Time to Think

Part Two

by Michael Patrick O’Leary

In my previous article I reviewed Hannah Barnes’s excellent book Time to Think about the bizarre and horrific events at the GIDS (Gender Identity Development Service) clinic operated by the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust in north London. The NHS has closed the clinic after a number of damning reports. Why did it take so long to close it down? An insider told Barnes: ” because it was bringing in so much money they could not challenge it.” This is the business-orientated NHS of 2023. In 2015/16, GIDS’s income was 5.9 % of the Tavistock Trust’s total. Within a year, it had almost doubled to 10.4 %. That proportion grew further. The Tavistock needed the income GIDS brought in.

GIDS was set up in 1989 to provide talking therapies for young people who were questioning their gender identity. The Tavistock used to be a centre of excellence for psychotherapy (the talking cure) but concerns started as long ago as 2005 that children were not being given any meaningful counseling but were being put on a fast track to gender reassignment through drugs or surgery. By 2011, it seemed that it was routine practice to refer children to endocrinologists for prescription of puberty blockers. In 2011, a child of 12 was on blockers. By 2016, a ten-year-old was taking them.

Barnes’s title is ironic. GIDS claimed that children did not have to make a snap decision about gender reassignment because puberty blockers would give them pause and time to think. GIDS falsely claimed that the effects of these drugs were reversible and that they were harmless. The drugs caused various problems on which data was not kept. There is evidence they affect bone density, brain development and sexual function. The children were being used as guinea pigs but they were rarely offered follow-up appointments. GIDS did not keep in touch with its patients in the long term or keep reliable data on outcomes. Keira Bell regretted transitioning from female to male and took the Tavistock to court. GIDS had referred her for blockers at 16 and she had a double mastectomy at 20. Then she had second thoughts.

Millenarian Madness

Sometimes a madness overtakes the masses. I have been reading Norman Cohn’s influential book, The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages, which I first encountered in my student days in the heady 60s. Cohn’s book was published in 1957 and influenced many people such as the French Marxist philosopher and writer Guy Debord and the British author Richard Webster who wrote a book, which I found quite impressive, about false allegations of child abuse, The Secret of Bryn Estyn (2005). Webster helped find lawyers for Dawn Reed and Christopher Lillie, former Newcastle nurses who were falsely accused of sexually abusing children in their care.

Reed and Lillie, who were first accused of child abuse in 1993 and only found not guilty in 2002, say that they would probably be dead, through suicide or murder, without Webster’s assistance. Webster said of Cohn’s work: “All three books seek to establish the role played in history by collective fantasies and all three are concerned with “the urge to purify the world through the annihilation of some category of human beings imagined as agents of corruption and incarnations of evil.”

Here in Sri Lanka we had the “Grease Yaka “phenomenon. When we lived in Uva province, there were a number of attacks blamed on bhuthaya, grease yakas or grease devils. Historically, a “grease devil” was a thief who wore only underwear or went naked and covered his body in grease to make himself difficult to grab if chased. In 2011, the “grease devil” became a night-time prowler who frightens and attacks women.

As Sri Lanka was experiencing Grease Yaka mania, riots were erupting all over the UK. Contagion Theory was formulated by Gustave Le Bon in 1896. According to him, crowds exert a hypnotic influence over individual  members. In a crowd,  people abandon personal responsibility and surrender to contagious emotions. A crowd can drive people toward irrational, even violent action.

Today, we have social media to spread madness.

Epidemic of Dysphoria

Transsexualism was discussed in the mass media as long ago as the 1930s. Time magazine in 1936 devoted an article to what it called “hermaphrodites”, treating the subject with sensitivity not sensationalism. When I worked in a local social security office in Manchester in the early 70s, there was one client who wanted to change the gender on their official documents but was unable legally to do so. The office staff were a hard-bitten, cynical lot but were sympathetic, if nonplussed. It is good that society has evolved so that practical measures can now be taken to address such a problem. Unfortunately, sympathy has been distorted by activism. Even Joe Biden has contributed his confused view of the issue by saying that regulations to protect children from transgender medical interventions and to restrict classroom instruction in gender ideology were “close to sinful.”

Crowds of Gender Ambiguous

Ambiguity of gender at birth is very rare. Incorrect description and assignment on birth certificates is also rare. While one might sympathize with people in this situation, giving blocker drugs, hormones and irreversible surgery to children is a drastic response. It is indeed a reinforcement of gender stereotypes. Just because very small boys do girly things does not justify physically changing their gender. When I was about four years old, I was fascinated by the pomp and theatre of the Mass and played at being a priest. Thank God my parents did not pack me off to a seminary and force me into a life of celibacy.

