Common sense prevails in the gender debate

The publication this week of the Cass Review into gender-identity services for young people marks a welcome return to reason in an area of medicine which for the past few years has been driven by identity politics. No one is denying that there are those who deserve psychological – and in some cases physical – help to cope with their condition. But the explosion in the number of children treated on the NHS for gender-identity issues (and in many cases being given powerful drugs with severe side effects) should have set alarm bells ringing long before it did.

The NHS first set up its Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) at the Tavistock Clinic in 1989, and for the first two decades of its existence it was a small outfit with a low profile. At first, it treated fewer than ten children a year, most of whom had by adulthood overcome their feelings of gender incongruence. A very small number went on to be prescribed hormone treatment from the age of 16. That all began to change after 2009, when the clinic treated 51 children and adolescents and thereafter numbers rose steadily until in 2014 there was a further massive jump. By 2016, the Tavistock was treating 1,700 children and not only had the numbers greatly increased but the clinic’s patients were ever younger. Initially, most cases had been boys who felt they ought to be girls, but by 2016 two-thirds of cases were female.

Medical professionals should have been alerted to what looked increasingly like a classic case of mass mania. But far from questioning the dramatic changes, GIDS ploughed on, offering powerful, often dangerous, drugs to vulnerable children.

The clinic adopted what became known as the ‘Dutch protocol’, derived from a single case of a child in the Netherlands administered puberty blockers in the late 1990s.