Former specialists of the controversial British Tavistock gender clinic have launched a new private service to continue offering hormone therapy and sex-reassignment surgery to children and teenagers, despite the public outrage about the questionable practices that forced their previous workplace to shut down, the Telegraph wrote on Tuesday, June 20th.
The private clinic, called Gender Plus, offers “specialist gender assessment for children, adolescents and young adults” which can be used as “onward referral to an appropriate endocrine or surgical team.” Gender Plus is also setting up an “associated hormone clinic,” that too will be run by a former Tavistock physician.
The Transgender Trend—an organization of parents, professionals, and academics concerned about the current trend of diagnosing children with gender dysphoria in unprecedented numbers—explained to The European Conservative that this is even more worrying than letting Tavistock continue, since, as a private institution, Gender Plus will not necessarily be bound by the NHS’ standing hormone therapy protocol when it comes to treating minors.
What’s more, as Stephanie Davies-Arai, director of the advocacy group told us, they appear just as ideologically driven, if not more, than Tavistock was.
Under the radar
To recap: NHS decided to shut down Tavistock less than a year ago after an independent research paper published by Dr. Hillary Cress uncovered that the puberty blocker and hormone replacement drugs that Tavistock was prescribing to children hadn’t gone through proper clinical trials and could even cause brain damage among other things.
Moreover, parents and patients weren’t properly informed about the potential side effects, the appropriate protocol for psychological factors was commonly neglected, and the clinic often encouraged its young patients to make these life-altering decisions without even once questioning the validity of their self-assumed gender dysphoria.
After NHS decided to close down Tavistock due to the growing public backlash and the threat of a thousand-strong class action lawsuit, the service also changed its national policies to stop administering puberty blockers and other hormone therapy drugs to minors, with the sole exception of clinical trials, ruling that “there is not enough evidence to support their safety or clinical effectiveness.”
But according to Davies-Arai, “there is no indication that the new clinic will follow this approach,” as the former Tavistock staff’s decision to set up Gender Plus as a private clinic outside the bounds of the NHS could easily enable them to circumvent the ban on hormone therapy without any official oversight.
New colors, same people
Unsurprisingly, half of the staff listed by Gender Plus have earlier been working at Tavistock, the only gender clinic for children run by the UK’s National Health Service (NHS). The Tavistock ‘refugees’ include Clinical Director Aiden Kelly, who said he was “passionate about increasing access to gender care to questioning people.” Translation: they’re happy to make a fortune by exploiting clueless kids.
According to Gender Plus, it will take about six Zoom sessions—priced at £275 an hour—to get a complete gender assessment. After that, patients can ask for a surgery referral for another £275, or for hormone replacement at their associated clinic which will open in a few months. With business models like this, it is no wonder that transgenderism has exploded in the past few years.
“Gender Plus will refer children for hormones from age 16 but we don’t yet know if this means blockers or cross-sex hormones, which have irreversible effects,” Davies-Arai told The European Conservative, adding that this standardized path of a few Zoom calls and immediate referrals is unlikely to account for more complex cases or adequately established assessment.
Ideology in the front
Another ex-Tavistock staffer who joined Gender Plus is the well-known trans activist Dr. Lyndsey (Igi) Moon, whose presence is enough to cast doubts on the professional motivations of the team.
“We are not confident that this clinic will be based on clinical evidence rather than ideology,” Davies-Arai said.
“Dr. Igi Moon is a prominent Queer theorist who heads the Coalition Against Conversion Therapy, an unaccountable body with no oversight. This suggests to us that the clinic will employ the ideological ‘gender affirmative’ approach that led to diagnostic overshadowing at Tavistock and put vulnerable children at risk,” she explained.
The fight is not over
There is still hope that with enough public pressure, the appropriate regulatory oversight can be implemented. Transgender Trend, for one, plans to go knocking on Westminster as long as it takes.
As the organization’s director told us, the group “will be writing to the Health Secretary to demand urgent regulation of all private gender clinics for children to ensure that they meet the clinical standards of the new NHS service model.”
