This is the Times article on it (pasting because paywall). I think the most encouraging bit is the comments from Dr Polly Carmichael of the Tavistock.
A doctor who has given sex-change hormones to children as young as 12 has been stopped from working in the field by the medical regulator.
Dr Helen Webberley, a GP from Abergavenny, Monmouthshire, set up a private gender clinic in her home and started treating children who said they wanted to change sex.
Cross-sex hormone treatment, which Webberley has prescribed for a number of child patients, causes permanent body changes and compromises fertility. NHS guidelines do not allow it for children.
After complaints by two NHS consultants, the General Medical Council, the doctors’ disciplinary body, has begun an investigation into Webberley and imposed an order that prevents her from treating transgender patients unsupervised.
Last night she said the restriction “stops me” but was not a finding of fault.
“It’s a temporary thing while they’re investigating,” she said and blamed the inquiry on a “mafia” of consultants.
Webberley, who charges between £75 and £150 an hour, said she catered for children who had been denied sex- change treatment on the NHS and were “screaming in agony at being stuck in a puberty that isn’t right for them”.
She said she had given cross-sex hormones to four child patients. “Giving it at 12 is a very unusual situation — but if you met that child, you would say, ‘Oh my goodness, I understand that now,’” she said.
Stephanie Davies-Arai, founder of Transgender Trend, a website for parents questioning the diagnosis and treatment of children as transgender, said Webberley was a “rogue doctor” who was giving “serious life-changing treatment” to people too young. “Children’s identities are fluid,” she said. “The medication fixes an identity in place, with girls in particular left with irreversible effects.”
Dr Polly Carmichael, of England’s only NHS gender identity clinic for children at the Tavistock Centre in north London, said: “We are talking about very young people and one of the things about young people is that their thinking changes.
“Really having consent is about the ability to fully weigh up all the options and the risks. Given the irreversibility of some of the steps, we need to be careful.”
For under-16s seeking to change sex, the NHS can prescribe “blockers” that prevent development in puberty. Carmichael said most of her clinic’s child patients did not decide to go on blockers or go on to have cross-sex hormone therapy at 16.
Webberley said: “To keep [children] pre-pubertal until they’re 16 is just killing for them, literally, because they do harm themselves.” Referrals of young people to the Tavistock Centre rose by 42% last year to more than 2,000. Of those referred, 84 were aged seven or younger, including two three-year-olds.
Transgender pressure groups have criticised NHS waiting lists and demanded an end to “arbitrary” age limits for cross-sex hormone treatment.
Webberley said she had provided medicine to 850 transgender patients, most of them adults.
Davies-Arai said the GP’s only training in the field was a one-hour online course in gender variance from the Royal College of General Practitioners designed by a transgender campaign group.
Webberley insisted she had “read everything going on gender care, met every single type of gendered person you can possibly meet and talked to different professionals from across the whole of the world to inform my practice”.
Doctor Matt, an online prescription website which is also managed by Webberley, was suspended in April for six months by the regulator, the Care Quality Commission, which said that it “did not provide safe, effective, responsive and well led services”.
