Gender experts warn parents of deception, surgical horrors awaiting kids seeking gender transition
Experts on gender dysphoria are accusing the Tavistock clinic, England's lone gender clinic, of using deceptive tactics to coerce children into taking hormones and puberty blockers that are irreversible.
Affiliated medical staff are going public about the misleading advice given to children suffering from a range of conditions, according to a Saturday report in the U.K. Sunday Times.
Kirsty Entwistle, who until last October was a psychologist at the Gender Identity Development Service in Leeds, accused Tavistock clinicians of misleading young patients, saying they are “making decisions that will have a major impact on children and young people’s bodies and lives ... without a robust evidence base.”
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In a July 18 open letter published online addressed to Polly Carmichael, who runs the Tavistock clinic, Entwistle said children who had traumatic events in their early years were being set on a course of gender transitioning and medicalization “without having explored or addressed their early adverse experiences.”
The fact that many of the children were victims of abuse and neglect or were poor was "minimized and dismissed" by the clinic, Entwistle asserted. Children and their families were told that puberty-suppressing drugs used to transition youth were "fully reversible," when in actuality the drugs' impact on young bodies and brains remains unknown. The health agency's own research on puberty blockers shows mixed results, the U.K. Times reported. It was also reported that nearly all youth who start taking puberty-blocking drugs go on to take cross-sex hormones by age 16.
The psychologist explained that an "unspoken rule" existed within the clinic — that clinicians were never to inform families that their children were not transgender. If staff dared to explore reasons for why earlier life experiences may have contributed to their children's desire to transition they risked being called "transphobic."
The Gender Identity Development Service responded to that accusation by stating that fewer than half of its patients were given puberty blockers: “We do not hold a view on what the outcome will be for a child when they come in to the service. There is no pressure to provide medical intervention from the service, though there can often be from the young person or family.”
The release of Entwistle's letter comes as U.K. women's rights activists have been working to expose the medical and surgical interventions being performed on impressionable and psychologically distressed youth who have come to believe they were born in the wrong body and need to transition.
In May, the group Standing for Women hosted a talk at the House of Lords that featured a former governor of the Tavistock clinic to discuss concerns about these medical treatments and the exponential rise in the number of children being referred for gender transition. Earlier this month the group protested outside an education conference put on by Stonewall, the leading gay rights group in the nation.
"This conference was for 600 educators, using taxpayer money and corporate funding, to help them further indoctrinate children into the trans cult," said Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull, who is also known as Posie Parker, the group's founder, in an email to The Christian Post on Wednesday.
Parker and fellow activists stood outside the building where the conference was held, holding posters measuring more than 6-and-a-half feet, some of which showed grisly images of the aftermath of surgical transition procedures, particularly the effects on young women's bodies.
Among the images shown was that of a young woman's surgically scarred chest and mid-section after a double mastectomy where the nipples were removed — euphemistically called "top surgery" — to appear as male. And a picture of a forearm where surgeons removed layers of skin and tissue down to a patient's muscle and bone to construct a pseudo-penis. The procedure is called a radial forearm phalloplasty.
"This is like something out of the [Nazi doctor] Josef Mengele's handbook," Parker told CP.
"Activism in the U.K. has been polite when it comes to children transitioning. But I felt it was necessary to show people the horror of what transition actually means. We are not allowed to talk about the fact that children who take puberty blockers grow into adult bodies that have no sexual feeling or function, or that these surgeries and medical pathways are experimental."
She added: "I've always thought if the public really knew what 'transition' entailed they would object and it would stop. I think the U.K. is collectively reaching a point of critical mass where too many of us know what is happening and are doing everything we can to stop it."
As CP reported on July 2, most of the youth seeking a gender transition at Tavistock are girls.
Many young women and girls are being led to think that since they cannot conform to society's standards of femininity they must not be female and need to transition, Standing for Women spokesperson Venice Allan, a colleague of Parker, explained to CP at the time. Allan believes the data that has emerged from Tavistock indicates highly suspicious medical practices.
"We know that compared to only 1% of the general population, around a third of young people treated at the Tavistock has an autism spectrum disorder diagnosis, a condition that is characterized by difficulties of social interaction," Allan said.
"Vulnerable girls are being used by the transgender movement to destigmatize what is essentially a male sexual fetish," she asserted.
Last year, Equalities Minister Penny Mordaunt ordered a review into the increase in girls seeking a gender transition, in light of aggregated data showing that in the past decade the number of young people referred for medical help to transition genders had increased by over 4,000%.
