If a child has some of the minor gender non-conforming attributes that gay children can sometimes (but not always) possess, they would be happier to transition them than to accept their child's sexual orientation and let the child know that they are loved in all their gayness - a phenomenon that we know occurs in nature across all mammals. Not only is this pathway wrong, but unlike claims made to the contrary, it almost certainly is hurting children and we simply aren’t hearing enough of the detransition/regret stories (and neither are they) because it has turned into a bizarre political and ideological battle, where instead of encouraging free thinking, doctors and providers are being forced to STOP thinking and prescribe to the status quo, or find somewhere else to work.

Swift Press | Time to Think

Edit: to those saying the book is based on first hand experiences. The book interviews four people. Just four out of the thousands and thousands successfully treated. Do we base the success of a place on four people or the many thousands? The testimonies in the book are raw, honest and moving. More than that they are a vital piece of evidence that shows – without prejudice – where things went right, where things went wrong and, remarkably, the thousands of cases of young people where we still don’t know’ Emily MaitlisThe pair started a new service, identifying people who were ready for transition by assessing them before they started hormones. This approach, involving an assessment by a psychiatrist, was criticised as pathologising by the trans community, but they say it has resulted in dramatically better outcomes. Barnes mixes the stories of people working at GIDS with stories of children who have been through the clinic. There are some de-transitioners and some who had issues with the clinic. Dr Anna Hutchinson is a clinical psychologist who has specialised in adolescent mental health and embodied distress over many years. She was a senior psychologist in the GIDS service between 2013 and 2017 and her concerns relating to the clinical practice she witnessed there formed a key part of the narrative in “Time to Think”. LOCATION A deeply reported, scrupulously non-judgmental account of the collapse of the NHS service, based on hundreds of hours of interviews with former clinicians and patients. It is also a jaw-dropping insight into failure: failure of leadership, of child safeguarding and of the NHS’ – Sunday Times FiLiA: You include lots of different perspectives and lots of different voices from people who were actually there, who were actually involved, and had direct experience. So it's not a sort of commentary from folks on the side lines. Dr Anna Hutchinson, in particular, plays quite a large role in the book. She kind of opens and closes the work with that question: ‘Are we harming children?’ You do seem to be quite careful about choosing a range of different stories with a range of different outcomes in terms of kids who've actually been through GIDS themselves and have different perspectives, and some of them seem quite positive. So do you think it's fair then to characterise what happened at GIDS as a “serious medical scandal”? And in that case, why?

Time to Think review: the book that tells the full story of

Some patients were very clear, from very young, about their identity. But others presented puzzles. How to approach a child professing three alter egos, two with Australian accents? Or one wanting to transition both sex and race to “become” Japanese, or survivors of trauma with compelling reasons for wishing to leave their old selves behind, or kids with complex mental health diagnoses? This incredibly important book shows that we still don’t know how many children were damaged for life. I want every institution and every politician who pontificates about gender to read this book and ask what happened to all those lost girls and boys – and why they were complicit’ – Daily TelegraphSue Evans, who was working at the service around the time of the audit says in the book “I didn’t come across simple cases.” about 70 per cent of the sample had more than five ‘associated features’ – a long list that includes those already mentioned as well as physical abuse, anxiety, school attendance issues and many more” The trans rights group Mermaids is described as having put some pressure on GIDS and at times to have had a say in hiring decisions.

Time to Think by Hannah Barnes review – what went wrong at

The results were not good; “the children’s gender-related distress and general mental health – when based on clinical measures of things like self-harm, suicidal ideation and body image – had either plateaued or worsened.” Moreover, “Researchers reported a statistically significant increase in those answering the statement ‘I deliberately try to hurt or kill myself ’ as well as a significant increase in behavioural and emotional problems for natal girls.” Even though there was no clinically measurable positive impact on psychological well-being, GIDS chose instead to focus on the children’s self-reports of being “highly satisfied with the treatment”. Time to Think shows what happens when the exponents of an ideology, so certain of its righteousness, capture a field of medicine, silencing critics, refusing even to collect follow-up data on whether its treatments actually work’– The Times Best Books of 2023 So Far FiLiA: I suppose this is beyond the scope of the book and perhaps something you don't want to comment on, but there is that sort of tension. Like you said, this is a question that's being grappled with in different countries. Different places are starting to look at their own sort of services. So notably, for example, Sweden had Uppdrag Granskning that looked at, in a series of documentaries, what was going on in Sweden on the subject. And that actually ended up changing practice. In a similar way that I think the BBC and other news outlets reporting here in the UK are also now affecting practice in an English context. I don't really know necessarily what's happening up in Scotland. GIDS began seeing Irish children in 2012 under the Treatment Abroad Scheme. Three years later, as demand increased, staff started holding monthly clinics in Crumlin hospital. Between 2011 and 2021, 238 young people in Ireland were referred to GIDS. As in the UK, the Irish referrals were overwhelmingly female and had multiple other “difficulties”.

Evans’ concerns led to the commissioning of a report written by the medical director, Dr David Taylor. He found that: So, as Dr Hilary Cass, who is undertaking a very thorough review of this whole area of healthcare for young people, has said: GIDS, the Gender Identity Development Service, has not been subjected to the level of oversight that one might expect of a service using innovative treatments on children. And the experience of some clinicians was that general concerns were not treated in the spirit that they were intended.

Time to Think, The Inside Story of the Collapse of the

Hannah Milton of BJGP Life explains that Barnes' approach to writing the book was "very rigorous" and that Barnes "comes across as a compassionate writer" who was objective, "fair and balanced". However, reading the "fastidiously documented" book was "heavy going at times" and ultimately "doesn’t give any answers about how a gender service should be run". [12] Suzanne Moore from The Daily Telegraph called it "well-researched" and notes that "Barnes is not coming at this from an ideological viewpoint." [13] Janice Turner of The Times said it was a "sober, rhetoric-free and meticulously researched" account. [14] Awards [ edit ] Award Where was NHS England in all this? How did the Care Quality Commission judge the service ‘good’ in 2016 when the following year so many concerns were relayed to David Bell? A blunter question may be: why did the GIDS and the Trust not care enough about teenage girls, autistic, gay and troubled children to provide them with a service in line with normal standards of paediatric health care? FiLiA: I just wondered, for example, I think you say in the book, it's quite difficult to get psychologists to speak about something. And in this case, you had a certain cohort of people who are really quite desperate to get their story out. And then you had others who perhaps weren't so happy to have their name on the record, but would also want to be discussing things. And then others who, at least it looked like in the footnotes, there were some people who just didn't want to be participating in the book. And so I suppose from that sort of perspective, was this atypical? Is this what normally happens?It was only when the first referrals were old enough to have their care transferred to the adult service at St Colmcille’s Hospital in Loughlinstown that concerns were raised.