensed for gender dysphoria. They read blogs by “detransitioners”, mainly young women in America – where private gender clinics perform double mastectomies on girls as young as 13 (a process TikTok-savvy surgeons jocularly call “Teetus Deletus”) – who later regretted this hasty, irreversible process. And they felt an urgent mission to tell the world what GIDS was doing.

It wasn’t the parents’ views that surprised me when I began my own research, but clinicians within the Tavistock who were both desperate to speak out and terrified of being identified. So we met in discreet cafés, with one clinical psychologist driving across London to my home while heavily pregnant. Pacing my kitchen, visibly upset, she described her frustration and horror that a new kind of patient – distressed, same-sex attracted girls with complex problems – was being funnelled by GIDS towards a universal panacea: medical transition...

 

[Emily]

The question is, what could have possibly gone right there? Thank goodness there were advocates there for the children. Bad thing is that Tavistock still has this legal win that could be a precedent.

https://flutrackers.com/forum/forum...ercussions-court-of-appeals-overturns-verdict