Inside Britain’s new trans clinics
by Kathleen Stock, UnHerd:
They said they were closing the Tavistock’s gender services — but what happened next?
Since its closure was announced last July, Gids — the Gender Identity Development Service at the world-renowned Tavistock and Portman Trust — has become synonymous with mismanagement and medical scandal.
It was supposed to be a haven for young people experiencing gender-related distress. Instead, following a string of complaints by whistle-blowers, an “inadequate” rating by the Care Quality Commission, a high-profile judicial review and, finally, a damning independent review, it was deemed unsafe.
In its place, two new regional hubs were set to open, with several more centres to follow. For Gids’s long-standing critics, concerned about the distress its tumult was having on children, this came as a huge relief.
The story, however, does not end here.
Kathleen Stock has spent the past month speaking to a range of clinicians, NHS professionals and parents of dysphoric children — to find out whether Gids’s new service will be an improvement.
The portrait she paints is stark: her findings suggest that the NHS gender services are yet to become a clinically safe space for children and teens, with senior figures still pushing an activist ideology. Only last week, NHS bosses internally announced that they are significantly delaying the launch of one of the hubs. And as she reveals in the below investigation, it is unlikely to be the final twist in Gids’s new chapter…
[…] Following Cass’s interim recommendations, published in February last year, two new regional services are being formed to treat “gender incongruence and gender-related distress” in children under 17, with several more centres planned for launch afterwards. Slated to open next month, the “Southern hub” involves teams from Great Ormond Street Hospital, the Evelina Children’s Hospital, and the South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust. The “Northern hub” partners Alder Hey Children’s NHS Foundation Trust with the Royal Manchester Children’s Hospital.
Many long-standing critics of Gids have been reassured by these developments, and by the principled and cautious approach apparently taken by Cass so far. It seems she aims to examine trans-identification in children and adolescents systemically, applying what is known about wider paediatric health rather than sacralising her patients as exotic anomalies. One parent of a Gids patient, seeking anonymity for the sake of protecting the privacy of his child, as so many parents of trans-identified children do, told me with enthusiasm: “Gender has been exceptionalised as a clinical speciality, but Cass wants to weave it back into paediatric practice.”
But the story does not end there.
Read here (£)
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