FANTASTICAL WORLD OF HORMONES REVIEW FULL

This now began to happen, on occasion, after only two consultations. Such organisations vociferously encouraged the swift prescription of drugs. Trans charities such as Mermaids were closely – too closely – involved with Gids. Barnes found that the clinic – which employed an unusually high number of junior staff, to whom it offered no real training – no longer had much time for the psychological work (the talking therapies) of old. So why did they continue to be prescribed? As referrals to Gids grew rapidly – in 2009, it had 97 by 2020, this figure was 2,500 – so did pressure on the service. Most seriously of all, as Gids’ own research suggested, they do not appear to lead to any improvement in children’s psychological wellbeing.

Such drugs do have severe side effects, and while the causality between blockers and cross-sex hormones cannot be proven – all the studies into them have been designed without a control group – 98% of children who take the first go on to take the latter. Unfortunately, none of these things were true.

FANTASTICAL WORLD OF HORMONES REVIEW FULL

This is a medical scandal, the full consequences of which may only be understood in many years’ timeĬlinicians at Gids insisted the effects of these drugs were reversible that taking them would reduce the distress experienced by gender dysphoric children and that there was no causality between starting hormone blockers and going on to take cross-sex hormones (the latter are taken by adults who want fully to transition). In that year, a child of 12 was on blockers. By 2011, however, Barnes contends, it appeared to be the clinic’s raison d’etre. Such medication was recommended only in the case of children aged 16 or over. But the trigger for Barnes’s interest in the unit has its beginnings in 2005, when concerns were first raised by staff over the growing number of patient referrals to endocrinologists who would prescribe hormone blockers designed to delay puberty. Gids, which opened in 1989, was established to provide talking therapies to young people who were questioning their gender identity (the Tavistock, under the aegis of which it operated from 1994, is a mental health trust). To shrug in the face of that story – to refuse to listen to the young transgender people whose treatment caused, among other things, severe depression, sexual dysfunction, osteoporosis and stunted growth, and whose many other problems were simply ignored – requires a callousness that would be far beyond my imagination were it not for the fact that, thanks to social media, I already know such stony-heartedness to be out there. This is the story of the hurt caused to potentially hundreds of children since 2011, and perhaps before that. To do so, a person would not only have to be wilfully ignorant, they would also – to use the popular language of the day – need to be appallingly unkind.

Several of her interviewees say they are happy either with the treatment they received at Gids, or with its practices – and she, in turn, is content to let them speak. It comes with 59 pages of notes, plentiful well-scrutinised statistics, and it is scrupulous and fair-minded. A journalist at the BBC’s Newsnight, Barnes has based her account on more than 100 hours of interviews with Gids’ clinicians, former patients, and other experts, many of whom are quoted by name. H annah Barnes’s book about the rise and calamitous fall of the Gender Identity Development Service for children (Gids), a nationally commissioned unit at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust in north London, is the result of intensive work, carried out across several years.

Fantastical world of hormones review