The Times today reports serious concerns about the functioning of the Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) at the Tavistock & Portman NHS Foundation Trust. Lucy Bannerman, the Times reporter, writes:
“The Times has spoken to five clinicians who resigned from the service because of concerns over the treatment of vulnerable children who come to the clinic presenting as transgender. “They believe that some gay children struggling with their sexuality are being wrongly diagnosed as “transgender” by the Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) clinic.” “All five former staff were responsible for deciding which trans-identifying youngsters should be given hormone blockers to halt their sexual development.”
The paper also carries a piece by Carl Heneghan, professor of evidence-based medicine at the University of Oxford, who says that the long-term effects of those hormone-blocking drugs when administered to children is not yet known; the medicines concerned were not developed for this purpose, he notes:
“Given the paucity of evidence, the off-label use of drugs that occurs in gender dysphoria largely means an unregulated live experiment on children.”
That’s quite something.
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