RoI medics predict ‘Irish Tavistock’ fallout

Children rushed onto sex-swap drugs at a hospital in Dublin are likely to suffer serious regret, medical experts have warned.

Dr Paul Moran and Prof Donald O’Shea, clinicians at Ireland’s National Gender Service (NGS), blamed interference by staff from the Tavistock Centre in London on “problem assessments” being made at Children’s Health Ireland at Crumlin – a suburb of Dublin.

The claims appear in a new book by BBC journalist Hannah Barnes on NHS England’s controversial ‘trans’ clinic – ‘Time to Think: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Tavistock’s Gender Service for Children’.

‘Potty’

Dr Moran told Barnes that hormone experts at the NGS started to raise concerns about the children they were seeing from Crumlin.

Endocrinologists would contact him, he said, reporting: “‘Listen, I’ve got this kid here, we took him over from Crumlin and he looks very unwell, depressed, or he’s self-harming.’ That’s when we started to notice there’s a problem here with the assessments”.

O’Shea described “the idea that you would just jump in with hormones and start treating, without social work input, without liaising with the school, the key worker” as “potty”.

He predicted: “It is likely we will encounter significant levels of regret and other adverse outcomes in the Crumlin legacy group which will be difficult to defend.”

GIDS

Last year, NHS England announced that its controversial Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) would close, after an independent report by Dr Hilary Cass found it was not a “safe or viable long-term option”.

Ahead of the publication of her book about the Tavistock clinic, Barnes told The Sunday Times: “It’s really striking how few people were willing to question GIDS.

“As one clinician said to me, because it was dealing with gender, there was this ‘cloak of mystery’ around it. There was a sense of ‘Oh, it’s about gender, so we can’t ask the same questions that we would of any other part of the NHS’.”

The book, which is published next week, claims that more than 1,000 children were referred for puberty blockers. It notes that 97.5 per cent of children seeking sex changes had autism, depression or other problems – evidence the clinic ignored.