A whistle-blower has told a conference that the NHS Tavistock clinic is treating girls who don’t play with dolls as transgender. Dr. David Bell, a former governor at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust, said his former employer was acting as a “gateway for puberty blockers”, putting young people on a pathway to medical treatment.
According to The Times today:
At a conference organised by Genspect, a parental support group for gender-questioning children, Bell said that adolescents not conforming to gender stereotypes were treated as if they had been born in the wrong bodies.
Medical intervention at the north London trust was “supporting a rigid, binary construction of gender” where if patients “don’t like pink ribbons and dollies, you are not really a girl”.
With “proper” treatment, he believed many of the children would go on to be gay or lesbian and instead wants gender-focused treatment to be scrapped with these issues looked at as part of general mental health support. About 98 per cent of young people put on puberty blockers went on to take cross-sex hormones, he said.
Dr. Bell spent 24 years working at the trust. Three years ago he was hauled before bosses and warned that he faced disciplinary action after he accused some of his colleagues of fast-tracking children into life-changing decisions without proper assessments
During his speech at the Genspect conference, Bell said that the “influence of powerful political lobbies had closed down space for thought, doubt and exploration.”
He was undoubtedly referring to Stonewall and Mermaids. Bell said that Tavistock staff feared speaking out lest they be labelled as transphobic.
The Times website, like most newspapers, allows readers to post comments under articles. Here are a couple of interesting points:
Lynda Merrill:
I’m glad that I’m not young now. I didn’t like dolls etc, preferring to play with construction toys and train sets. I became a physicist but am definitely a heterosexual female! One of my daughters was similar and she became an engineer but is also married with 3 children. Heaven help us if the Tavistock Clinic had got hold of us!
Coandalift:
Shameful. One of our daughters had nothing to do with fluffy things and there’s not the slightest chance she was, is or will remain anything but female. I wouldn’t let that lot anywhere near a hamster, let alone children. At what point does their work cross the barrier into abuse?
