Tavistock scandal ‘on a par with East German doping of athletes’ - top of Times home page tonight

[Fenlandia]

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/e04f4958-aa26-11ed-8a03-b2faadede0c5?shareToken=81bddfc85342137edc81797069ccd8cb

Well done on providing share token. I was hoping someone would. Just read it via Twitter. It's left me feeling quite despairing for the common sense and integrity of senior NHS managers and politicians. Thousands of kids affected, if I've read that correctly, either through the effects of puberty blockers or the lack of appropriate therapy. Massive scandal.

And just undermeath it Hadley Freeman's interview with Hannah Barnes:

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/f38ca170-a236-11ed-9d5c-69bd3c5b98b3?shareToken=08c87b70474a5200b2d70b4b1cd67574

Thank you Glen Keogh for this piece, Hannah Barnes for doing real journalism (good luck with the book) and thank you to everyone who fought to get this scandal known about.

Ah, it was Hadley's article I read. Will catch up with the other one now.

This point is very interesting:

The clinic accounted for almost 30 per cent of the Tavistock NHS Trust’s income by 2021 and staff said it resembled a “tech start-up” with regular trips to international conferences.

Homophobic, accepting of parents peccadilloes, and brought in lots of money: well, I wonder exactly at what point there will be next obvious step in this story regarding the exploitation of children.

Thanks Igneo, so much to take in and I'm still digesting the first piece! Even if you've followed the story for years there's new revelations coming out, like this

"In 2016, Susie Green, former head of the pro-trans charity Mermaids, emailed Dr Polly Carmichael, who was then the head of Gids, asking to cut the time children had to spend on puberty blockers before irreversible cross-sex hormones could be introduced." But Mermaids aren't medical experts are they!

And Susie Green was right in the middle of it. Colour me fucking surprised.

But the worst bit is the clinicians themselves saying “Will we look back in 10, 20 years and say, “What the hell did we do?”?”

Sweet Jesus.

Did Mermaids know this was coming and it was another reason they turfed (!) Green out?

I've been following this saga for 4.5 years and this article still made me feel such rage that I felt nauseous.
The Times app sent a push notification to my phone for the Hadley interview, which it seldom does (one a week maybe?) and it's still top of the page!

Anastassis Spiliadis, a family therapist, told Barnes of the impact of outside groups, and parents, on decisions to refer often vulnerable children for puberty blockers.
He said in his four years at the service, on two occasions he decided that children from complex family set-ups and backgrounds should not be placed on blockers. However, the families complained and “both ended up on the blocker”.
Parents who complained were referred to “clinicians who we all knew it was much easier to get on hormones through them, rather than other clinicians”, he said.
There were also concerns that parents were pushing children into transitioning, in cases of fabricated or induced illness (FII), previously known as Munchausen’s syndrome by proxy.
In one case, he said, the child told him, “my mum wants this for me”, or “my mum wants the blocker more than I do”. He said there was sexual abuse and domestic violence in the family and he and a colleague agreed that they would not be putting the young person forward for puberty blockers. However, this decision was allegedly overruled by Carmichael.
On other occasions a change in clinician would be requested by Green, the Mermaids chief, Spiliadis said.

“Parents who complained were referred to “clinicians who we all knew it was much easier to get on hormones through them, rather than other clinicians”, he said.”

Having been a member of the Mermaids forums at that time, I can confirm that parents regularly rated clinicians on their level of buy-in to trans ideology, and advised each other on how to complain and get switched to someone who was more likely to prescribe blockers, as desired.

I know others have said this but this is going to be the next medical scandal and end up with a major inquiry like the Infected Blood Inquiry.

Jesus, the bit that jumped out at me was the kid saying "Mum wants this for me more than I do" WTAF!

Children are generally safer with their mother than anyone else. But that doesn't mean sexual abuse by a mother never happens. Surely to god they should have been looking out for it.

