Ordered to close
The Tavistock is shutting down!
The NHS is shutting down its gender identity clinic for children after a review found that it failed vulnerable under-18s.
The gender identity service at Tavistock & Portman NHS Foundation Trust has been ordered to close by next spring.
It will be replaced by regional centres at existing children’s hospitals offering more “holistic care” with “strong links to mental health services”.
Tavistock’s Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) clinic has been accused of rushing children into life-altering treatment on puberty blockers.
In other words into making changes to their bodies they will be stuck with for life.
The paediatrician Dr Hilary Cass, who is leading a review of the service, issued a series of recommendations today for a radical overhaul of how the NHS treats young people who are questioning their gender identity.
She found that the Tavistock clinic was “not a safe or viable long-term option” and that other mental health issues were “overshadowed” when gender was raised by children referred to the clinic.
And that problem must surely be complicated and amplified by the way being trans is treated as some dazzling new religion plus political stance plus sainted status as opposed to a mental health issue. Mustn’t it? With all these adults telling teenagers that being trans isn’t a problem, isn’t a mental health issue, isn’t a mistake, but on the contrary is the most magical thrilling profound adorable identity one can wrap oneself in?
In other words isn’t it a problem and hasn’t it been a problem all along that there’s been all this massive pressure to say being trans is not a mental health issue but on the contrary a kind of divinity?
In this article at The Telegraph there is additional hope for neurodivergent kids who have been shoved along as trans and medicalized for the wrong issues in order to “save their lives.”
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/07/28/tavistock-transgender-clinic-shut-nhs-review-finds-not-safe/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email#Echobox=1659007448-1
We need to keep hammering on the fact that holistic treatment and mental services are not “conversion therapy.” As Dennis Kavanagh continues to shout into the unhearing void, medicalizing affirmative care is actually anti-gay conversion therapy. That’s the message we need to amplify, and considering the new report by the US FDA that drugs used as puberty blockers have a newly identified side effect that can cause brain tissue damage, it’s even more urgent. Not only is it unwise to prevent puberty from a development standpoint (not just making later bottom surgeries more likely if more difficult,) the medicines are being used off-label.
On kids.
Is not terribly reassuring. If Tavistock’s gruesome malpractice is scattered across the country and ‘integrated’ into pediatric psychiatry, it will be harder to oppose effectively.
I sincerely hope this change flows on here to Australia.
Seems to me that part of the problem with Tavistock was “when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” It’s not surprising that a “gender clinic” is going to be predisposed to diagnose gender issues, even if everyone involved is operating with the utmost good faith.
Of course specialization is good in some medical contexts — if you have cancer, you really do want to be sent to an oncology department. But my understanding is that we have actual, indisputable, objectively verifiable tests for cancer, so there’s not a big concern that patients who don’t actually have cancer are going to be subjected to chemotherapy based on the views of an individual oncologist.
Our own Arty with Graham, Helen and Dennis Kavanagh are talking about it here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YHVRmdl8vnA
John, that’s a concern. But there are some things to consider.
First, this is big. It is completely unprecedented in the history of the NHS. It’s happening months before the Cass report will be complete. The report on the Tavistock doesn’t say that there are some areas for improvement or some procedural problems; it says it is outright unsafe for children and should be closed as soon as possible. All eyes are on this, which can only help.
Second, there’s hopefully some benefit in placing the accountability and governance of these clinics in the hands of children’s hospital, whose existing safeguarding and government remit will cover these new services. This ought to be an improvement over leaving the single clinic to govern itself as a silo.
Third, the focus will be on multi-disciplinary teams, the idea being that no particular issue will be treated as more important than any other. Plus, multi-disciplinary teams are to some extent self- governing, at least on a day to day basis.
I’m not being overly optimistic, here. there is still plenty of opportunity for it all to go wrong and, as you say, lots of smaller clinics might be better able to avoid scrutiny.
But there are reasons to be cautiously optimistic, I think.
In fact, there is particular stipulation that the clinics will provide exploratory psychiatric care, which is basically an end to affirmation-only care.
I consider this to be very good news indeed.
A long-time friend, however, didn’t. He’d already berated me, about a year or so ago, for my ‘transphobia’ and told me how disappointed he was with me, but wouldn’t be unfriending me, just unfollowing, until I saw sense. Cheeky little git.
Anyway, I didn’t see any further posts by him until today, and he was ranting and raving about Terfs and bints closing down the Tavistock because of ‘rumours’ of inappropriate treatment of children, thus depriving him of the hormones he’d been waiting five years for, and likely forcing him onto the bottom of a new waiting list.
It took me all of two seconds to unfriend and block him.
Anyone who is that breathtakingly selfish isn’t worthy of my attention. He was a pleasant teen, but has grown into a thoroughly unpleasant adult, thanks to the cult. It’s not my place to attempt to rescue him.
Teaching people to be selfish appears to be baked in. My guess is that it’s because the belief system is so rickety it requires a kind of solipsistic stubbornness to keep it afloat, and that ends up in selfishness.
I hope in all of this, they will be revisiting instructions to psychologists/psychiatrists that mental health care must be affirming. I don’t know the situation in the UK, but I believe the APA has made that the standard. Maybe the closing of the clinic will make them more cautious, and actually listen to the children. Maybe there will be no more treating depression and anxiety by cutting off healthy organs and stopping normal development.
Ophelia @ #8: The selfishness appears to function as a way to short-circuit any population-level reasoning. As long as you’re only able to see things in terms of oneself, one cannot consider the possibility and importance of cases unlike (what one believes to be true of) one’s own. This would, of course, contribute to the hostility toward the idea that a particular person’s self-knowledge is fallible. A trans-identifying person would have to accept the fallibility of his or her own conclusions, but that’s incompatible with a belief system that requires certainty.
And, as a bonus, thinking that way means you basically ignore everyone in the world who isn’t you, in other words, you become a glaringly horrible person.
The older I get the more allergic I become to self-obsession, self-admiration, self-dealing, self-ism of all kinds. As epistemology it’s completely hopeless.
This NYT article on the Tavistock closing is utter garbage. Completely misses the point.
England Overhauls Medical Care for Transgender Youth