Young people appeared to be experiencing internalized homophobia and some families would make openly homophobic comments. It is not wise to reorder society and suppress freedom of speech because of birth defects in an infinitesimal minority. It is even more foolish to reorder society and suppress freedom of speech at the behest of men who have decided they are women without going for the surgery. One should sympathize and protect the rights of minorities but not kowtow to bullies who want to act out outdated gender stereotypes.

The original founder of GIDS, Dominic Di Ceglie, said that only about 5% of the young people seen at his clinic would “commit themselves to a change of gender” and that “60% to 70% of all the children he sees will become homosexual”. Barnes write: “Many of the young people did not seem in need of a specialist gender service at all. But because they were being seen by a gender service, it created the expectation for physical interventions. Why on earth would you wait a year and travel miles to receive therapy? this therapist asked. Clinicians feared they may be seeing fabricated or induced illness (FII), a presentation previously referred to as “Munchausen’s by proxy”.

Mass delusion extended to the GIDS staff. As external criticism grew, the service developed a “siege mentality”. One clinician, Matt Bristow (who happened to be gay), told Barnes that doubts and criticisms were regarded “as a personal affront rather than people raising legitimate professional concerns”. He and others recount how :”It was difficult to voice legitimate concerns when these were construed as a personal attack on people you cared for and admired. ” “It’s tribal, isn’t it? Anybody who speaks out against a system that they’re part of inevitably is going to have a hard time.” Staff who raised concerns about the safety of children were labelled “transphobic.”

Kathleen Stock writes in her book Material Girls: “something called ‘gender identity’ gripped public consciousness, strongly influencing UK and international institutions, and causing protests and even violence.” According to Stock, “In 2004, it was estimated there were about 2,000–5,000 trans people in the UK. Back then, the popular image of a trans person was mainly of a ‘medically transitioned’ adult trans woman, or ‘male-to-female transsexual’: an adult person of the male sex who had taken hormones over a long period of time to change many aspects of appearance, and who had also had ‘sex reassignment’ surgery to refashion natal genitalia.” That is not the case today. Today, according to the LGBT charity Stonewall, their “best estimate” of the number of trans people in the UK is “about 600,000”. Referrals to GIDS grew rapidly – in 2009, it had 97; by 2020, this figure was 2,500. Many of them opt to keep their natal equipment but still want to use women’s changing rooms and call themselves lesbians

There was, between 2009 and 2020, a 4,700% increase in the number of girls referred to GIDS. When asked publicly why three-quarters of referrals to GIDS were female, a representative of the Tavistock Trust said they simply didn’t know. Stephanie Davies-Arai closely followed events at GIDS for many years and founded the organization Transgender Trend in 2015. She was worried about the increase in young people, particularly girls, identifying as trans. She wanted quality research about why girls arrived at GIDS with a set of beliefs.

Satanic Abuse

“The history of medicine is scattered with psychosomatic diseases that appeared, spread like wildfire and then disappeared”. In Creating Hysteria: Women and Multiple Personality Disorder, published in 1999, journalist Joan Acocella described how a disease so rare that most doctors never came across it turned into an epidemic. I had dealings with the Tavistock Clinic in the 1990s when they were promoting the idea of Satanic Ritual Child Abuse. Who believes in that now?

According to her website, “Dr Valerie Sinason was Consultant Child Psychotherapist at the Tavistock Clinic from 1987 … Valerie founded the Clinic for Dissociative Studies in 1998.” I met her in 1994. She had been pestering my bosses at the Department of Health (Tom Luce and Rupert Hughes) to do something about what she alleged was a serious problem. We agreed to meet her and it soon became clear that she had no evidence to support her claims. She was recycling a small number of anecdotes to fit different scenarios. As a concession to her, the Department of Health commissioned anthropologist Jean La Fontaine to investigate. I edited the subsequent book, Speak of the Devil, which was published in 1998.

Professor La Fontaine found that all of the cases of alleged satanic ritual abuse that could be substantiated were cases where the perpetrators’ goal was sexual gratification rather than religious worship. The satanic allegations by younger children were influenced by adults. She said that there were indications that most allegations were sparked by investigations supervised by social workers who had taken SRA seminars in the US. I attended a conference on child protection in Bristol where I was horrified at the religious zeal of the social workers promoting the idea of satanic abuse. It reminded me of a pyramid selling convention a neighbour took me to. These professional social workers seemed about to burn at the stake for heresy a police forensic psychologist who argued rationally against their zeal and said she had never heard of any evidence to support their case.

Hope for Common Sense?

Can we hope that the madness can be contained? I leave the last word to Helen Joyce: “liberal, secular society can accommodate many subjective belief systems, even mutually contradictory ones. What it must never do is impose one group’s beliefs on everyone else.”

Time to Think: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Tavistock’s Gender Service for Children by Hannah Barnes is published by Swift Press (£20). I got mine from Kindle.