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

If Cahms is already failing and not fit for purpose, why anyone thinks access to a multi disciplinary service is going to remotely work is beyond me. There will be no oversight at all. Just practitioners with reputations one way or another. And kids / parents unable to get access to any kind of support.

Despite the fact the message from the book is pretty much 'any child identifying as trans has a massive red flag for safeguarding'. A huge number of kids were going down the tavi path precisely because of the failure of Cahms.

Publishers not being able to get things past their junior staff

I would be interested to hear more about that - maybe a journalist could ask these publishers’ senior staff how the junior staff enforced this.

Camilla Tomminey just said on GB News that they’ll have the author, hannah Barnes, on her Sunday morning show next week.

But at least there were senior clinicians there who were probably the most authentically GC people in the country. They were working with these children in appalling distress, every day. I'm afraid tbh that what will happen in the future is that centres will fe set up where that conflict of ideas will simply be buried.

I agree - as can be seen from the posts above there have definitely been thoughtful, considered, ethical, clinicians at GIDS (eg the ones that Mermaids were telling parents to avoid!)

How many of them are still there, who knows? That 35/80 employees did not sign the open letter either indicates that they do not agree that GIDS was doing a good job or that they have contracts for the new service that prohibit talking about this stuff or that they are relieved to get to the end of this job and move on to something related but less contentious!

The thing that annoys me most about all the excuses coming from GIDS is the complaints about underfunding - many of us have looked at the yearly trust-wide meetings where year after year, GIDS was unable to spend vast swathes of their NHSE budget because they just couldn’t recruit. Clinical staff were leaving at the same rate, if not quicker, than new clinical staff were coming in.

The same is replicated in the adult GICS, NHSE keep allocating more money but no one in psychology or psychiatry (eg those who diagnose) wants the work because service users arrive with a goal - there is no room for differential diagnosis or alternative treatment pathways - who would want to spend years and years and thousands of pounds qualifying in order to just tick boxes for a complicated and demanding patient group with multiple comorbid conditions and a cultural tendency towards suicide ideation?

The pilots (such as indigo) have non clinical, ideological staff doing a lot of the patient facing stuff, which probably seems great to service users at the time but the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Graham Linehan AT glinner
Remember this from the LGB Alliance tribunal? After today's reporting by Hadley Freeman on Hannah Barnes's book, Belinda Bell of Mermaids looks all the more reckless and dishonest. Barnes/Freeman report that between 80% and 90% of the kids at Tavistock were same-sex attracted.

Tribunal tweets AT tribunaltweets
BB - our data says that most people who go through transition are not straight at the end.
KM - are these girls going through transition to avoid homophobia or societal pressure?
BB - that idea is absolutely laughable that someone would go through transition to avoid that.

^^

One agency has already setup a refreshed, funded Gender Identity Service.

Not clear to me who’s leading this l, what qualifications they have, what they’re fixing and what paediatric support is included.

www.allsortsyouth.org.uk/gids-project

Some of GIDS failure is to do with accepting referrals from non doctors (social workers, schools, mermaids etc).

When a primary or secondary care doctor makes a referral to a highly specialised service like GIDS, the referring doctor is supposed to be responsible for that patients well-being until the specialist takes over.
Children referred by teachers, youth groups and charities wouldn’t have had that back up while on those long waiting lists. Children referred to kids by CAMHS should’ve been CAMHS responsibility until they were seen but CAMHS are barely able to keep track of children they see regularly, let alone those left on a list somewhere.

I wouldn’t be surprised if it turns out that the non-clinical referral route was an entirely Mermaids driven policy.

BB - our data says that most people who go through transition are not straight at the end.

Because they identify as the more fashionable, trans ideological approved option of pansexual?

or because they are all asexual after permanent pubertal blockade?

Maybe it's in the book but what's curious, is who Polly Carmichael reported into? And what structure was that, and how close was that structure, to any kind of oversight?

