Following a very damning report by Dr Hilary Cass, a highly qualified and respected Consultant Paediatrician, into the activities of the Gender Identity Clinic run by the Tavistock and Portman NHS trust, NHS England has decided that this clinic should be shut down. The report found that the clinic was unsafe for patients. Children who presented at the Tavistock with symptoms that looked like gender identity disorder, but which might be symptoms of some other condition, were treated in ‘very short time-frames’ which meant that children were being railroaded into taking puberty blockers, cross sex hormones and eventually having sex reassignment surgery of some type.

What does not appear to have happened at the Tavistock is any consideration being given to trying to understand why patients present with gender identity disorders or any form of effective counselling to help these children come to terms with their own natal bodies. The delusions of children, the belief that they were ‘born in the wrong body’ were consistently taken seriously and acted upon by the Tavistock’s staff. From what I can gather from reading around the subject of the Tavistock there was little effort expended on helping children understand that their delusion of being the opposite sex is just that, a delusion.

This means that hundreds of children may have been subjected to irreversible damage both physically and psychologically from having their delusions entertained by warped and ideologically motivated adults. Many of those gender non-conforming kids who were taken by parents to the Tavistock may have ended up as normal balanced straight or LGB people if they had either been left alone or helped to understand that it’s not that their body is wrong, it’s just that they feel different from the majority.

I’m shocked at just how much has gone wrong at the Tavistock but some of the things that make me most angry and concerned are related to how ideologically captured the Tavistock clinic had become. According to press reports, Trans activist groups had an enormous amount of influence and power over and within the Tavistock clinic, a far greater influence that maybe they should have had. This influence from trans activists created a situation where those who had safeguarding concerns about how the children were being treated by the clinic or who questioned the activist prescribed treatment regimes were smeared as ‘transphobic’ or treated badly because they raised concerns.

At the Tavistock the practise of medicine became overtly and unjustifiably politicised. Rather than concentrate on what was best for the patient and working towards an outcome that involved the least psychological and physical damage to the patient, the clinical and management staff of the Tavistock always kept one eye on what the trans activists wanted. This has resulted in a situation where children who might possibly have been better served by having counselling to reconcile themselves with their bodies or to help them understand that it’s not that their body is wrong but their view of it, ended up being sent into a medical tornado of puberty blockers, cross sex hormones and eventually gender reassignment surgery, that in many cases has not helped and in some cases has been enormously counterproductive.

The Tavistock scandal is probably one of the worst medical scandals to hit Britain so far this century. Physically healthy but mentally ill children were pushed along treatment paths that although not the best thing for them, kept the transgender activists both inside and outside of the Tavistock clinic on side. In my own view of this situation what has happened at the Tavistock is comparable to the over use in the 20^th century of the practise of Leucotomy/Lobotomy, where a medical fashion has been followed, not only with little regard for the needs of the patient, but also long after sufficient evidence has accrued to show that the treatment and its outcomes might be worse than the actual condition that the treatment was supposed to alleviate. The results of the Tavistock deciding that they would be uncritical enthusiasts for a particular form of medical treatment, in this case paediatric gender transition, are going to be both horrible and legion. The victims of the Tavistock will suffer for decades to come. They will be robbed of properly functioning bodies, sterilised at ages where the patient could not comprehend what this meant, physically and psychologically mutilated and forced to live in pain and subject to constant and lifelong medical interventions. This is what the Tavistock clinic has done and this monstrous scandal took far too long to be halted because those in authority chose to believe the fact-lite blandishments of trans activists over the evidence that all was not right with the Tavistock or the outcomes of the treatments they were carrying out. The Tavistock might be gone by next spring, but the horrors they’ve created will live on in those who have had the misfortune to be treated there.