Tavistock clinic to be sued by 1000 families

[WarriorN]

Times article I've just seen...

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/tavistock-gender-clinic-to-be-sued-by-1-000-families-lbsw6k8zd

I'm afraid I don't have access but the headline alone...

I'm assuming it's for overly enthusiastic affirmative care and not the opposite?

This is going to highlight the affirmation model - to schools, parents and society, as being fundamentally problematic.

Mermaids have proudly flown the banner for extreme affirmation since SG got in.

Gires too.

(Note both are/ were led by women who transitioned their children and made it their life's work to get other parents to do the same.)

I don't think I've had enough coffee yet to deal with the cognitive dissonance it takes to try to second guess what they may do there.

I can't believe this is finally starting at last and I hope it bankrupts the NHS.

Vindication for all of us who have been saying this would happen for years.

If Tavistock treated 19,000 children since 1989, then I doubt that as many as 1,000 will sue.

That would be one in 19, which seems high anyway.

And I assume that a lot of potential cases arising from historic treatment would likely be prescribed (time barred) by now

Still, this is a welcome development

I wonder if there is scope to pursue the manufacturers of any prescribed drugs

Medical care based on ideology rather than evidence was always going to end up in court. Shame on the NHS for allowing this. I'm just gutted the lobby groups can't also be sued.

Win or lose, it will be sunlight on the true side effects of the drugs.
And that will hopefully stop the narrative that blockers are just a pause, are reversible, etc.

I hope this lawsuit becomes massive.

I want all doctors who are prescribing irreversible medications to children to have to publicly defend their hopefully rigorous assessments, their clear outlining of all the risks and their thorough follow up and research into any non-standard treatments.

that should be a bare minimum. As is “above all, do no harm”.

Article says it's treated 19,000 people since 1989. If 1000 clients join the action, does that mean....

at least 1 in 19 patients desist and regret so strongly that they object to how they were affirmed (more than 5%, look at me percentaging!)? Even if they lost the case, that would be information worth having, given how people tell us that regret is rare. Or does it mean...

... we might have families joining the action when their child (now adult) did not in fact regret the treatment, but the parents feel it was wrong, eg because they see it as the cause of estrangement?

I can't see the lawyers wanting to include any clients of the latter sort because what a mess that would be. However, even if initially willing, the former patients joining this action are going to come under horrendous pressure from "the trans community" to recant rather than damage the cause, aren't they?

If any come to feminism via this and end up here, welcome home.

Vindication for all of us who have been saying this would happen for years.

Surely Hat Trick Productions are going to see this today and reverse ferret immediately - we'll be seeing the Father Ted musical in the West End by Christmas.

WOW! All those children potentially harmed. We've known but it is still staggering when you really think about what has been done. I agree Mermaids should be included as a group who were instrumental in advising GIDS.

www.commonsense.news/p/how-tavistock-came-tumbling-down?triedSigningIn=true

Interesting points @nexttry, the Tavi kept no records so the numbers will be partially illustrative of how the affirmation model is fallible.

Some may feel it's inappropriate to sue the nhs at this time but I wonder if it will bring more out to speak up about their detransition or desistance.

I hope so.

Wow @WarriorN , I was not aware that the head of GIDS also had a 'trans child'. That explains a lot.
Why did the NHS not realise that this would cloud/impair her judgement?

GIRES not GIDs

Terry Reed who died last year I think, and it seems husband Bernard Reed.

Gosh, this hasn't aged well.

www.gires.org.uk/gires-projects/a-legacy-of-kindness-telling-the-story-of-gires/

Sorry. Too excited!

The law firm quoted was involved in the England & Wales class action against VW over dieselgate - something like 19,000 claimants were involved. They’ll be used to finding and persuading people to join their class action - might not be 1,000 but could still be a significant number.

It’s a respectable firm of lawyers. Good luck to them.

And it’s not good enough to place the NHS in the category ‘too saintly to be sued’. The threat of legal action is a check on bad practice. This was very bad practice.

This could have been predicted at the point when Kiera Bell brought her case against the Tavistock.

A lot of us here were predicting it far earlier than that. If anyone at the Tavi had had an ounce of sense they could have predicted it themselves when they started putting children on puberty blockers with minimal counselling and no follow-up. Idiots.

It does seem like an odd choice of law firm, however. I'd have expected parents to go with one of the big well-known medical negligence firms like Irwin Mitchell or Leigh Day. This lot don't seem to specialise in medical litigation.

How are the families who join the suit going to be protected? It isn’t as though the police act on the current threats and violence of the TRAs - so how are any detransitioners/families/children going to be kept safe and able to give evidence?

Money talks and however depressing it is this is the only thing that's going to inform how gender issues are dealt with by the NHS and private clinics in the future... namely the upcoming regional clinics and also GP care.

Article says it's treated 19,000 people since 1989. If 1000 clients join the action, does that mean....

The 1,000 number is speculation. The 19,000 appears to be total referrals, which have been running at over 2,000 per year since 2016.

From the interim Cass report we have sketchy data from GIDS:

3.12. In 2019, GIDS reported that about 200 children and young people from a referral base of 2,500 were referred on to the endocrine pathway. There is no published data on how the other children and young people from this referral baseline were managed, for example if: their gender dysphoria was resolved; they were still being assessed or receiving ongoing psychological support and input; they were not eligible for puberty blockers due to age; they were referred to endocrine services at a later stage; they were transferred to adult services; or they accessed private services.

If we accept that 200/2500 ratio, that would mean only 1520 total given drugs "directly", which would make 1000 claimants seem a very high target.

But I think a lot of the remaining 17500 could well have a cause for complaint - not getting good treatment for their actual problems because of the over-emphasis on "gender identity", "affirmation" and discussion of drugs.

Part of TullipR's claim is that he felt pushed into agreeing to the drugs to get continued attention. There are likely many more who got stuck into some sort of holding pattern where they weren't agreeing to physical treatment, but were still attending the clinic hoping for help with their mental health issues, and not getting what they needed. I think they could form part of the claim base.

True, and it will have impact.

With this and Ritchie I bet there will be more within the year.

This is great news, although there's lots of unpredictable elements. I think this law firm are being proactive and probably jumping in ahead of other firms, thinking this is going to be a cash cow for years to come. It will be very interesting to see how this plays out.

My first reaction though was to wonder how the TRAs I know are going to process this information... still firmly on the right side of history?