WELSH GP GAVE CHILD, 12, SEX CHANGE DRUG
ADOCTOR who gave sexchange hormones to children as young as 12 has been stopped from working in that specialist area by the General Medical Council.
Abergavenny-based GP Dr Helen Webberley started to treat children who wanted to change sex from a private gender clinic she set up from her home.
There, Webberley prescribed a number of child patients with a hormone treatment, which causes permanent body changes and could make girls infertile.
Under NHS guidelines the treatment is not allowed for children.
Following complaints by two NHS consultants, the doctors’ disciplinary body the General Medical Council, began an investigation into the GP and imposed an order that prevents her from treating transgender patients unsupervised.
Speaking to the Sunday Times, Dr Webberley said that the restriction “stops me” but argued it was not an admission of fault and blamed the inquiry on a “mafia” of consultants.
“It’s a temporary thing while they’re investigating,” she said.
The GP said she treated children who had been denied sex change treatment on the NHS – youngsters who were “screaming in agony at being stuck in a puberty that isn’t right for them”.
She added: “Giving it at 12 is a very unusual situation – but if you met that child, you would say, ‘Oh my goodness, I understand that now’.”
In response Stephanie DaviesArai, founder of Transgender Trend, a website for parents questioning the diagnosis and treatment of children as transgender, told the newspaper that Webberley was a “rogue doctor” who was giving “serious life-changing treatment” to people too young.
“Children’s identities are fluid,” she said. “The medication fixes an identity in place, with girls in particular left with irreversible effects.”
Dr Polly Carmichael, of England’s only NHS gender identity clinic for children at the Tavistock Centre in London, added: “We are talking about very young people and one of the things about young people is that their thinking changes.
“Really having consent is about the ability to fully weigh up all the options and the risks. Given the irreversibility of some of the steps, we need to be careful.”
Webberley said she had provided medicine to 850 transgender patients, most of them adults, but Davies-Arai said the GP’s only training in the field was a one-hour online course in gender variance from the Royal College of General Practitioners designed by a transgender campaign group.
Webberley insisted she had “read everything going on gender care, met every single type of gendered person you can possibly meet and talked to different professionals from across the whole of the world to inform my practice”.
Doctor Matt, an online prescription website which is also managed by Webberley, was suspended in April for six months by the regulator, the Care Quality Commission, which said that it “did not provide safe, effective, responsive and well led services”.