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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 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. A one sided view which fails to take sufficient account of the voices of transgender people. It is purely looking to follow an anti transgender and gender critical view point. Arguably, GIDS moved from being a disorganised, ill-thought out service to being the centre of a medical scandal when, in the 2010s, numbers grew exponentially. The demographics also changed –across the world – as there came reports of an unexplained rise of teenage girls presenting at clinics with gender-related distress. In the gender identity literature there had never been significant numbers of teenage girls; pre-pubescent boys had always been the largest proportion of the paediatric cohort. In addition, the cases of these teenage girls appeared to be complex, happening within the context of wider identity confusion. One Finnish study showed that “Thirteen per cent were in care or living independently, and well over half had been ‘significantly bullied at school. But close to three-quarters of those had been bullied before they came to think about their gender identity. Most startling was that the fact that 75 per cent of the young people ‘had been or were currently undergoing child and adolescent psychiatric treatment for reasons other than gender dysphoria when they sought referral’.”
Hannah Barnes “Time to Think: The Inside Story of the Hannah Barnes “Time to Think: The Inside Story of the
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.
Hannah Barnes
The book is not transphobic. At no point does Barnes question that many people are happier being trans and that those people should be treated well. When things are sensitive, it is always difficult to persuade people to talk to you. And really often in journalism, there's not much in it for them to do so. To put your head above the parapet is difficult. And especially, as you will know from reading the book, there are people who have put their head above the parapet, who have been named, who are prepared to say ‘I got things wrong’ as well. And that's incredibly rare. 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. Because obviously from an outsider's perspective, you want to just be able to say, well, of course, you're always going to put the patients first. This shouldn't even be a question. But then it comes to those sorts of human factors and the relationships. I think you at one point characterise the feeling of being within GIDS as being almost like a start-up. FiLiA: I think one of the difficulties, is that it’s at every level. At the individual, when there's the two clinicians in the room, looking at the patient. Then beyond that, it's in that team meeting where you're allowed to speak but nothing seems to then happen. And then it's going to the more senior people, and having these secret meetings with, for example, Dr Bell or someone and creating this report. Then making those reports and then nothing happens from the reports. And then you have this top safeguarding lead [Sonia], who you're then not allowed to speak to because that's apparently going to be perceived as a hostile act. And so, I think is one of the questions that, I was thinking was: ‘Well, what is it about child safeguarding that provokes this idea that it’s being transphobic? Or vice versa?’ This is not an easy book to read - but it's important that it was written and published. Hannah Barnes strikes a balanced, journalistic tone throughout the sorry tale of a pioneering NHS unit becoming ensnared in a crisis not wholly of its own making, but then doubling-down on idealogical grounds and creating the potential for very great harm to children and young people in the process.
Waterstones says ‘no truth’ in claims it refuses to sell
It traces various reports made by clinicians raising concerns: the David Taylor review (2005), David Bell report (2018), Dinesh Sinha's GIDS review (2019), Helen Roberts report (2021), and Hilary Cass review (2022).Concerns about autism or parental pressure were allegedly dismissed by Carmichael. Children were turning up identifying as other ethnicities such as Japanese. By 2017, three quarters of their patients were girls, a dramatic shift from the years up to 2010, when the majority were boys. Were they not asking why? 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. We were seeing very haphazard referrals from Irish psychologists operating mainly in the private sector, where somebody was going along, saying, ‘I think I have gender dysphoria,’ and there wasn’t really an assessment being carried out,” O’Shea says. “We began to see more and more disasters,” Moran explains. There were suicides; other people barely left their homes in years. This book contains so much more than is outlined here. It should be read carefully by everyone involved in the care and safeguarding of children, including schools and government ministers. What other institutions are in thrall to transgender activists, leaving the most thoughtful professionals afraid to speak out? Where else do we see the same failure of safeguarding demonstrated at the GIDS? Why are the same ideological groups that influenced the GIDS allowed to influence policy in schools? Medical harm may be the most extreme result, but what other harms are being caused to children in schools, social care and child agencies by the failure to put facts and evidence ahead of ideology?
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