The Collapse Of The UK’s Gender Identity Clinic - Hannah Barnes

Who's to blame? Lots of people are to blame. The leadership of GIDS is to blame, and they should take responsibility for the decisions they did and didn't make. The leadership of the Tavistock Trust are to blame for not taking seriously enough the concerns that were brought to them by a sizeable number of staff working in that service, who were not transphobic, who were relaying clinical concerns, safeguarding concerns, safety concerns, and potentially child protection concerns about the young people they were caring for. (wind blows)

How did you feel before releasing this book, and during the research, what did you think the sort of response was going to be like upon revealing your investigation, and what's it actually been like since it's come out?

I think the weeks and months prior to publication were the worst. I was very, very nervous, and it had been years of work, and it's a bit like, it was a bit like a third baby really. I've got two kids, and, you know, you take your baby out into the world and you want people to, to love it. Um, obviously not the way that you do, and, uh, I love my children more than my work, but I was really nervous about how it would be received and, and the response that I would, would get as well. And I have to say, I've been so pleasantly surprised, in that the, the response has been overwhelmingly positive. I mean, there have been favorable reviews on the left, on the right of British politics. I've spoken with Public Service Radio in Australia, the first time the ABC have really looked at this topic, acknowledging that, you know, p- people do have concerns about the evidence base in particular. I've spoken to NPR over there in the States. Um, and I think when you get favourable reviews, um, for your British viewers, you know, from The Guardian newspaper, from The Observer, from The New Statesman, but also from The Telegraph, The Mail on Sunday, The Sunday Times, The Times, you know, it really speaks to the, what I was trying to do with this book, which is, this is a health story. It's not an ideological story. I'm not a culture warrior in any way. It's about whether the best care was always provided to each and every one of the young people being seen at, at that gender clinic.

It seems like, for the very well-meaning people who are trying to raise well-meaning concerns around the ability to consent, the effectiveness of different treatments, the, um, confusion both, on both sides of the, uh, consultant desk, around how this stuff works, that because it is so ideologically heated, it's incredibly difficult. And also, it, this decision, I would actually say that some of the people on the right have made this a more difficult conversation to have, because of how inflammatory and how reactionary some of their conversations have been, because it's very easy to lambast anyone who decides to criticize this. It's, "Oh, you must be one of those reactionary far right people. You, you just want, you know, all trans people to die." And you go, "Well..." I can see why, uh, treading carefully, as it seems like you have done, uh, has hopefully managed to, uh, even out the, uh, the balance between left and right.