Following the order of its closure, Tavistock Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS), England’s main facility for child gender reassignment, has reportedly left “thousands of traumatised children” in its wake.
The Tavistock is currently under investigation after complaints from patients, parents, and whistleblowers that it hurried children, especially girls, into medical treatment for alleged gender dysphoria.
The investigation’s paediatrician has already made some early recommendations, including that GIDS is “not a safe or viable long-term option” for its patients and should be replaced.
Reports from publications like The Telegraph are now looking back on 18 years of complaints and whistleblowers about the National Health Service (NHS) clinic and how it rejected every attempt to force it to change its ways all the way up to the High Court.
The ostensibly right-leaning newspaper remembered how whistleblower Susan Evans, who had expressed concern that a 16-year-old child had been referred for hormones after only four meetings, had been fobbed off in 2004.
A second worried medical professional, Kirsty Entwistle, was called “transphobic” for questioning the use of an autistic girl who loved Thomas the Tank Engine as proof that she was transgender.
Evans also emphasised the “tremendous pressure” trans activist lobby groups like the contentious Mermaids organisation, which has pushed for puberty blockers to be delivered to 12-year-olds and disputedly claimed that their effects are “100% reversible,” have placed on the Tavistock.
In response to the Tavistock’s impending closure, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak hinted that they could explicitly forbid the NHS from forcing hormone therapy on gender-ambiguous youngsters, wondering whether it is acceptable to let them to make such “life-altering” decisions at such a young age.
“We have a responsibility to those under 18 to shield them from irreversible decisions that will affect them for the rest of their lives. As Prime Minister, I would review access to puberty blockers to ensure we have the right checks and balances in place to protect our young people,” Truss said, somewhat ambiguously.
Sunak’s stance was more direct, with a spokesman for the former Chancellor of the Exchequer declaring that “children should not be rushed down irreversible medical pathways, and under-18s should be protected from life-altering treatments.”