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The Tavistock didn't believe in objective truth. Alexi Rosenfeld/Getty Images
For years, the seeds of the Tavistock’s downfall have been hiding in plain sight, as a picture has slowly emerged of its clinicians doling out harmful drugs to gender-confused youth as if they were sweets. At the same time, though, a more subtle clue to the clinic’s endemic dysfunction has been contained in the generic communications that followed each new crisis.
“Thoughtful” is a self-description that crops up repeatedly. In response to critical reporting from Newsnight in 2019, the clinic’s Gender Identity Development Service insisted that it was “a thoughtful and safe service”. When Keira Bell and others took their case to the High Court a year later, arguing that under-16s could not give informed consent to puberty blockers, a GIDS spokesperson replied obstinately that theirs was “a safe and thoughtful service”. And when the Care Quality Commission rated the service as “inadequate”, the Tavistock’s ensuing statement defensively began: “The first thing to say is that GIDS has a long track record of thoughtful and high quality care.”
Alongside this manic insistence on thoughtfulness, there has also been a marked tendency to engage in special pleading about the especially difficult and highly contested cultural position the service occupies. For instance, in response to the damning CQC report, CEO Paul Jenkins replied that GIDS “has found itself in the middle of a cultural and political battleground”. And to the news of the closure last week, a spokesperson commented, with the air of someone sighing heavily: “Over the last couple of years, our staff… have worked tirelessly and under intense scrutiny in a difficult climate.”
Presumably what they really mean by this is that, as is now known, for several years GIDS has been caught between the emotionally blackmailing demands of transactivist organisations such as Mermaids and GIRES, talking constantly about suicide risk and lobbying hard for yet more relaxed attitudes to medicalising children, and the criticisms of those who profoundly object to the notion of a “trans child” in the first place. Former employees such as Susan Evans have reported the historical influence of Mermaids and GIRES on managers at the service, despite their lack of formal medical expertise and the possession of clearly vested interests.
Now, you might think that it is the job of a healthcare provider — and especially one who dispenses medication to children — to try to remove itself from current furores, social trends, and pressure from political activists, and to just get on with providing evidence-based medicine according to whatever gold-standard methodology is available at the time. And you might also think that while being thoughtful is all very well in a medical provider, you don’t exactly want them to emulate Hamlet. But to apply these earthbound medical standards to GIDS is to fail to recognise some of the distinctive and converging influences on the service that have led to the unholy mess we now see.
A crucial yet underappreciated part of the story is the clinic’s strong emphasis on psychoanalysis and psychodynamic approaches to mental health. The founder of the Tavistock, Hugh Crichton-Miller, was explicitly influenced by Freud and Jung. And when Domenico Di Ceglie founded the Gender Identity Service for children in 1989, later commissioned nationally as the only English NHS provider, he too was heavily influenced by psychoanalytic methods.
Bravo: a belated and overdue takedown of the philosophical hogwash that underpinned this institutional child abuse.
Two perhaps more prosaic observations: whatever happened to ‘do no harm’, the ur-principle of medical care; and where was the institutional oversight that should have stepped-in years ago to stop this?
On the first, the lack of any evidence-base should have set alarms ringing but didn’t: why?
On the second, the institutional failure was profound. So how did this ideology gain, and sustain, its hold on the NHS, DHSS, and successive ministers and civil servants; alarm bells have been ringing for years, all apparently ignored? When did the élite capture take place and how; where were the checks and balances that could have countered this?
It is said that this service is to be distributed around the country and this is meant to reassure us. What if, instead of destroying the nest of vipers we, instead, spread the poison around the country. I ask, because the practice amongst CAMHS clinicians when faced with someone who might have a potential Gender Dysphoria diagnosis was to pass them, like a ‘hot potato’ to the Tavi; in other words, no-one was going to either filter or intellectually challenge this new orthodoxy, especially when so many of the NHS Trusts were chasing Stonewall endorsement for their LBGTQ+ policies, and that endorsement came at a price.
So, the ‘counter-reformation’ has begun but undermining the conceptual underpinnings of this horror show is only part of the battle; extirpating the bacilli is next and will be harder.
