Being of a centre-right mindset, it is not often that I am given to heap praise on an article in the Guardian newspaper. Normally I consider the Guardian to be the epicentre of out of touch middle class Leftism in the United Kingdom and take the view that the print version of the Guardian is best suited for use as liner for a cat litter tray.

However, just as a stopped analogue clock tells the correct time twice a day, the Guardian sometimes comes up with an article that gets things right. The article that I’m going to quote from and link to, from The Guardian on the subject of alleged ethical problems with the Tavistock Gender Identity Clinic, is one of those articles where the Guardian may well be on the right track.

Over the last few years there has been a massive increase in the number of children and young people who are presenting with so called gender identity problems. Transgender groups have pushed for the idea that those claiming to be transgender should not be left to grow out of it but should have their feelings or delusion affirmed. This can lead to confused young people placed on a medical path that too often leads to the immature alleged trans person making life changing decisions that they may one day regret.

The allegations that the Guardian are saying are being made by senior medical staff at Britain’s main NHS gender identity clinic, the Tavistock are very serious and to my layman’s eye look like they border on the unethical. The Guardian is saying that senior medical staff at the Tavistock have raised concerns with the clinic’s management that young people are being fast tracked through gender transition with no detailed examination of their psychological or social background. I know from having had trans friends that such gatekeeping and detailed psychological examination is vital to ensure that the patient really really is trans and that the gender dysphoria symptoms are not related to some different underlying psychological issue. To my mind it would be highly unethical to submit a person to aggressive and sometimes dangerous hormone treatment or surgery that is irreversible without checking that this would be the very best and last resort course of action for the patient in question.

The Guardian said:

Britain’s only NHS gender identity service for children is reviewing its operations amid claims made by a senior member of staff that it is failing to examine fully the psychological and social reasons behind young people’s desire to change gender.

The views are shared by a group of parents of transgender children, who have raised their own concerns that the Tavistock Centre’s gender identity development service (GIDS) in London is “fast-tracking” young people into life-altering decisions without fully assessing their personal histories.

In a letter to the trust’s board, seen by the Observer, the parents say they fear “the GIDS team is being asked to engage with and assess complex and difficult cases within a highly constrained time frame”.

These are really horrible and worrying allegations and relate to people who may well have been given or are currently undergoing highly inappropriate treatment. Going deep into the background of a person claiming that they have a gender identity disorder is vital to ensure that the right sort of treatment is given to them. This allegation makes it seem as if the Tavistock is running some sort of gender treatment sausage machine where tick box medicine is being practised. The fact that these criticisms are coming from both sides of the medical divide, clinicians and the families of patients, is very alarming and may point to all not being well in Britain’s premier publicly funded gender identity clinic.

The Guardian then further quoted from the letter from the parents of young gender identity patients being treated under the auspices of the Tavistock clinic’s gender identity programme which said:

“We have specific concerns about the situation of those with gender dysphoria in the age group 17 to 25 who are referred to the [adult] GIC [gender identity clinic], where they do not receive the complex psychosocial assessment offered at GIDS: for these young adults there is little exploration of the family or cultural context of their still developing gender identity.”

The Guardian’s sister paper The Observer which yesterday brought to light the concerns about practises at the Tavistock said that the Tavistock is taking the concerns by the senior clinician on board. The Observer believes that the report that was submitted by the clinician raises concerns that not enough consideration may be being given to other factors that may be behind a patient presenting with alleged or supposed gender identity disorder. The Observer claimed that factors such as childhood trauma, social contagion by currently fashionable trans attitudes, cultural factors and autistic spectrum disorder, may not be being adequately considered when the Tavistock treats those presenting with alleged gender dysphoria. I must admit I find it very worrying that young people may be being pushed into gender transition when the main reason for a person’s gender distress may well be completely unrelated to gender identity disorder itself. The gender distress that a patient may be presenting with may be related to other psychological, social or developmental problems and nothing to do with the person being definitely and definitively transgender.

I’m absolutely horrified by the revelations being made by the Guardian and the Observer over what is alleged to be going on at the Tavistock. It really does look like corners may be being cut by the Tavistock in order to deal with an increased caseload more swiftly than they would do if they examined each case in much more detail. When we consider that transition treatment is not at all risk free and sterilises and castrates those who complete it, we should be very very concerned that there may be young people pushed into transition treatment that may not only be highly inappropriate for them but also is the wrong treatment for whatever really ails them.

