The Tavistock Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS), England’s hub for child gender reassignment which has been ordered to close down, is said to have left “thousands of damaged children” in its wake.
Currently subject to an investigation as a result of whistleblowers, parents, and patients accusing it of rushing children, particularly girls, into medical treatment for supposed gender dysphoria, the Tavistock is now set to be shut down by Spring 2023 after the paediatrician leading the investigation announced some of her recommendations early — most notably that GIDS is “not a safe or viable long-term option” for its patients and should be replaced.
Reports by outlets such as The Telegraph are now looking back on 18 years of whistleblowing and complaints about the National Health Service (NHS) clinic and the way it resisted all efforts to make it change its ways all the way up to the High Court.
Some Tavistock clinicians were even accused of “converting” youngsters who were likely same-sex attracted or bisexual into believing they were actually trans.
The notionally right-leaning newspaper recalled how whistleblower Susan Evans had been fobbed off as long ago as 2004 after expressing worry that a 16-year-old boy had been referred for hormones after a mere four appointments. Another concerned clinician, Kirsty Entwistle, was branded “transphobic” for questioning the fact that an autistic girl enjoying Thomas the Tank Engine was used as evidence that she was trans.
Evans also highlighted the “tremendous pressure” the Tavistock was put under by trans activist lobby groups such as the controversial Mermaids organisation, which has campaigned for puberty blockers to be given to 12-year-olds and argued dubiously that their effects are “completely reversible”.
Indeed, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak, the Members of Parliament (MPs) currently vying to succeed the outgoing Boris Johnson as Conservative (Tory) Party leader and, by extension, Prime Minister, have responded to the Tavistock’s looming shutdown by hinting that they might ban the NHS from inflicting hormone therapy on gender-confused children outright, questioning whether it is safe to let them make such “life-altering” decisions at a young age.
“We have a responsibility to those under 18 to shield them from irreversible decisions that will affect them for the rest of their lives. As Prime Minister, I would review access to puberty blockers to ensure we are maintaining the right checks and balances in the system to protect our young people,” said Truss, somewhat equivocally.
Sunak’s position was a little more forthright, with a spokesman for the former Chancellor of the Exchequer saying that “[c]hildren should not be rushed down irreversible medical pathways, and under-18s should be protected from life-altering treatments.”
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