In today’s Observer, sister paper to the Guardian, there is an article about the current controversies surrounding Tavistock GIDS, and the concerns expressed by current and former GIDS clinicians and senior members of staff over the past few months. 

It has been a great disappointment to many on the Left that the Guardian has been largely silent on this issue.  But two former GIDS clinicians sent a letter to the Guardian back in 2017 to alert them to serious concerns about what was going on within GIDS.  One of the authors of the submission to the Guardian commented to us “we really really tried.”  However, rather than jumping to publish such a devastating testimony – the kind of exclusive most journalists would give their right arm for – the Guardian chose to ignore it. 

We are very happy to publish that letter here.  We are very grateful to the GIDS clinicians for writing such a powerful and honest testimony and for allowing us to publish it.  The rest of this post is in their own words:

Testimony from GIDS clinicians

At the end of our tethers, in the summer of 2017, we wrote this letter and sent it to the ‘Do you know what I’m really thinking?’  column at the Guardian.  Although only a couple of years ago, this was a different time.  Gender critical therapists did not yet exist, publicly at least.  We thought we would lose our careers if anyone traced it back to us.  In fact, we were so paranoid that we posted the letter so it would never be traced.  One of us then called the Guardian news desk. 

Then we sat back and waited.  And waited.  Our experiences of speaking out to colleagues had already left us fearing that people would label us transphobic and so ignore our concerns.  The Guardian’s total lack of response, at the time, to what we thought was mind-changing information confirmed to us that we were on our own. 

We have come a long way since those despairing days and are immensely grateful that they are now taking the risk and reporting these stories as they evidently need to be told. 

Do you REALLY want to know ‘WHAT I AM REALLY THINKING’? 

The child ‘gender’ specialist:

I might be sitting with an educated, middle class family committed to permissive and liberal parenting; perhaps a socially disadvantaged family without the necessary vocabulary to engage critically with what is happening to them; it might be a family with terrible stories of abuse, neglect and trauma; I might hear a story of ‘he/she was always like this’, ‘from the moment he/she could choose’; ‘she was always a tom boy’, ‘he always wanted to dress up’. 

Mostly with the teenagers there is no particular history to suggest this was rumbling, there is however lots of unhappiness, discomfort with who they are and how they look, and/or the dawning of homosexual desire still, even in this day and age, causing fear and anxiety.  More often than not the internet lurks in the background: hours spent trawling the echo chamber websites confirming and affirming lost young people looking for answers, enticing those on the autistic spectrum to see themselves and their struggles through the lens of ‘trans’. 

Everyone I see is in pain and in distress.  Gender dysphoria is real and painful and sometimes hellish.  There are multiple reasons for it, and there will be different ways of managing it.  One such meaning and ‘solution’ might be to transition, but these are children not adults.  These are young people for whom complex and profound confusion and turmoil is being collapsed into a one size fits all concrete explanation. ‘ Trans’ can be used not as the compassionate realisation that some people need to take the always radical and courageous step to live their lives as though they had been born into the other sex role, but as a phoney panacea which seeks to shut down textured and nuanced discussion about these children and young people’s internal lives.  If we can’t bear to hear the diversity within gender dysphoria then truly something has gone wrong – and believe me it has. 

What I am really thinking is that mostly you are caught in a terrible moment of social contagion.  You and your children are swirling in a toxic storm of psychological and emotional distress meeting homophobia, sexism, misogyny against the back drop of the most appalling ‘bad science’.  There is no such thing as a male or female brain and you cannot be ‘born into the wrong body’.  The sloppiness of the language of both the internet and the politicians does you no favours with their conflation of sex and gender.  This chimes so well in the era of post Truth anti expert hatred. 

I am really thinking that you are too young to be making decisions which will affect you and your body for the rest of your life: too young to drink, get married, have intercourse yet able to ‘consent’ to medical intervention.  You should know that there is no unequivocally shared consensus on what you are undertaking; and the evidence, such as it is, suggests no greater health or happiness.  Most of us at your age did not cherish our fertility, and the imagined easy alternative of adoption or surrogacy is far from that.  I need you to know that you really might change your mind, as many have before you.  And at that point there will be no funded NHS corrective surgery or therapy for you. 

What I am really thinking is that we have truly wandered through the looking glass with our eyes closed and opened them only to see the Emperor’s new clothes.