The infamous UK-government-run Tavistock child transgenderism clinic has been accused by one expert of having ignored medical concerns for financial gain, among a series of shocking claims by a former governor.
Dr David Bell, a former governor of the now-infamous Tavistock & Portman NHS Foundation Trust, has alleged that the health service’s Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) ignored issues involving how transgenderism was being pushed onto children for financial gain.
Bell has become one of Britain’s most prominent critics of the service, which was finally ordered to wind down in 2022 after a report found it was “not a safe” service for children to be subjected to.
According to a report in the UK’s establishment-adjacent newspaper-of-record The Times, further revelations into the questionable operations of GIDS are to be published in a book later this week, which will contain testimony from a number of experts linked to the clinic.
In the book by BBC journalist Hannah Barnes, Dr Bell is said to describe the Tavistock trust as benefitting immensely from the GIDS service, with the service proving to be like “gold dust” financially for the NHS-linked operation, with any criticism of the child transgenderism services operations being sidelined as a result.
“Bell argued that knowledge of Gids’s economic importance had made it difficult for those with legitimate criticisms to raise them,” the soon-to-be-published book, titled Time to Think: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Tavistock’s Gender Service for Children, reportedly says.
Such a claim is reportedly backed by other officials interviewed in the book, with Dr Anna Hutchinson — who served as a senior clinical psychologist for GIDS — saying that the profitability of the service “more closely resembled a tech start-up” than the UK’s public health service.
Another expert describes GIDS as quickly growing in financial importance within Tavistock, going from not having a single dedicated office in the building to taking up an entire floor.
“[B]ecause it was bringing in so much money they [senior trust staff] could not challenge it,” the expert explains in the book.
The new publication is also said to go into even further detail about the various activities of the now-disgraced clinic, with some officials alleging that a number of children were put on drugs after only one face-to-face medical assessment.
Treatment at the clinic was also said to be greatly influenced by pro-transgenderism NGOs, with the former head of the Mermaids child transgenderism charity, Susie Green, alleged to have written to the trust multiple times to ask them to change general treatment methods, and even sometimes even requesting changes to the treatment of individual children.
One expert at the clinic also describes there being cases where it appeared that parents were actually pushing their children into transitioning in cases of fabricated or induced illness (FII), with one child being reported as saying that their mother wanted them to be treated medically as a transgender individual more than they did.
While it is said that the child was initially refused puberty blockers by the medic, this decision was then allegedly overruled after an intervention by then-GIDS director Dr Polly Carmichael.
“Despite the obvious complexity of all these cases — sexual abuse, trauma, potential FII — the answer was always the same,” another former medical expert at GIDS said. “That the young people eventually get put on the blocker unless they themselves say they don’t want it.”
This latest report by The Times has prompted some dissenting voices within the broadly pro-transgenderism Tory government to respond, with International Trade Secretary Kemi Badenoch calling the “scandal” revolving around the state-linked agency “tragic”.
“Let the tragic Tavistock scandal remind us to always stand up for the truth as we see it…no matter how inconvenient or impolite some may find the truth to be,” she wrote on Twitter.
Meanwhile, the former Health Secretary, Sajid Javid, appeared to use the report as an opportunity to bolster his own legacy, arguing that the government’s decision to close GIDS was “right”.
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