How did the Tavistock carry on for so long?
By Fraser Myers, spiked:
That is surely the question on everyone’s mind following the NHS’s announcement this week that it will shut down the Tavistock Centre, its specialist gender-identity clinic for children and young people…
…So why were so many children exposed to this harm? And why did no one put a stop to it? The simple explanation is that anyone who raised concerns was met with dismissal at best and venom at worst. …
…The most common accusation thrown at those who blew the whistle was, of course, ‘transphobia’. An absurd smear, with its cruel implication that these practitioners must have hated the children in their care. The very children they were trying to protect from harm.
Of course, the accusation of transphobia not only appeared to discredit the concerns of the whistleblowers – it also made others afraid of voicing their own. Last year’s report by the Care Quality Commission into the Tavistock identified a culture of fear, in which ‘staff did not always feel able to raise concerns without fear of retribution’. As Marcus Evans put it when speaking to spiked in 2020: ‘The fear of [being accused of] transphobia has basically just immobilised people’s capacity to think critically.’
This lack of critical thinking and questioning opened the door to all kinds of strange and illogical views about gender.
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