‘extirpating the bacilli is next and will be harder’. Agreed. Perhaps having a few people struck off, followed by lawsuits and/or criminal prosecution would be a useful start.
Criminal prosecution will be difficult because these people will not accept that they have done any wrong or blame everyone else for letting them do it. There will be plenty of money for the lawyers. Striking-off won’t work because time-after-time medics have been allowed back once the furore has died down. They get a period of probation or retraining and then let loose again. Medical retraining won’t cure Wokedom.
I actually think these clinicians and their medical associates represent in clear terms a new type of criminal, but one which has always been with us, usually as individuals.
The doctor as ‘God’ who believes, through some kind of supreme arrogance, that he always knows what’s best for the patient regardless of evidence. In this case the clinicians believe their sincerely held trans ideology is a religion that has to be observed regardless of the evidence, and the consequent suffering of patients.
They should be prosecuted by their profession and then the courts for malpractice.
A lot of medical people understand this but are afraid to speak out for fear of losing their jobs. We have allowed this to go this far and really governments have let us down and appear to have joined the bandwagon.
Who we now simply trust ‘experts’ after the debacle we have experienced? Seems many medics and others have in to threats if they questioned the narrative. Thank heaven for those who fought back on Covid nightmare oppression.
Some ex patients have sued. May it increase so that eyes may be opened.
My observation is that when people pointed out these problems, no one really believed them. It was assumed that a medical service of this kind would only be promoted if it really was evidence based, if it was the real bet practice.
There were plenty of Cassandras, they were called bigots and told they didn’t understand the new science.
Really the parents should get political and form pressure groups. If you read the LGBT literature they are the enemy and portrayed as such to vulnerable children. Parent power can be massive when they work together and get back the reponsibility for their own children and resist the woke and the Mermaids corrupting their children. It’s a fight between good and evil really.
It is unbelievable what these people were doing. When I was young I told a psychologist that I was looking for truth. His reply was that there is no truth. Each makes their own. The seeds for these attitudes started a long time ago. If there is no truth you can make it up according to your own point of view and poison vulnerable children. These people were swimming around in their own fantasy truth and called it medical treatment. Many of us had a gut feeling that there was something desperately wrong but didn’t have the arguments to deal with it. It is encouraging that Kathleen Stock has been thinking it through and coming up with answers. We all need to understand what is going on in this land and continue the fightback, especially the parents who are responsible for their children. Marxism tries to usurp that responsibility. Why did we ever let into our schools homosexual men dressed up as women. Time will tell that Cameron and May as Prime Ministers have a lot to answer for by adding to the rot that was starting in their terms. They both fell for the deception.
To a Postmodernist, “everything is relative” – except for their own interests, which are absolute, backed by ideology and beyond any form of challenge.
Catherine Stock has become the indispensable public intellectual of these twisted times. Like a surgeon she identifies the malignant growths of relativism and the twisted illogicality of identity politics. She then with considerably more humanity and understanding than her detractors uses the truth scalpel to excise them. Sadly, with most academics imprisoned or entranced by woke ideology we are going to have to rely on her and her like more to defend truth and logic. The politicians looking fir a sensible and humane perspective on our world could do with listening to her.
Eloquently put.
Kathleen Stock. At least get her name right. Just saying.
Don’t be petty. Just saying.
People need to know her right name if they are going to use her insights.
At least explain what you mean by ‘at least’. It tends to subvert ‘just saying’. I’m not just saying.
Many of our politicians are lost themselves and will not act. I believe it has to be mass parent power at the local and national level.
For me this is a great article, what has been going on in the Tavistock appears to have been state sponsored child abuse and mutilation. One thing that is being overlooked is how much big pharma are invested in this process and probably keen to see it continue. Once someone is on this form of treatment the cost over a lifetime must be huge. Someone is definitely buying influence-always follow the money trail, it will be interesting to see where it leads
Yes, Big Pharma seems to be behind so many of the great evils of our time.
Well, not to defend Big Pharma, but I wish it were so simple.
Yes. (1) There is a “Equality, Diversity and Inclusion” industry which offers plentiful jobs (2) Transhumanism is a growing medical field which offers “spare part surgery” on a “pick and mix” basis. These are just two modern developments which set the scene for “transgenderism”.
