Girls who do not like dolls ‘treated as transgender’ by NHS trust
‘Clinicians were no longer sleeping because they felt they were being unwillingly complicit in doing harm’
NHS services treat girls who “don’t like pink ribbons and dollies” as if they have been born in the wrong body, a Tavistock whistleblower has warned.
Dr David Bell, a former governor at the gender identity NHS trust, said that under the influence of political lobby groups such as Stonewall, clinicians believed the “only acceptable explanation” for a range of complex issues was that a young person was transgender.
The consultant psychiatrist described his former employer, the Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust, as a “gateway to puberty blockers” that put children and young people on the path to a lifetime of medical treatment. About 98 per cent of teenagers who are put on puberty blockers go on to take cross-sex hormones, he added.
Dr Bell said that rapid progression to drugs and even surgery in the NHS was “a form of conversion therapy” as with “proper” treatment many of the children would go on to be gay or lesbian.
He told a conference organised by Genspect, a parental support group for those concerned about the treatment their children are receiving, that those “unwilling or unable to conform to gender stereotypes” are “misunderstood” as being transgender.
Medical intervention is therefore supporting a “rigid, binary construction of gender”, he said, warning the view was that “if you don’t like pink ribbons and dollies, you are not really a girl”.
Dr Bell’s comments come after his retirement from the trust earlier this year, almost three years after he blew the whistle on serious concerns of clinicians and concluded that the service was “not fit for purpose”.
During his time at the trust, the number of referrals to Tavistock’s gender identity development service (GIDS) increased by almost 20 times. It rose from 135 in 2010-11 to 2,565 in 2019-20, the conference heard. It fell slightly last year, to 2,242, though many health services were paused due to the pandemic.
In recent years, the number of girls being referred has increased dramatically. Last year, 1,512 females were referred, compared with 704 males. In both sexes, children as young as three were sent to the service. Dr Bell called for gender-focused services in the NHS to be scrapped, arguing the issues should be looked at as part of general mental health treatment, which considers all underlying conditions and causes of a person’s distress.
He said that as he was preparing his 2018 report into Tavistock, about a quarter of all clinicians at the London centre contacted him to express “deep concern” about the treatment and some “were no longer sleeping because they felt that they were unwillingly being complicit in doing harm to children”.
Factors including the “influence of powerful political lobbies” such as Stonewall and Mermaids meant that staff feared raising concerns in case they were labelled transphobic.
“This closed down space for thought, doubt and exploration,” Dr Bell said as he recalled instances where clinicians were taken off a case because they believed the child was not trans but gay.
He said many services were “openly hostile” to suggestions of other issues and that considering root causes was regarded as an “act of hostility as the only acceptable explanation is that the child is literally in the wrong body and all suffering is secondary to this fact”.
A spokesman for the trust said that GIDS worked on a “case-by-case basis with no prior expectation of what the right outcome might be” and that it welcomed “people from all parts of the LGBTQI+ community”.
“We are aware that issues of sexuality and gender identity may be intertwined for any individual,” GIDS said.
“We are also well aware of the intense pressure young people may feel under when they express a non-conforming gender or sexual identity in our society. The service and assessment we provide are there to offer a space for exploration of these matters.”