When Doing Grievous Harm Becomes the Norm

The Factory of "Gender Change"

The Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) in the UK is increasingly becoming a place of controversy.  A long article has appeared in Spiked  detailing the arguments and counter arguments that are racking the GIDS.  It is worth a read.

Here are some striking paragraphs:

Unsurprisingly, GIDS’ activity at the Tavistock has been subject to increasing public attention, and, more recently, scrutiny. In 2018, an internal report, by then staff governor Dr David Bell, effectively accused GIDS of fast-tracking children and adolescents for gender transition. Featuring damning quotes from whistle-blowing clinicians and unhappy staff members, it reinforced the growing sense that GIDS has been a little too eager to encourage young people to transition and potentially undergo life-changing medical treatment. Indeed, since 2017, over 35 clinicians have quit GIDS because they are worried about ‘overdiagnoses’ of gender dysphoria. Sonia Appleby, who works at GIDS as its Named Professional for Safeguarding Children, is even bringing a case against the Tavistock on the grounds that it is failing in its duty to safeguard children, by encouraging staff not to report any child safety concerns to her. . . . 

Nevertheless, Marcus and Susan insist that hormone therapy and other treatments should be a last resort, and even then only in extraordinary cases. They should be something that takes place after all other avenues of therapy and mental-health treatment have been explored. But too many at the Tavistock, Marcus says, are simply ‘not interested in the downside of treatment’. ‘There’s all this sort of pressure to say, “Well, it’s not really a medical decision – is it any different from, you know, having plastic surgery?”‘

Yet it is very different from having your nose done or your ears pinned back. Hormone therapy, for instance, is a serious, life-altering treatment. ‘It should try to not be at all for children’, says Susan, citing the potential for future ‘sterility or infertility’. She points out how absurd it is that we are encouraging some young people to take a decision that could change their lives forever. ‘There’s a reason we don’t let children marry or have tattoos. And somehow we’ve unrolled this treatment!’ . . . . 

This problem has come to head in the case of Keira Bell. Bell underwent surgery and medication to transition to male during her teen years, and is now acting as a claimant, alongside Mother A, in a legal case being brought against the Tavistock, for which Susan is a witness. Bell claims she was given poor care. She alleges that instead of challenging her demands to transition, and taking into consideration her poor mental health at the time, doctors and nurses at the Tavistock allowed her to undergo life-altering treatment which she now regrets. ‘I was allowed to run with this idea that I had, almost like a fantasy, as a teenager’, Bell told the BBC, ‘and it has affected me in the long run as an adult’. When asked about the importance of listening to, and not questioning, children who are claiming to want to change genders, Bell told a BBC reporter ‘it’s up to institutions like the Tavistock to step in and make children reconsider what they’re saying’. . . . 

 Yet at the same time, it is not enough to ask questions of GIDS, or trans-activist charities like Mermaids. We need to ask ourselves searching questions, too. After all, what has happened to our society that means thousands of children are encouraged to feel estranged from their own bodies? Why is it that some feel so averse that they want to change those bodies? And what does it say about us as adults that instead of questioning these children’s demands we are all too willing to give in to them?