Because I agree with others that some people did speak out. And they weren't junior, they were senior and influential people. So how come their concerns were able to be pushed aside?

https://www.amazon.co.uk/As-Nature-Made-Him-Raised-ebook/dp/B00AXXUB2G/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?crid=17IWKQVN55BY7&keywords=as+nature+made+him&qid=1676192216&sprefix=as+nature+mad%2Caps%2C108&sr=8-1

Everyone should read this book: As Nature Made Him. It's the story of David Reimer whose penis was irreparably damaged due to a botched circumcision, and the experiment and abuse that followed.

Dr John Money set himself up as the authority on "sex changes" and creator of "gender identity".

Because Money who was the only one who knew about "gender identity" and "sex changes", everyone deferred to him and followed his lead, even when they had doubts.

I think it's a similar thing now. You have:

1. ideologues who are making it up as they go along and
2. a whole bunch of people who are either humble enough to know they themselves don't know, and so defer, or
3. are too afraid to oppose the so-called experts.

Paul Jenkins was boss of the Trust during peak referral years. In the meeting minutes he’s practically giddy with all the money and media attention GIDS gets and is very sad that they didn’t win a BAFTA for the channel 4 documentary series that Tavi & P co produced.

Jenkins left rather suddenly.

Thanks Shire. I do vaguely remember that name now. This is public inquiry territory IMO. The Cass Review isn't set up to trace accountability, it's doing something else. But inquiries take years, and accountability must come swiftly.

I find it beyond depressing that all this has been known for years now, since Bell blew the whistle. Many others have tried since and the stories are all the same. It's all been in the public domain.

• Monetary driven, lots of people invested in their big budget and big job salary and a service that kept pulling them in and so kept pulling in the nice fat funding year after year with the big conferences and flights out to exotic places. The gravy train becomes the focus, not the patients.
• Overstretched service where kids are galloped through because of waiting list pressures
• Massive interference and control from a highly fashionable political lobby group, government funded, where unqualified but politically powerful people pushed medical decisions and practice to their own agenda and clinicians obeyed (and likely would argue they were unable to do otherwise)
• A climate where anyone raising questions of ethics or questions at all, was disposed of quickly
• Open knowledge among staff that many cases were parent driven and based on a range of agendas, some very deeply concerning, with one treatment channel only
• The staff themselves seriously questioning the ethics of what they were doing even as they did it.

And yet beneath all the shiny marketing and awww bless emotive anecdotes, the gravy train rumbled on, creating lots of nice outcomes for adults. With the main product being children.

I hope we're reaching a critical mass of these scandals to the point where something starts to change, because the amount being required to build up to the point where something actually happens is sickening. It will build to that point. It's inevitable. But in the inevitable inquiry one of the big questions will have to be, why did this stuff come out in the papers over and over and over again, and yet was just let to keep rolling?

And with the dismantling of the Tavistock, what actions are being taken right now to prevent the gravy train separating itself into small cells, using the same people, and rebuilding its empire exactly in the model of the one deemed in need of immediate closure?

Jenkins ‘retired’ last April.
www.hsj.co.uk/daily-insight/daily-insight-tough-times-new-leader/7032490.article

The planned closure of GIDS was announced a couple of months later (July 2022).

So I’d say it’s probable that quite early in Cass review process Jenkins was aware he was unlikely to come out of it looking good.

Thanks for your condolences. My titbit of advice - which you both probably know - is ffs get your parents to grant you Lasting Power of Attorney in Health & Welfare when they are still in a position to do so. Don't wait til you need it - like travel insurance, by then it's too late. LPA in Finance is good too, but not enough. The reason you need it? Without LPA in Health & Welfare, you find that when your parent is deemed to have lost mental capacity - a vague area, they don't have to be completely ga-ga - then you are not the decision maker for their care, the State is - namely any hospital consultant, Social Services - they can overrule you. Jean Hills of Epsom did that with us - we were stopped from moving Mum from that care home having given notice - the care home promptly phoned them up to let them know - and her life was put at risk on many occasions - there was a choking incident where she nearly died too - again, nobody held to account. Social Services will be in cahoots with the care provider, always.