It will lead to lawsuits and, fingers crossed, bankruptcy and closure …
“Follow the money”: See Jennifer Bilek https://thefederalist.com/2018/02/20/rich-white-men-institutionalizing-transgender-ideology/
Wow. I read that. It is horrific how these billionaires are backing transgender for lifetime profit. Will I ever sleep again?
Thank you for posting this. Eye opening to say the least!
It appears that the medical oath of do no harm has become follow the money.
Big Pharma almost control the medical profession now. Doctors are less and less allowed to pick the treatment but have to refer to the approved treatment set above their heads which big Pharma have a lot of influence over.
It is actually worse than that: the majority in the medical professions do not know that they do not know the influence of the medical industry on the model of healt-care modern society has elected to prefer..
“Consider the following: for over a decade, and for highly uncertain gains, an NHS service appears to have been been potentially “sterilising” a cohort of minors dominated by homosexual and autistic children, leaving some unable ever to experience orgasm at all. It has exposed them all to increased risk of other irrevocable physical effects”
I have always assumed that medical intervention should not be entertained in the absence of a specific and identifiable medical problem. One that can be treated with a procedure that has been demonstrated to be effective, and that has identifiable and limited side effects. Perhaps we should revert to medieval practice: Place two leeches under your tongue and let them gently dissolve. Quackery? Yes, but harmless quackery.
I am rarely shocked these days, but what these people were allowed to do to children in furtherance of their ludicrous ideological obsessions certainly surprises me. Of course such people have always existed, but the sane majority kept them away from children. No longer it would seem. Perhaps we have lost the confidence to know a rat when we smell one. This was an interesting read by Kathleen Stock, but I didn’t need her to persuade me that the Tavistock was run by wrong ‘uns. The most dispiriting part is that, having abandoned their sinking ship, they will take up residence in other parts of the medical establishment where they will continue to practice their pseudo-scientific claptrap unimpeded.
A very good point, and a very real concern.
Without very rigorous checks and balances, there is a very real risk that these abuses could continue in the planned local GIDS centers.
Why a criminal investigation into this clinic and its child abuse should be done as a priority. We have let abusers get off Scot free because they were from ‘minorities’ for far too long. Spreading the abusers mindset across the NHS means it will be harder to pin down the abusers. Investigate & if needs be prosecute.
Agree
The children’s parents were sometimes willing accomplices, preferring a new daughter to a troubled gay son, for example.
I suspect a lot liked the attention, and the sense of being open-minded and with it.
Perhaps not: they definitely cannot do “double blind” trials for this form of medical treatment for ethical reasons.
The Tavistock “gender ideologues” may throw in the towel when the final Cass report and the CQC both demand trials in the new centres. Only “watchful waiting” would pass the test of balance of harms of giving puberty blockers vs not giving puberty blockers.
Cass is demanding experiments and experimental results.
So, whilst the rest of medicine was engaged in the ongoing process of making medicine a science using evidence based treatments GIDS was tacking in absolutely the other direction. This anomaly should have been noted as such and corrected.
It was eventually and a big thank you to Hilary Cass for her fearlessness and focus on the children as children not as affirmation tools for adult Trans.
The Carthaginians practiced child sacrifice. At least it was quick. We practice prolonged child sacrifice by means of the scarifying of flesh and horrifying stigmata. We know Trans people tend not to survive. Efforts to study their fates fell as apparently being transphobic. Trans want good Trans healthcare, just not that good. Ignorance is not bliss, it is death, of the body and the psyche.
That sacrificial bit. Padded stats. After that long march through our institutions, that long uphill climb toward artificially-inflated numbers that were supposed to convince us that a stupefying artificiality was actually real. Cosmetics for the soul. We would become as gods, apparently. When a child becomes a means to that end, we have lost some very much more than our sense of direction.
As to the studying of the fates: that long tumble down into an inferno became so much more than a lie, than simply sidestepping the truth. Like the proffered sponge-soaked drip of vinegar offered up on behalf of clear clean water.