@umbel, I don't know if you could tell parents' motivation, but what was your impression of why parents were so keen to get their children onto medication? Fear of suicide, homophobia, pressure from their children, blind belief in what they were reading on the internet and being advised by Mermaids?

From Hadley Freeman's article:

In around the year 2000, the trust asked Di Ceglie to draw up a report of who its patients were. The results were astonishing. Most of Gids’s patients were boys with an average age of 11. More than 25 per cent of them had spent time in care, 38 per cent came from families with mental health problems and 42 per cent had lost at least one parent, either through separation or death. Most had histories of other problems such as anxiety and physical abuse; almost a quarter had a history of self-harm. No conclusions were drawn and Gids continued to treat gender dysphoria as a cause, rather than a symptom, of adolescent distress.

23 years ago. It was already obvious that most of these extremely distressed children had been through trauma, often multiple traumas.

I wonder really if the parents had investment in the process. Some of them would have been homophobic, a few probably had Munchausen's by proxy. Puberty is of course the point where children separate from their parents and start to become adults. For some parents, it may have been fulfilling psychologically to have this continuing intense parenting role if they simply went along with medicalisation or complete acceptance. My suspicion is that in some homes the transition would have suited the family, not the child. The background of parents in these cases would have been very significant, I think.

Oh yes, and here's the opening paragraph of Hadley Freeman's article.

t wasn’t easy for Hannah Barnes to get her book published. As the investigations producer for Newsnight and a long-term analytical and documentary journalist, she is used to covering knotty stories and this particular one, she knew better than most, was complex. She had been covering the Gender Identity Development Service (Gids), based at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust in north London — the only one of its kind for children in England and Wales — since 2019 and decided to write a book about it. “I wanted to write a definitive record of what happened because there needs to be one,” she tells me. Not everyone agreed. “None of the big publishing houses would take it,” she says. “Interestingly, there were no negative responses to the proposal. They just said, ‘We couldn’t get it past our junior members of staff.’ ”

Look at that last sentence. When I was a junior member of staff, nobody took a blind bit of notice of anything I said or thought. Now, I'm not saying that was a great state of affairs, but how did we reach the point where junior publishing staff are calling the shots? This has happened at JKR's publishers. Fortunately, faced with a choice between easily replaced tantrumming junior staff and the bestselling author on the planet, Hachette did not hesitate. www.mirror.co.uk/3am/celebrity-news/jk-rowlings-publishers-spark-internal-22198731

The clinic accounted for almost 30 per cent of the Tavistock NHS Trust’s income by 2021 and staff said it resembled a “tech start-up” with regular trips to international conferences
**
Repeating this paragraph for emphasis. It's the most important fact going on.
**
**

"Whistleblowers also allege the clinic, which treated under-18s suffering from gender dysphoria, was “institutionally homophobic” and bowed to pressure from parents who preferred their children to be transgender rather than gay. When homosexual clinicians raised concerns it was becoming a “conversion therapy for gay kids”, they were ignored because they were deemed subjective, it is claimed."

"Mermaids declined to comment."

No shit, Sherlock.

It doesn't matter which way you slice it and dice it, the whole thing and the people involved are appalling!
There truly isn't sufficient opprobrium in the world, to spell out what scum they are precisely!
And not only did we pay their damn wages, we're going to be paying them their gold plated pensions too!

Such distressing articles - child abuse in plain sight funded by the NHS under the influence of Mermaids and Gendered Intelligence.

Oh I can hardly read that without crying - all those young people 'medically damaged' and 'medically reliant'. I hope they can find peace and haven't had their lives completely ruined but how could the adults in charge have allowed this?

This is not related to publishing, but I have heard about a couple of examples where junior staff didn't pass certain communications on to their superiors in politics or blocked the senders' email accounts so that further communications became impossible etc.

Those who read the post in organisations now have invisible power of this type and do seem to use it, too, because they believe that they are on the right side of history and interpret questions/provision of important data etc. as bigotry which should be stamped out by them.