The news that one of the governors of the Tavistock gender clinic recently resigned brings the whole organisation and its ideologies into question, yet there is a great unwillingness to speak publicly about the real dangers of allowing under-18s to ‘transition’ gender. Carys Moseley says now is the time to investigate what really goes on in the Gender Identity Development Service for Children and Adolescents.
The Gender Identity Development Service for Children and Adolescents (GIDS) has been severely criticised in recent weeks by former clinicians, research scientists and even a former governor. During the last week of February, a leaked internal report on the Gender Identity Development Service for Children and Adolescents in London said it is “not fit for purpose”. This was revealed in the press when one of the governors of the Tavistock & Portman NHS Foundation Trust, which oversees the GIDS, resigned over the matter.
Psychotherapist saw trans people suicidal due to transition regret
Marcus Evans is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist with 30 years’ experience. He told the Daily Mail that he had first come across the negative effects of gender transition early in his career when working in a parasuicide clinic in London. Several patients came who had taken overdoses because they were so unhappy due to regret at having undergone gender reassignment. He reveals that many were very angry with medical and psychiatric professionals for having allowed them to transition in the first place.
In the internal review of the GIDS, Dr David Bell showed great concern that the GIDS was not taking with full seriousness psychological and social aspects of the lives of young people being referred. The worry was that these might have formed part of the reason for their decision to live as members of the opposite gender, and include a history of being abused, being on the autistic spectrum or suffering bereavement.
However, the real problems have still not been acknowledged, which is that children and adolescents are being allowed to ‘change gender’ at all. None of the professionals who have spoken to the press in any capacity have repudiated the whole concept of changing gender. The entire idea of ‘changing gender’ is based on allowing vulnerable patients to reject their biological sex, to live in contradiction to their bodies.
Option of ‘gender transition’ always existed at the GIDS
The fact of the matter is that the GIDS has always allowed for minors to ‘change gender’. Psychological researchers David Freedman, Fiona Tasker and Domenico Di Ceglie published an article entitled 'Castaway’s Corner' in the journal Clinical Child Psychology and Psychiatry in 2002, outlining some of the early history from its foundation in 1989, and in that they make this clear. Domenico Di Ceglie was the first head of the Service.
The article also reveals that it was around this time that the charity Mermaids, which works to support children and adolescents who transition to live as members of the opposite gender, was founded. Thus, if we wish to understand the problems some parents today have with that organisation, we must in fact look at the entire history of the GIDS, as the two organisations are very closely intertwined.
BBC Panorama promotes teen gender transition
Marcus Evans rightly drew attention to the fact that clinicians who had resigned from the GIDS would only speak on the BBC Panorama documentary 'Trans Kids: Why Medicine Matters' on condition of anonymity (their words were spoken by actors). The only staff member who speaks openly is Polly Carmichael, the director, who tries to be tactful in steering a middle course between those who favour physical treatment and those who oppose it. However, this documentary is clearly very biased.
Again, just as in the newspapers, no one involved questions whether it is acceptable to allow anybody under 18 to live as a member of the opposite gender. This is a problem because a lot of parents and doctors would be opposed. To what extent was the documentary aiming to promote real public debate?
The documentary does say what is already known to those who read the academic literature on the subject – namely that the practice of administering puberty blocking drugs to adolescents came from the gender clinic in Amsterdam eighteen years ago. The BBC presenter claims that this only started at the GIDS ten years later, which would be 2011. What nobody says is that the GIDS really goes back to 1989, and that options for living as members of the opposite gender were kept open from the very beginning. Perhaps drugs weren’t used, but it is the idea that matters most.
BBC idolisation of male-to-female transition embarrassingly obvious
It seems like the BBC and other press outlets have a blind spot when it comes to probing sufficiently far into the ‘trans kids’ phenomenon. Perhaps also nobody from inside the gender clinic wants to speak about this, despite the publicly-available evidence.
However the entire Panorama documentary is framed by the narrative surrounding ‘Jade’, a young male-to-female transgender person awaiting treatment. Jade had not taken puberty blockers, and in subtle ways is presented as a ‘moderate’ transgender voice. A young female-to-male transgender person called ‘Reuben’ is also interviewed, and also presented subtly as a ‘moderate’ transgender voice. There is not one single person interviewed who has gone through the GIDS only to desist from physical transition, or to go through it completely and then regret it. This is totally unacceptable bias, especially given the huge public concern around this problem.
The most embarrassing thing about the BBC Panorama documentary is the fact that despite the presenter repeating the correct official statistics that most adolescents referred to the GIDS are females identifying as ‘male’, the entire narrative is framed by this eerie romanticisation of a male-to-female person. In other words, the ‘feminine’ boy is idolised, while girls with problems being female are effectively invisible.
Who is putting pressure on the GIDS to transition teenagers?
In the BBC Panorama documentary, one of the clinicians interviewed on condition of anonymity is ‘John’. He is a member of the Association of Child Psychotherapists, and says he has become very concerned about the large number of patients who want to be referred on for physical treatment...as quickly as possible.’
He says there is growing pressure not to question young patients. Unfortunately, he does not say from whom this pressure is coming. The odd thing is that the presenter does not say anything further about this. Panorama is supposed to be the foremost programme of investigatory journalism at the BBC. So why isn’t it probing into who or which organisations are putting pressure on the GIDS? After all, taxpayers’ money is paying for all this via the NHS, and all BBC licence fee payers are also British taxpayers. It would seem to be in the public interest to investigate.
Whilst I can guess which organisations and individuals might be putting pressure, it would not be a good idea to name them. For litigiousness runs deep inside transgender activism. One thing that is absolutely crucial to find out is the nature of their involvement with the Memorandum of Understanding on Conversion Therapy.
Time to reject the Memorandum of Understanding on Conversion Therapy
Bizarrely, Marcus Evans suggested in the Daily Mail that there should be more gender clinics to help children distressed with gender issues. Given that he has just resigned, this is a surprising statement to make in public. Does anybody really think that a sensible professional would want to work in a gender clinic, given how many at the Tavistock only spoke to the BBC Panorama documentary on this problem on condition of anonymity?
It is also telling that Evans had absolutely nothing to say about the Memorandum of Understanding on Conversion Therapy, which would have cemented the pro-transition mentality in the GIDS. Like nearly all psychotherapists in the UK he is not on record as having spoken out publicly against the Memorandum.
It is high time psychotherapists as a whole came clean and acknowledged the huge damage the Memorandum has done to the integrity of their field.For it is undoubtedly the case that the pressure to push adolescents into physical transition is because the Memorandum prohibits clinicians from assisting clients in changing their gender identity, i.e. their self-image, to accord with their biological sex.
Paedophiles invented and promoted ‘gender identity of children’
This recent spate of resignations will only bear fruit if those same therapists actually confront – or are confronted – with the fact that the very concept of ‘gender identity’ in children was invented by John Money, a charlatan who turns out to have been a monstrous child abuser. I have previously shown extensive evidence here that the concept crept into the policy landscape in the UK because it was promoted by another paedophile, Peter Newell, in the third edition of the UNICEF Implementation Handbook on the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. Newell is now in jail for having raped a teenage boy.
It is high time psychotherapists working with children and adolescents with gender problems were confronted about this, and that the press investigated whoever it is who is pressurising the GIDS into putting these teens through gender reassignment. Those clinicians who demand an external investigation of the GIDS are absolutely right. However, anybody involved would have to go in with their eyes wide open to the level to which child abusers will go to distort the entire enterprise, both within the NHS as well as in the press, Parliament and the government. Who will have the backbone to get to the bottom of the problems?