The Guardian added:

The parents claim that the huge increase in numbers of children seeking referrals, which has risen from 97 in 2009 to 2,519 in the year to April, is placing great demands on the clinic, with potentially negative consequences for children.

That is indeed a significant rise in caseload and there may be many cases within that increased caseload for whom transition may not be the best answer to their psychological distress. I wonder how many suicides and unhappy individuals may have been created by the Tavistock if the allegations are correct and young people have been placed on a transition path that is not appropriate for them? I also wonder whether the Tavistock has put aside sober clinical evidence in favour of following the demands of trans activists to make transition easier?

We can see from a statement put out in connection to the Tavistock concerns by the dangerous Mermaids group, which campaigns for the right for children to make decisions on what gender they want to be, that some activists such as Mermaids want minimal delays in giving life changing gender treatment. In relation to this story Mermaids are whining loudly about how any delay in giving gender reassignment treatment to young people cold be ‘harmful to a young person’s well-being’. I would ask Mermaids this question: What is worse, a relatively short period of psychological distress whilst proper care is taken to find out whether a young person is really trans or not, or the long term harm caused by sterilisation, castration and powerful drugs which form a part of gender transition treatment? Mermaids have shown themselves by their statement to be completely unethical here. They should be fully behind the idea of being cautious and trying not to do any harm to the patients concerned. That they are calling for less delay rather than more shows that they care little for the outcomes of individual patients and much more for the political cause of transgenderism.

The Tavistock is obviously rattled by these criticisms and allegations and are fighting back. They are denying that they are ‘fast tracking’ gender identity patients for medical and surgical treatment. They claim that they follow the national guidance on gender transition treatment, that there should be a minimum of five to six meetings with clinicians before endocrine or surgical treatment is approved. However to my mind five or six meetings to deal with cases that may have their roots not in genuine gender dysphoria but in some other cause doesn’t look remotely enough time to deal with patients with complex problems. Worryingly the Tavistock are also denying that gender dysphoria is a mental illness when it plainly is, as is any other type of body dysphoria where people perceive that something is wrong with body when there is no objective evidence to show that this is the case.

I must admit that I’m intrigued by the fact that it was the Guardian / Observer that has broken this story of alleged unethical behaviour by the Tavistock. It’s the sort of story that one would have expected the Daily Mail, the Sunday Times, one of the trans critical blogs such as 4^th Wave Now or right wing outlets like Brietbart to break, as this story would have fitted in more with the ethos and viewpoints of these publications. It makes me wonder whether or not The Guardian group, which normally trumpets progressive talking points uncritically are starting to notice that the wheels are starting to come off the transgender bus? Is it the case that the Guardian, which has hitherto been friendly to pro-trans viewpoints is starting to recognise that the whole area of gender identity treatment is mired in bad ethics, bad assumptions, bad pseudo-science and bad and sometimes dangerous medical treatment? It may even be that the Guardian group may be coming to the realisation that they, like others especially those in the political sphere, have been conned by trans activists into supporting forms of gender identity treatment that are inappropriate for the individual patients concerned. If that is the case, then I suspect that one motivation for the Guardian / Observer to break this story may be to distance themselves politically from a massive scandal that is about to break over the issue of transgenderism, a scandal that will inevitably feature stories of individuals who have had their lives and futures ruined by inappropriate types of treatment for their psychological problems.

As I have said before on here there are a lot of similarities between the medical and surgical treatments given out for those presenting with gender identity disorders and the brutal and destructive neurosurgery called Leucotomy. Just as in today’s world shoving people into gender reassignment is fashionable for those with certain types of mental distress, so in the past was Leucotomy seen as a fashionable way of treating depression and other mental illnesses. I foresee a time, maybe not too far in the future, when the idea of sterilising and castrating children and young people because of a mental problem may be judged with the same sort of horror and disgust as we now see Leucotomy. I see very little difference morally or ethically between many current fashionable gender reassignment treatments which damage the patient and Leucotomy, a procedure which basically involved randomly poking round in a patient’s brain with a surgical tool.

Maybe in the future when we look back in horror at the idea of mutilating and poisoning people who have gender based mental problems, we will be able to point to this Guardian article as one of the key moments when a much needed questioning of the transgender ideology started. I commend the Guardian for this piece, it is one that needed to be published and says much that needs to be said.