As I’ve mentioned before, London’s Tavistock Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) has been dismantled after a report by Dr. Hilary Cass that found serious missteps, weaknesses, and evidentially unsupported treatments of gender dysphoric children. Tavistock’s services will be farmed out to other centrs, with a concurrent de-emphasis on the rush-to-judgement form of “affirmative care” (i.e., believe the child and get doctors and therapists to simply facilitate a hoped-for sex transition), as well as a deemphasis on the use of surgery, hormone therapy, and puberty blockers.
This is in line with what other European nations are doing: pulling back from the no-holds-barred form of affirmative care, raising ages at which adolescents can get drugs or surgery, and using puberty blockers, whose safety has not been demonstrated, only in clinical trials. In those countries, it was the unevidenced medical and psychological care that led to the pullback, while in the UK it’s it’s not only that, but the threat of lawsuits against Tavistock, as I discussed in an earlier post.
The lawsuits, as the notice below indicates, are now a reality. Of the 19,000 young people treated at Tavistock, over 1,000 of them may bring lawsuits against the GIDS via “Pogust Goodhead,” an international litigation firm specializing in group claims. The piece below allows you to start filing a claim, and I doubt readers here will be doing that, but it also outlines the basis for claims, which is of more interest. Click to read:
I’ll just reproduce the section, “What is the case about?”:
The Tavistock clinic opened in 1989 as the UK’s only dedicated gender identity clinic for children and young people. Prompted by concerns from patients, parents, and clinicians at the clinic, the NHS commissioned an independent review of the GIDS service.
The Cass Review’s interim report in 2022 made a number of recommendations on how the service can be changed and improved. Following the findings of the review, the GIDS Clinic at Tavistock is set to close in Spring 2023 and will be replaced with regional centres.
It is expected that localising services to regional hospitals will result in much needed improvements to standards of care and treatment and reduce lengthy waiting lists.
The report raised a number of concerns, including the lack of a consistent clinical approach to assessing the correct treatment pathway for individuals.
Members of staff at the Tavistock clinic reported pressure to adopt an ‘affirmative and unquestioning approach’ to children and young people reporting feelings of gender dysphoria.
Consequently, there are concerns that some children and young people may have been referred down the path of hormonal treatments, without adequate counselling taking place to understand the background of their feelings of gender dysphoria. The report addresses the issue of ‘diagnostic overshadowing’ meaning that other health conditions may have been overlooked.
As a result, some children and young people have been prescribed hormonal treatments before it was established that this was the appropriate treatment for them.
Service Specifications set by NHS England recommends at least 3-6 appointments at the initial assessment stage, Following this an assessment report and care plan should be produced.
Without a proper assessment process some children may have been misdiagnosed or other health conditions have been missed resulting in delays in being sign posted to the appropriate services.Studies suggest that a number of children who attended the GIDS clinic later regretted the decision and subsequently wish to de-transition.
If you have concerns about your (or your child’s) clinical experience at GIDS at Tavistock or if you believe you should never have been prescribed hormone treatment in the first place, please get in touch with our lawyers who will be able to help and guide you through the process.
In other words, Tavistock is being accused of a form of medical malpractice: rushing first to judgment and then to treatment.
I don’t know how successful these lawsuits will be, but I doubt that this firm, which has a good record of successful litigation, would instigate such a large-scale lawsuit unless they thought they had a good chance of winning, whether it be in the courts or via settlements. Let this be a lesson to those Americans and American organizations who are huge advocates of “affirmative care.” As I said, money talks louder than anything in America, and if we’re to assure that gender dysphoric children get thoughtful and empathic treatment, only the threat of lawsuits will do that. Even ideology must bow before Mammon.
What a world?!
I know of no medic, and I know quite a few, that thinks that ‘gender affirmative’ action on first or second contact is medically indicated. If there is a consensus, it is that fast resort to puberty blockers, let alone surgery, is a nono. Medical malpractice.
Tavistock has ruined the lives of hundreds for the benefit of what, half a dozen? Or possibly zero. There is no evidence whatsoever that puberty blockers, hormone therapy and surgery actually benefit even the real gender dysphoric patients.
I disagree. They were not imposing treatment in a bizarre experiment, they were giving the children the changes they were demanding. What is ridiculous is that it was done on the NHS, stealing resources from real illnesses. Now they selfishly want to steal more resources, for it will be the NHS that suffers, & consequently all the people who had no choice to go to hospital. Any compensation should be capped.
