THE BOOK THAT DARES TAKE ON THE TRANSGENDER MYTHS TOLD TO CHILDREN
They’re highly respected medical experts who’ve seen first hand how debate is shut down at sex-change clinics. Now they’ve written ...
THE rocketing number of children seeking to change sex has become a national scandal, a powerful coalition of whistleblowers, academics and medical experts warns today. In a dramatic intervention marking a watershed in the transgender debate, they have come together to express fears about the dire consequences faced by thousands of youngsters changing gender – including infertility and long-term health problems.
A whistleblower from Britain’s only NHS gender clinic for children said: ‘I’m really angry at what’s happening to these children. What I’ve witnessed feels incredibly distressing and disturbing and like something that should be stopped.’
The experts’ concerns are laid bare in a forthcoming book of essays entitled Inventing Transgender Children And Young People. It challenges what it calls the ‘dangerous’ transgender ideology promoted in schools, universities, the NHS and other public institutions.
Heather Brunskell-Evans, a former research fellow at King’s College London, who co-edited the book, said that 30 years ago the thought of a child being born in the wrong body would have made no sense to the public.
She added: ‘Now the idea, which was invented by specialists in gender medicine and transgender activists, has become universally accepted.
‘But we are collectively arguing that this unquestioning acceptance poses a serious threat to children’s well-being and safety. We hope through this book to bring the world’s attention to the public scandal of transgendering children.’ The book warns: Doctors are failing to tell young people they are ‘sacrificing’ their chance to have children by taking powerful sex-change drugs;
Psychologists are scared to question transgender ideology;
Clinicians who resist diagnosing children as transgender face accusations of transphobia;
Britain’s only NHS child gender service is failing to acknowledge other reasons for youngsters wanting to change sex, such as autism;
Teenagers who have ‘normal feelings’ of discomfort with their bodies are being classified as transgender.
Another contributor to the book, due to be published later this year, is Dr David Bell, consultant psychiatrist at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust in North London, where the NHS child Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) is based.
Other authors include Professor of Sociology at Oxford University Michael Biggs; psychotherapist Bob Withers, a former senior lecturer at Westminster University; and Dianna Kenny, Professor of Psychology at the University of Sydney, Australia.
Dr Bell, who wrote the book’s foreword, called for an ‘urgent investigation’ into the reasons for the huge rise in the number of gender identity referrals. The latest figures from GIDS show 2,590 children – three quarters of whom were girls – were referred last year. In 2009, the figure was below 100.
More recently there has been a trend of mainly teenage girls declaring, seemingly out of the blue, that they want to change sex, a phenomenon dubbed rapid onset gender dysphoria.
The Tavistock clinic is the only NHS service for under-18s diagnosed with gender dysphoria, an individual’s belief they are trapped in the wrong body.
Dr Bell, a former governor of the Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust, said: ‘The rapid escalation of referrals, the large increase in natal [born] females seeking to change gender and the sudden appearance of so-called rapid onset gender dysphoria, cannot be explained by individual factors alone. Nor is it likely to be caused by a large number of individuals feeling free to “come out” in this new liberal atmosphere.’
The psychiatrist, who last year produced a critical internal report on GIDS which branded the service ‘not fit for purpose’, further warned: ‘Many services have championed the use of medical and surgical intervention with nowhere near sufficient attention to the serious, irreversible damage this can cause and with very disturbingly superficial attitudes to the issue of consent in young children.’
The Mail on Sunday has also seen interviews with whistleblowers who work at the Tavistock clinic, and whose accounts are due to be included in the book. They have chosen to remain anonymous.
One of the NHS gender specialists said: ‘I keep thinking about all of the children, adolescents and families who are being harmed by the one-dimensional discussion and the attack on truth and on thinking and on what we know about adolescent well-being.’
Another added: ‘I’m angry with all the grown-ups, all the clever people, all the thoughtful people, who are letting this happen.’ One of the issues causing ‘turmoil’ at the clinic is the prospect that children are being rendered infertile by the medication prescribed for them.
This newspaper has previously reported that the service has prescribed controversial pubertyblocking drugs to hundreds of children in England, many of whom have been under 14.
The powerful monthly hormone injections stop the development of sex organs, breasts and body hair.
Young people are advised by GIDS that the treatment is reversible and that if they stop having it, their adult reproductive functions will continue to develop as normal.
But the whistleblowing staff at the service say the drugs – which can permanently weaken bones and stunt growth – put children on an inexorable path to further treatment which is irreversible.
Research has shown the vast majority of those who take puberty blockers go on to start ‘cross-sex hormone therapy’ at 16, which involves doses of oestrogen for males and testosterone for females. This strong hormone medication begins the physical process of changing individuals from one sex to another and is likely to lead to a loss in fertility.
Yet the concerned clinicians claim the fact puberty blockers are putting youngsters on a pathway to infertility is ‘completely swept under the carpet’ at the Tavistock. Instead, they say children and teens are being given false hope that they will be able to conceive in the future by being offered the chance by the clinic to freeze their sperm or eggs. In actual fact, it is unlikely they will ever have babies – with boys facing the minefield of finding a surrogate mother to have a baby using their sperm and the relatively low chances of frozen