Time to Think: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Tavistock's Gender Service for Children

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Barnes is rightly reluctant to ascribe the Gids culture primarily to ideology, but nevertheless, many of the clinicians she interviewed used the same word to describe it: mad. FiLiA: There was this kind of siege mentality, let's say, because there was pressure being put on the service from all sides. Whether GIDS operated within the framework of gender identity theory or a more developmental understanding of gender dysphoria never seemed to be properly clarified. Many revelations in the book were already in the public domain, although more effective when compiled into one engaging volume.

Hannah Barnes | Book review | The TLS Time to Think by Hannah Barnes | Book review | The TLS

Sue Evans, who was working at the service around the time of the audit says in the book “I didn’t come across simple cases. Prior to joining the Newsnight team in 2016, Hannah was a daily programme editor at Radio 4’s Today. What other institutions are in thrall to transgender activists, leaving the most thoughtful professionals afraid to speak out? This is a brave book which dares to challenge the contemporary view that anything relating to a minority group is beyond critical consideration. Feminists who protect the sex-based rights of girls and women have long challenged the social and medical interventions done on children who express unhappiness with their body or strongly resist their ‘expected’ social role.GIDS were also reported not to have substantially changed their clinical practices despite documented shortcomings, and not to have collected long-term data on how their young patients were faring with their multiple difficulties. As Mermaids became more politicised and extreme in their belief in gender identity ideology, so did the GIDS.

Time to Think by Hannah Barnes | Waterstones

In a dangerous sequence of buck-passing, Barnes demonstrates how junior clinicians were overawed by senior clinicians while the leadership team were intimidated by Susie Green. And that if there were concerns that they'd be motivated by transphobia, and I think nothing could be further from the truth. FiLiA: Yeah, that was a line that actually I wrote down because I thought it was such a striking line from one who's working within the medical sphere to even be contemplating it like that.Exactly the same concerns detailed in the Taylor report in 2005 were repeated in a report by David Bell in 2018, which described the service as ‘not fit for purpose. Some trans people saw attacks on Gids as attempts to stop children transitioning at all; some gender-critical campaigners treated its closure as vindication of wider arguments. There was a lack of consensus on what the best way to help those young people might be, and whether different people would require different treatments. 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”.