Telegraph article on Tavistock lawsuit

[BovaryX]

^This week Mrs Evans, 62, applied for a judicial review into whether NHS guidelines - which are followed by the Tavistock - on administering hormone blocking drugs are unlawful. Her lawyers are arguing that the provision of the drugs to under 18s is illegal because children cannot give valid consent to the treatment. If the application is granted, the High Court will be asked to consider whether the practices are in breach of the law.
“There was a significant lack of interest from hospital bosses in the downsides of any treatment,” he told the Telegraph, from the couple’s south-east London home. “The first thing that landed on my desk were these two really serious complaints, which completely tied with everything Sue been talking about 14 years earlier - only this time around it was 10 times worse because of the exponential rise in patients^

www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/01/11/fear-young-trans-patients-could-sue-nhs-negligence-former-tavistock/

Thanks for posting OP - does anyone have a share token for this please?

Unfortunately the Telegraph doesn't do share tokens for this forum so I can't post one.

Mrs Evans, who is in the midst of raising £50,000 through an online crowdfund to help pay her legal fees, said: “I fear that in 10 years time, there will be a lot of people in their mid-20s whose lives have been wrecked by poor assessment and poor evidence based treatment, who will have been rushed down a path which they should never have been taken down so swiftly. “We have a situation where clinical sense has been overridden by political lobbying and activism. And I am not ashamed to say that. “I fear that some of these young transgender patients will have grounds to sue the NHS in years to come

They also describe how any questioning was dismissed as 'transphobic or prejudicial'

clinical sense has been overridden by political lobbying and activism.

In fact all kinds of policy and standards and procedures right the way across society, carefully developed over decades to be good practice, have been permitted to be overridden by political lobbying and activism. To the detriment of those policies, standards and procedures, to public trust, to the general public and most reprehensibly to children.

There will be a lot of people with a lot to answer for, and a lot of departments and organisations so severely compromised that the only solution will be to close the department, sack everyone employed by it, and begin to construct it again from scratch. While going through every single policy to check who advised on it, what were their qualifications to advise in the first place, has their position of trust or that of the group they represented been compromised, what consideration was made of other groups apart from trans people and the impact upon them, and most of all, is the policy compatible with the law. Much of the civil service will be compromised beyond recovery. The NSPCC is another one.

This will go into the history books as a world wide example of What Not To Do. And what the fuck you do to clean up the mess when your ruddy government was asleep at the wheel and was so stupid as to permit it to happen, despite their many policies supposed to prevent it.

Just to add actually, if you looked at this as you would a serious case review in regards to a massive failure to protect a vulnerable person or group: (These are the questions and main areas of failure in the majority of serious case reviews)

• Were the difficult questions asked? Or did service providers in a position of responsibility chicken out?

• Who took responsibility for ensuring compliance with law and process - or was the buck constantly passed around in the hope someone else would be brave enough to do the dirty work and take the flak for it?

• Were the needs and wishes of challenging and difficult adults who used threatening and unpleasant and behaviour if displeased, placed over and above the needs of the vulnerable person/group by the responsible service providers?

• Did the needs of that group slip to become the focus of the providers' time, attention and provision? Did professionals seek through this to 'keep them on side' to avoid dealing with the behaviour?

• Did the responsible service providers follow their safeguarding requirement to 'think the unthinkable', no matter how unpleasant or how angry that might make others involved in the situation, to ensure that harm did not happen to the vulnerable because of 'not wanting to suggest something accusatory or not nice'?

• Did service providers share information between themselves and show proper responsibility in checking facts, details, backgrounds, suitability, qualifications and history for those allowed to be within vulnerable situations or placed in positions of responsibility? (Such as delivering training/writing policies, advising govt)?

Michelle
Were the difficult questions asked? Or did service providers in a position of responsibility chicken out?
I agree with your analysis. This is so shocking because the institutional capture is so explicit and so damaging. Anyone who questioned puberty blockers was immediately accused of 'transphobia' Increasingly control words are being used to silence criticism. It is damaging to democracy and as this example demonstrates, the most vulnerable suffer. I think class action lawsuits are inevitable in a decade

That is a very interesting perspective, Michelle - thank you.

Here

Further to Michelle's excellent posts upthread, an article from 2018 by Professor Kathleen Stock:
medium.com/@kathleenstock/womens-place-talk-full-text-house-of-lords-oct-10th-2018-b1f3d70c4559

Quote:
I take it that the selection of advisors on a particular issue should follow four basic and commonsensical principles:

· All groups affected should be represented

· Advisors should have relevant expertise, and should advise only on areas where they have expertise.

· Advisors shouldn’t have backgrounds which undermine their credibility.

· Advisors should, where possible, appeal to independently verified evidence to back up their views.

For an example where these four principles were not put into practice, I’d like to look at the select committee report from the Transgender Equality inquiry, which came out in January 2016.