A governor who resigned from England’s only gender identity clinic for children says it is failing the vulnerable.
Marcus Evans left the Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust, which oversees the clinic, earlier this year, because it failed to heed “important concerns about an experimental treatment of vulnerable children”.
He said the clinic showed, “little interest in the damage done by treatment. When I was governor, the Tavistock was not following up children it had seen, and yet we are carrying on as if we know what we are doing.”
’Dark chapter’
Evans said the treatment of gender dysphoria among children “operates outside good medical practice”.
He continued, “there is pressure to view patients as consumers who have a choice over their gender, rather than people with underlying conflicts about themselves and their relationship with society.”
“The mental health services will look back at this episode as another dark chapter in the treatment of people with psychological difficulties”, he added.
Rushed treatment
Last month, Marcus’s wife Sue Evans also raised concerns over the Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS).
The psychotherapist and mental health nurse said during her time at Tavistock she mostly treated girls who were adamant that they were boys, but after further consultation other factors emerged and many subsequently changed their minds.
Dr David Bell, a current consultant at Tavistock’s adult department, has also accused GIDS of not taking extra mental health factors into account.
’Coerced’
A group of parents has recently formed to campaign against the “coerced medicalisation” of children who believe they were ‘born in the wrong body’.
The Our Duty organisation plans to lobby the Government and the NHS against the ‘affirmation model’, where children who say they are transgender are given medical treatments with limited evaluation.
One mother said: “It just doesn’t make any sense that hundreds of young vulnerable people with mental health issues like my son are being led by the LGBT lobby into the delusion they were born the wrong sex”.