And if you are a parent of any decent-ish quality, you know that you must not give children what they want, you must give them what they need. The former approach tends to be taken now by parents who feel they have to be their child’s friend, rather than their mother or father.
The “bizarre experiment” aspect of this is that the investigators are the trans activists, the assistants were the recruited medical staff, and there was no ethical review board to protect the subjects, few of whom will have any chance of a normal life if they survived. I’m sure the investigating doctors in the children’s camp felt they were doing good work, and that they were on the right side of history too. It is so dangerous to let ideology drive medical care.
I’m not really clear what you are disagreeing with. That there is no serious evidence that puberty blockers or surgery leads to better outcomes? That immediate resort to affirmative ‘care’ after one or two short contacts should be considered medical malpractice? You talk about a “bizarre experiment”, which I never mentioned. There is no experiment, no experimental or study design, ethical evaluation or anything like that. Just a wild drive by trans-activists. I think it is in essence worse than the Tuskegee ‘experiment’ (apart from the racist* element, of course).
*As a footnote: since involving ‘race’, why would the wave of sudden onset gender dysphoria so disproportionally involve white middle class girls? The only answer I’ve seen -whether correct or not- was given by Abigail Shrier: seeking victimhood status by a ‘privileged’, hence despised, group, fishing, nay begging, for approval by their less privileged peers.
For all clarity, lest I’d be misunderstood: I think that the frivolous ways in which puberty blockers, sex hormones and ‘gender affirming’ surgery are offered by the likes of Tavistock is profoundly unethical. I’d say probably nothing short of criminal.
And, as said, I know (and I know several dozens of them professionally) of no physician or paediatrician not concurring there (well, they concur about it being unethical and wrong, not all of them about calling it ‘probably criminal’, as I do).
Giving them changes they needed ?????
Seriously children can’t make these decisions!! Come on man!
Please don’t address another reader as “man”. Thanks.
Money does talk. The British taxpay paid for 19,000 cases, from simply a consult all the way to full surgery and lifelong medication.
When this identity crisis arose, with a full funnel into taxpayer funding, is it any wonder that money talked to this clinic and all others in the USA? (a tactic in the US was to get the government regulators to force insurance companies to cover.) Roughly half of USA states’ medicaid systems pay for hormone or surgical transition.
I’d be curious to find out how many cases, world-wide, were paid for by the families or the person of the patient.
Money talks, and monstrously so when assisted by a raging and ruthless cultural/philosophical green-light by Woke.
If you think this cruel, the only way to confirm would be to get to the real real real thoughts and feelings of people who have radically transitioned and find out if it relieved their gender dysphoria.
If they actually had gender dysphoria.
“get to the real real real thoughts and feelings of people who have radically transitioned and find out if it relieved their gender dysphoria”.
There are already many speaking out, the detransitioners, like Ritchie Herron and Sinead Watson https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oyMbTd1crgs who were given surgery without proper therapy. It’s hard for detransitioners to speak as they are often attacked viciously by trans activists.
Very few other people who have transitioned are willing to admit they made a mistake. They have too much invested in their surgery to admit they were duped. Watch the videos by Exulansic on Substack. She has been documenting videos from transitioners where they discuss their terrible surgery results. Fistulas, sepsis, necrosis, hair growing inside a neo-vagina, permanent nerve damage from removing arm skin to create a neo-phallus, many TM with long term catheters, multiple ‘revision’ surgeries, internal scarring, nerve damage and other, bowel related, things I don’t want to type. That’s before we even go into the disasters of ‘tracheal shaving’ and ruined voices from voice ‘feminisation’.
The list of horrors is endless, but they invariably make excuses, few blame the surgeons, I don’t think I’ve seen any ready to sue.
Many of these people have serious mental health issues which should have been treated first. You often see self harm scars on their body when they display their double mastectomies. One woman said her neo-phallus us uniquely ridged because they used arm tissue which was scarred from self harm.
These ‘surgeons’ are butchers and should be struck off.
One important difference between this kind of litigation here in the UK and the States ( as far as I know) is that this will be held probably in the High Court in front of a specialist judge (probably the Family Division – in fact it might even be a cousin of mine) who is extremely experienced in such cases. Judges in the UK will look at the welfare of the child first – something that I suspect will come up frequently in any case that might follow.
The parallels with ‘Repressed Memory Therapy’ (RMS) are definitely there. The whole idea that there is ‘one true cure’ (In the case of RMS the ‘One True Cure’ was the acceptance that the patient that they had been sexually assaulted by a close male relative.)
When it was finally accepted that the whole process of RMS induced confabulation and that in some cases patients had been thrown out into the street after their medical insurance ran out there were several lawsuits in America.