The Covid in care homes scandal was no surprise to me, it became a turkey shoot. That care home mentioned lost 25 residents acc to the CQC during the main lockdown year. Usually losses in each care home don't get to double figures. Deaths of the elderly save the State money, of course, in pensions and prescriptions, plus they get a nice windfall inheritance tax.

I seem to be hijacking this thread but it all does link up and I was interested at the same time with the Tavistock scandal because one finds that whenever there are profits involved, care will be adversely affected and whistleblowers will be targeted for some pretty extreme mistreatment - they'll face smears, defamation, even have the police called out on them to criminalise them. It's all done according to the playbook.

You can find more on LPA for your parents by going on the 'Elderly Parents' forum on Mumsnet. To get it, you download a form from the Govt website, print it out, get the signatures in the right order, witnessed, then send it off with an £80 cheque for thereabouts.

Of course, many of us don't ordinarily frequent that forum, so I thought I'd drop it here too.

Oh, and just to let you know - we WERE self-funding, that won't help you. We were paying around a grand a week, week in week out for Mum's care but as I suggested, where money is involved... we were subsidising Council-funded tenants as all self-funders do; the Council won't want you to leave, esp if there's a load of incriminating stuff on your parent's medical notes - which, you should know, you are not even allowed to read if you didn't get LPA in Health & Welfare, just sit with that one for a while.

It is similar to the Tavistock case because it outlines the sheer powerlessness that families can endure once the State or money-orientated care providers get hold of your relative.

The account from the young TM of their distress in being told wanting to freeze sperm was at odds with their desire to take the medical route of transitioning and that this did not meet with welfare requirements for any subsequent offspring - the journalist seems to imply that the reason for the apology from the NHS for saying this was that the TM found it upsetting to hear.

Within the information given by the article, this would seem two extremely good reasons. I'm not sure why they were outweighed and later viewed as wrong on the grounds of making the patient cry?

You don’t have to be elderly to get an LPA - I’m 37 and have one. I don’t want the state in charge if I get hit by a bus, I specifically want my mum (not dad) making the decisions.

I read both of those articles. I already knew most of the information in them, but it is still so enraging and upsetting to read. If I buy my MP Barnes’ book, do you think she might actually listen to the concerns this time? Or will I just get a #bekind response again?

clinicians obeyed (and likely would argue they were unable to do otherwise)

Another comparison with East Germany: ‘Do as you are told or else…….’

Tweet from Transgender Trend (3 years before Jenkins announced early retirement)

Bizarre letter to the Observer co signed by Paul Jenkins and Polly Carmichael (1 month before Jenkins announced early retirement)

Letter is a response to this editorial comment piece:
www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/mar/20/observer-view-cass-review-gender-identity-services-young-people

Helen AT mimmymum
‘Gender critical’ transphobe and BBC Newsnight researcher, Hannah Barnes, new book is just a rehash of the transphobic narratives previously spun in her BBC Newsnight segments targeting Tavistock GIDS!

This is yet more twisting of the facts to support her bigoted ideology

Safeguarding and ethics = Transphobic narratives.

Publishers really need to look at their recruitment and employment practices. One suspects that they are hiring only the kind of people who can afford to do unpaid internships and then a few years living in London on precarious, low wages, rather than people who actually merit a career in publishing.

Supporters of Mermaids etc come from all backgrounds not just ‘posh’ people as is your implication.

It was a comment about the publishing industry in general. What on earth made you think it was about Mermaids?

Thank you for highlighting this - I went out and bought a paper to see was the story included in the Irish edition, and yes it was. Very important because Irish children were being referred to the UK, including to the Tavistock RInotP - there were already some GPs going slowly - now they have more evidence to support them doing so in the interest of their patients.