- Book Name:Time to Think: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Tavistock’s Gender Service for Children
- Book Author:Hannah Barnes
- Book Genre:Feminism, Gender, Nonfiction, Politics, Psychology
- Book ISBN:9781800751118
- Book ASIN:1800751117
- Language:English
- Date of Publication:February 16, 2023
- PDF File Size:3.58Mb
- EPUB File Size:2.68Mb
- Downloads:56
Time to Think goes behind the headlines to reveal the truth about the NHS’s flagship gender service for children.The Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS), based at the Tavistock and Portman Trust in North London, was set up initially to provide – for the most part – talking therapies to young people who were questioning their gender identity. But in the last decade GIDS has referred more than a thousand children, some as young as nine years old, for medication to block their puberty. In the same period, the number of referrals has exploded, increasing thirty-fold, while the profile of the patients has changed, from largely pre-pubescent boys to mostly adolescent girls, who are often contending with other difficulties.Why had the patients changed so dramatically? Were all these distressed young people actually best served by taking puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones? While some young people appeared to thrive after taking the blocker, many seemed to become worse. Was there enough clinical evidence to justify such profound medical interventions in the lives of young people who had so much else to contend with?This urgent, scrupulous and dramatic book explains how, in the words of some former staff, GIDS has been the site of a serious medical scandal, in which ideological concerns took priority over clinical practice. Award-winning journalist Hannah Barnes has had unprecedented access to thousands of pages of documents, including internal emails and unpublished reports, and over a hundred hours of personal testimony, to write a disturbing and gripping parable of our times.
and Michelle would attend appointments at UCLH, someone from GIDS would sit in. They wouldn’t have minded so much if it were Jacob’s own clinicians, but that’s not how the arrangement works. GIDS clinicians are rota’d to attend the endocrine clinic at UCLH. It means that on any given day there’s a chance the young people attending might be their own patients, but the likelihood is that they won’t be. But the agreement between GIDS and UCLH is that someone from GIDS must attend all endocrine- clinic appointments at UCLH. For Jacob, it meant that every time he and Michelle made the trip to London to talk about the medical problems he was encountering while on the blocker, a different member of GIDS staff would sit in each time. ‘It’s awful,’ Jacob says. ‘These were private medical discussions about things that I was already self-conscious about. And I had to talk about them in front of a stranger.’ After more than four years on the blocker, Jacob felt worse than he ever had before the medication. While his friends were getting their first boyfriends and girlfriends, experiencing their first kisses and sexual experiences, he felt nothing. ‘You have no desire, no drive whatsoever,’ he says. ‘You don’t even feel attracted to people.’ While sitting his GCSE exams he felt he was ‘being left behind’. Emotionally, he felt years younger than his peers. Michelle noticed it too. And physically, Jacob had stopped growing. Her child was not developing in the way he should. ‘I was desperate for it to work,’ Jacob says. But the puberty blockers weren’t working. And he’d been told by his doctors that even when he went on to testosterone, he would have to continue taking blockers. ‘They told me that I would have to be on the blocker for the rest of my life if I decided to take testosterone, and I was like – excuse my language – I was like, screw that.’
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