NHS clinic ‘treating girls who don’t like dolls as if they are in wrong body’
THE NHS treats girls who ‘don’t like pink ribbons and dollies’ as if they were born in the wrong body, a whistleblower has said.
Dr David Bell – a former governor at the Tavistock and Portman Trust, home to an NHS gender clinic for children – claimed staff believe the ‘only acceptable explanation’ for a range of complex issues is that a young person is transgender.
The consultant psychiatrist described the trust as a ‘gateway to puberty blockers’ which put children and young people on the path of a lifetime of medical treatment.
Around 98 per cent of teenagers who are put onto puberty blockers go on to take cross sex hormones, he added.
Dr Bell described the rapid progression to drugs and even surgery in the NHS as ‘a form of conversion therapy’.
He told a conference organised by Genspect – a parental support group for those concerned about treatment their children are receiving – that those ‘unwilling or unable to conform to stereotypes’ are ‘misunderstood’ as being transgender.
Dr Bell said medical intervention was supporting a ‘rigid, binary construction of gender’ based on the view that ‘if you don’t like pink ribbons and dollies you are not really a girl’, the Telegraph reported.
He first raised his concerns about the trust three years ago, when he argued that it was ‘not fit for purpose’.
Referrals for children as young as three have soared from 135 in 2010/11 to more than 2,000 a year now.
Dr Bell said gender-focused services in the NHS should be scrapped, and issues should be addressed as part of mental health treatment instead.
He also claims the ‘influence of powerful political lobbies’ means staff at the clinic are scared to raise concerns in case they are labelled transphobic.
A spokesman for the London trust said its ‘gender identity development service’ works on a ‘case-by-case basis, with no prior expectation of what the right outcome might be’.