Time to Think: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Tavistock's Gender Service for Children

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The evidence of the book shows that the grip of the ideology underpinning the demands of these groups only strengthened at the GIDS over the years. Language changed from ‘natal female’ to ‘assigned female.’ The clinic promoted Gendered Intelligence and the Genderbread Person (the GIDS conferences we attended over the years also reflected a service increasingly in thrall to gender identity ideology, with organisations like Gendered Intelligence, Allsorts and Intercom Trust given platforms to present their business models, and audience members invited to introduce themselves with their pronouns). In referral figures for 2021/22 the biological sex of 22% of children was not even recorded.

Hannah Barnes: I told the truth about what was going on at Hannah Barnes: I told the truth about what was going on at

It's also striking that it took till 2019 for GIDS to have a standard operating procedure around safeguarding. And that was one of the results of the review. But to have operated for 30 years without seemingly the feeling that there needed to be one, I think is interesting. And then not to include your safeguarding lead for children, so Sonia says, in the drafting of it is also rather striking.Some who had come into the profession to do talking therapy did almost none, as patients were referred for drugs sometimes after two sessions. Meanwhile, some of the gay staff were wondering if this all just conversion therapy for gay kids. Some staff felt under surveillance; they had doubts but they were reticent as expressing them could lead to accusations of transphobia. To say that sex itself is immutable was clearly heretical. Those discussions are taking place in gender clinics across the world. They took place at GIDS. They're taking place in Europe, and in the United States we're hearing as well. So it was really trying to bring this out of the gender clinics and into wider society because of course, of course, this is an issue for the trans community, but it's also an issue more generally about children and young people. FiLiA: Yeah, that was a line that actually I wrote down because I thought it was such a striking line from one who's working within the medical sphere to even be contemplating it like that. Because obviously from an outsider's perspective, you want to just be able to say, well, of course, you're always going to put the patients first. This shouldn't even be a question. But then it comes to those sorts of human factors and the relationships. I think you at one point characterise the feeling of being within GIDS as being almost like a start-up.

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I think there was a complicating factor that, in some cases, safeguarding concerns… you know, there was a grey area between the safeguarding concern and the trans identification. And the service was very keen not to stigmatise these young people, not to pathologise. And so, there was a line to tread whereby a concern about a young person wasn't a questioning of their gender identity. But on balance, many clinicians felt that the bar was too high. Because of that… fear, if you like, in the service, the bar was too high for referring, for taking these concerns as seriously perhaps as they would in other services. Actually, there isn't agreement amongst frontline clinicians working with this group of young people about how best to care for them, and how there may be different ways to care for different people. And I wondered a little bit about, do you think that there's something about, like you were saying, we're not really sure if it's a disease, we're not really sure if it's a condition or if it's just a state of identity, but is there something that is almost inherently troublesome with the condition or the question of gender dysphoria and paediatrics itself? That is causing perhaps, less of a focus on child safeguarding? As in, is this a problem with the idea itself? Or is this an issue of different practices locally that seem to be going beyond the scope of what is considered to be reasonable medical practice? Given that these sorts of issues are cropping up in lots of different places? Instead, what Time to Think offers is almost like a time capsule of what happened inside GIDS. It is a forensic piece of work that captures what clinicians, patients and staff were thinking. Barnes writes with restraint. She avoids direct commentary, highlighting instead the reflections of those she spoke with:Hannah Barnes’s well-researched book delves into how this situation arose. She speaks to over 60 clinicians: psychologists, psychotherapists, nurses, social workers. It is this forensic approach that makes her findings so devastating. Barnes is not coming at this from an ideological viewpoint. Some of her interviewees are happily transitioned. Others are not. They feel that the risks of the medical pathway they were put on were never explained to them or that they were too young to understand the full implications. One girl asked if when given testosterone she would be able to produce sperm. Hannah Barnesis an award-winning journalist at the BBC’s flagship current affairs programme Newsnight. She led its coverage of the care available to young people experiencing gender-related distress, which helped precipitate an extensive NHS review and unearthed evidence that was later used in several sets of legal proceedings. Newsnight’s reporting also led directly to an inspection by the healthcare regulator the Care Quality Commission, which branded the NHS’s only youth gender clinic in England ‘Inadequate.’ The management team of the clinic was disbanded as a result and the work was nominated for an array journalism awards, including the prestigious RTS Television Journalism Awards. Some patients were very clear, from very young, about their identity. But others presented puzzles. How to approach a child professing three alter egos, two with Australian accents? Or one wanting to transition both sex and race to “become” Japanese, or survivors of trauma with compelling reasons for wishing to leave their old selves behind, or kids with complex mental health diagnoses?

Time to Think by Hannah Barnes | Waterstones

To make this clear, we are not referring to anyone who is in the least bit “transphobic.” Rather, these clinicians feel the insane increase in referral numbers of trans children over the years needs to be examined more closely as to , rather than simply ignoring the problem. It’s unbelievable to me that the most vulnerable members of our population, children (sometimes as young as 3 or 4!) are being put onto a pathway which clearly isn’t right for them and at times when they clearly aren’t struggling with gender identity itself, but rather homosexuality, and often puberty and the awkwardness that EVERY child goes through at its onset.We were seeing very haphazard referrals from Irish psychologists operating mainly in the private sector, where somebody was going along, saying, ‘I think I have gender dysphoria,’ and there wasn’t really an assessment being carried out,” O’Shea says. “We began to see more and more disasters,” Moran explains. There were suicides; other people barely left their homes in years. Time to Think goes behind the headlines to reveal the truth about the NHS’s flagship gender service for children. So I'm not a health specialist journalist. I'm a generalist and I tend to do long form journalism, in depth journalism. I'm not sure which other stories I'd compare it to to make a direct comparison. You know, I'm not sure how to answer that. But this isn’t to say that ideology wasn’t also in the air. Another of Barnes’s interviewees is Dr Kirsty Entwistle, an experienced clinical psychologist. When she got a job at Gids’ Leeds outpost, she told her new colleagues she didn’t have a gender identity. “I’m just female,” she said. This, she was informed, was transphobic. Barnes is rightly reluctant to ascribe the Gids culture primarily to ideology, but nevertheless, many of the clinicians she interviewed used the same word to describe it: mad. It traces various reports made by clinicians raising concerns: the David Taylor review (2005), David Bell report (2018), Dinesh Sinha's GIDS review (2019), Helen Roberts report (2021), and Hilary Cass review (2022).