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

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Why are the same ideological groups that influenced the GIDS allowed to influence policy in schools? This ambiguity seems to be a fatal flaw in the service as clinicians operated from different theoretical perspectives.

Time to Think review: the book that tells the full story of

And it seems that really anybody who raised concerns about the safeguarding of children was dismissed in some form or another. Staff seemed to be cowed by a fear of being accused of transphobia from their young patients, parents and lobby groups. A problem that for decades has for certainty – affected those foetuses born male “long before puberty” – not necessarily those born female – until after puberty that is – when the female brain matures.France, Sweden and Finland have all paused their prescription until more longitudinal studies are done. How did the Care Quality Commission judge the service ‘good’ in 2016 when the following year so many concerns were relayed to David Bell? We rely on politicians, regulators and the media to scrutinise, care and — in the case of the former — intervene if necessary when the need for change is apparent and vulnerable young people are involved.

Time to Think by Hannah Barnes review - The Guardian

Dr Anna Hutchinson, one of Barnes’s main interviewees, became increasingly alarmed that children as young as 10 were being referred for blockers, which were spoken of as reversible – though they nearly always lead to the use of cross-sex hormones for life. They say that in all other services they worked in if you were concerned, then you referred on, that's what you did. Accusations of “transphobia” became a way to ensure that the medical pathway was prioritised over less invasive options such as psychotherapy. Clinicians felt pressured to recommend the prescription of drugs more often and more quickly but there wasn’t an “overall Trust position to support them.Hannah Barnes is Investigations Producer at Newsnight, the BBC’s flagship television news and current affairs programme. The management team of the clinic was disbanded as a result and the work was nominated for an array journalism awards, including the prestigious RTS Television Journalism Awards. Because you kind of wish that you can have a more clear-cut story, of heroes and villains, and so on and so forth. Actually, there isn't agreement amongst frontline clinicians working with this group of young people about how best to care for them, and how there may be different ways to care for different people. In March 2022 Dr Hilary Cass’s independent interim report on GIDS was published saying that the current model was “not a safe or a viable option” for the long-term treatment of gender-related distress in children.

Time to Think, The Inside Story of the Collapse of the

The results were not good; “the children’s gender-related distress and general mental health – when based on clinical measures of things like self-harm, suicidal ideation and body image – had either plateaued or worsened. The facts speak for themselves; Barnes leaves it to the reader to gasp in horror and make the judgments and analysis for themselves.Yet the programme remained convinced of the public interest value of our journalism and we continued to investigate, carefully but undeterred. And then you had others who perhaps weren't so happy to have their name on the record, but would also want to be discussing things.

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There will always be cutting-edge procedures or drugs but the trialled patients will be consenting adults. The book is centred around Barnes' over 100 hours of interviews with close to 60 former clinicians who worked at GIDS. And then you have this top safeguarding lead [Sonia], who you're then not allowed to speak to because that's apparently going to be perceived as a hostile act. One of the big ones is obviously a lack of a robust evidence base underpinning the main medical treatment, so the use of puberty blockers in young people experiencing gender related distress, followed by often gender-affirming or cross-sex hormones.Over the next decade and a half, more than a thousand children would be referred for puberty blockers, at ever younger ages. He branded GIDS “not fit for purpose”; by then, eleven clinicians had left in the previous six months because of ethical concerns. And I guess what so many of these clinicians told me was also that the standard questions that one would have as a clinician in any other field, were not treated in the same way when asked in this field.