![]() ![]() By then puberty blockers had become the “only real treatment” at GIDS for children with gender dysphoria – less invasive approaches such as talk therapy were typically deemed to be “transphobic”. It can also create an out-of-sync feeling between the child and their genitals. Puberty blockers stop sexual development in a growing child, meaning the adolescent doesn’t experience a full sexual awakening. In a bid to obtain some clinical evidence for the medicalisation of children’s gender identities, a study was commissioned by GIDS in 2011 to examine the outcomes of puberty blockers on children. GIDS’s income was 5.9 per cent of the Tavistock total in 2015/16, 10.4 per cent a year later, and then, in the draft Operational Plan for 2020/21, “gender services for children and adults were said to make up 28 per cent of the Tavistock’s income.” Senior employees at the Trust were asked to give up their offices to make space for GIDS and “because it was bringing in so much money they could not challenge it.” When Dr David Bell, the consultant psychiatrist and most senior psychoanalyst at the Tavistock, submitted a complaint about GIDS in 2018, he was rebuked by a colleague who said that the Tavistock would “go down” if GIDS closed. 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’.”Īs a result of the growth in numbers, the maverick GIDS rapidly became “a beast” that propped up less lucrative aspects of the Tavistock that has been recently operating at a deficit. But close to three-quarters of those had been bullied before they came to think about their gender identity. One Finnish study showed that “Thirteen per cent were in care or living independently, and well over half had been ‘significantly bullied at school. In addition, the cases of these teenage girls appeared to be complex, happening within the context of wider identity confusion. 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. 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. His report was ignored.Īrguably, 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. This was followed in 2006 by an extensive report made by Dr David Taylor, then the medical director for the Tavistock, who outlined the issues and made specific recommendations. The psychoanalyst Sue Evans first became worried in 2004 and raised concerns about the treatment provided to gender-distressed children in 2005. The clinic operated out of a small office at the Tavistock, Although the numbers were miniscule, the cases were extreme and the work was difficult. ![]() This ambiguity seems to be a fatal flaw in the service as clinicians operated from different theoretical perspectives. Whether GIDS operated within the framework of gender identity theory or a more developmental understanding of gender dysphoria never seemed to be properly clarified. The story begins in 1989 when a psychoanalyst called Dr Domenico di Ceglie became convinced there was a need for a clinic that focused on gender identity issues in children. This account of medical misadventure happening within plain sight at the Gender Identity Development Services (GIDS) in the Tavistock and Portman Trust in London demonstrates in explicit detail how none of this happened behind closed doors indeed concerns were raised and a litany of reports made recommendations about GIDS from 2005. When journalist Hannah Barnes carried out an exposé on the Tavistock for Newsnight in 2019, she was so shocked at what was uncovered that she took time out from working at the BBC to write her book, Time To Think: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Tavistock’s Gender Service for Children.
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