This is no different in it’s basic horror of vunerable people being manipulated into decisions with permanent consequences, but the ideological capture issues surrounding the Trans Movment makes it much harder to fight.
I think it shows tremendous restraint for the parents to be willing to deal with this through litigation.
One difficult part of this whole situation is that parents are not able to get an honest answer to the fundamental question of why so many health care professionals are harming all these kids. We are not getting any answers now.
It cannot reasonably have escaped their notice that there are few if any positive outcomes.
What I do not know could fill volumes, which goes back to my main point. I do not know if mental health professionals in the UK are able to prescribe hormones and antidepressants to kids without the knowledge or consent of the parents.
Another thing that happens here is that therapists are not always honest with parents about the nature and goals of their treatment. The parent thinks the goal of the process is to dissuade the kid of the belief that they are Napoleon, but the therapist is actually telling them where to secretly get uniforms, and trying to convince them of the wisdom of attacking Russia with fast moving troops who have less need of robust logistic chains.
So to speak.
.
They only gave them what they wanted! Choices have consequences.
The problem is that the patients were usually too young to give informed consent – preteens with no sexual experience have no idea of what giving up sexual function and fertility really entails. By the time the price of sterilisation and sexual dysfunction becomes apparent it is too late, if course.
“I think it shows tremendous restraint for the parents to be willing to deal with this through litigation. ”
Especially as the cognitive dissonance engendered (!) by the dawning realisation that your brave and supportive assistance in giving your child exactly what she and her Tumblr friends wanted was possibly not the best choice either. Imagine the guilt that such supportive parents have to suppress to live with themselves and their wrecked children.
PCCE wrote “Even ideology must bow before Mammon.”
This is so clear and concise! May I quote you with attribution?
If anyone is still following this thread then you might want to look at the background to it here from a report last year in the Sunday Times https://segm.org/GIDS-puberty-blockers-minors-the-times-special-report. What cannot be overestimated is that this whole issue became part of the culture wars and the battle between transrights activists versus gender-critical feminists and gay and lesbian activists. Its not as it is in the US a nattle between left and right. It seems clear that leaving legal issues aside you have to consider the relationship between key organisations like Mermaids and behind them Stonewall, which endorse an idealist view of gender divorced from material and biological sexual difference and those feminists etc who see sexuality as a material fact. It would be hard to fimd anything more contentious in Britain since the 1930s than this debate. Many people have lost their jobs over being accused of beimg transphobic and in some cases hounded and theatened with violence by transactivists. So more than anything it is about an unusual political cultural influence on medical attitudes. The Tavistock itself is world famous for psychotherapy but the clinic mentioned became decisively influenced by these very powerful groups like Mermaid and Stonewall who have been incredibly influential. I doubt if wed even have got to the point of former patients suing the NHS were it not for people, mainly women taking some very real risks to challenge the hegemony of trans ideology. Bell’s original report led to him having to take retirement as he became so hated by activists and parents determined to transition their children even though he is regarded as one of the great psychotherapists of his generation. It is arguably the nearest thing to McCarthyism in UK history. Famous journalists like Suzanne Moore were forced out of the Guardian for suggesting anything was possibly wrong with trans theory. Even the Conservative government was somewhat scared of the trans movements influence and organisations like Stonewall and Mermaids. Hence the Cass report was commissioned which wound down the clinic though maby in the trans movement ignore it is claim it is wrong. It was, perhaps ironically as she is of course the famous childrems writer, JK Rowling who had the profile, gumption and the money to fight as a feminist against trans ideology despite endless death threats, hate mail and transactivists trying to destroy her reputation and cancel her work. When the history gets written her role will be regarded as crucial. The battle is still ongoing as people must be aware from recent events in Scotland and the largest constitutional crisis in UK history for many years. The law suit will certainly matter but there is also an ongoing charity commision investigation of Mermaids which might cause serious problems if they have failed to safeguard children as seems very likely. It was Mermaids and Stonewall who played such a large part in pressurising the clinicians to follow trans ideology so there is an intertwined situation. A successful group lawsuit against the clinic will have a huge political and cultural effect here and will be made much easier if current political events in Scotland and the UK undermine trans activism. Time will tell how this works out as it isn’t by any means over yet and Britain and Scotland are still planning to contest the Scottish gender recognition act in court ( the UK government blocked it which is the first time this has ever happened).
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Of the 1000 possible cases, how many are currently being prepared, now they are no longer limiting it to just Tavistock, and not just minors?
They had zero.