As I consider Einstein and Jung to be two of the greatest thinkers of the twentieth century, I feel obliged to defend Jung from being maligned in this way. Jungian psychology has no problem with males identifying with the feminine or females identifying with the masculine. According to Jungian psychology, the anima and the animus are archetypes within the collective unconscious. The archetypes form the unconscious and are part universal and part personal. The animus contains those behaviours that are traditionally and historically identified with the masculine, the anima contains those behaviours traditionally and historically identified with the feminine. Jung believed women generally act out of the anima and men generally act out of the animus. In women the animus is usually part of the shadow, that is remains in the unconscious. In men, the anima usually remains in the unconscious. Jung believed to become whole, to individuate, unconscious components of the psyche need to be brought into consciousness and incorporated into the known self. It is a route to self knowledge, which according to the Delphic oracle is one of the most difficult things to achieve, and, according to the mystics, equivalent to the search for truth and for God. In Jungian psychology there is absolutely no need to change the body – for Jung, to be psychologically healthy is to have both masculine and feminine elements of the psyche in balance. Jung believed the incorporation of the shadow into consciousness is absolutely necessary if the evil innate within humanity is ever to be overcome. Recognising and accepting one’s shadow requires recognising and acknowledging one’s true motives, or, in the words of Shakespeare, acknowledging one’s ‘darker purposes’, or In Christian terms, removing the plank from one’s own eye before complaining about a speck in another’s.
Yes, I picked up on this too. Psychoanalysis – whether Jungian or Freudian – rarely takes a statement of psychological distress literally. The analyst wants to interrogate the meaning of what is said. So, a girl says she thinks she’s a boy; the analyst will want to discover what the patient means by ‘masculine’, what she understands by ‘feminine’, and the deeper background to what she says about herself.
To take any patient’s statement about themselves, whatever their age, at face value is the very antithesis of psychodynamic therapy. It follows that in most cases the ‘cure’ is in the therapeutic conversation, not drugs and surgery. The Tavistock betrayed its origins.
“It follows that in most cases the ‘cure’ is in the therapeutic conversation,”
A “cure” practised by mothers down the generations.
The power of the feminine to bless and to curse. I am not sure if your comment is intended to denigrate the mother or elevate her. What is problematic is that psychology is seen as the poor relation to psychiatry. Psychiatry is a branch of medicine and consequently higher status attracting more funding. Medicine treats the body with surgery and drugs. Dispensing drugs and and removing problematic organs is the medical response. The treatment of transgender children with drugs and surgery by psychiatrists was entirely predictable. I would say talking therapies are a cure practised by good mothers, it is the feminine response, but this is where sexism does have a negative impact, as talking cures are not scientific in the way medicine mostly is and tend to be held in low regard by the scientific community (science is associated with the masculine, the more egalitarian a country, the less women study science eg Sweden). A good/ideal therapist requires years of training, a great understanding of and insight into the human condition, as well as the ever elusive self knowledge.
Denigrate or elevate the mother?
Your mother was, likely, the only person capable of loving you without reservation. Therapists, et al, love their nostrums far more than they love you.
As Blind Willie Johnson sang. “Motherless children have a hard time”. He didn’t mention therapists.
My mother never loved me. She told me she was incapable of love when I was growing up. I grew up feeling hated. I believed I was an expense, a noise and a nuisance. Yet I worshipped my mother and did my best to please her. I was so desperate to be loved. My mother over identified with me and was enraged if I expressed a thought or a feeling different from her. She asked my best friend’s mother if she would like to swap daughters when I was 14. My best friend’s mother replied she preferred not to have any teenage girls. My story is long and horrific. I am entitled to almost full victim status but despise victim mentality. My mother was the eternal victim and my role was to be her scapegoat. Through observing her, I learnt how destructive victim mentality is. Those with victim mentality can construe any event however innocuous as malicious, and twist any event into one in which they are the victim rather the aggressor. I wrote a poem once about my mother called twisted people, it concluded with the couplet –
twisted people perceiving themselves to be,
innocent victims in a world of insanity.
victim mentality is currently rampant.
My mother wrote me a letter when I had a complete break down as a consequence of the abuse I had experienced, the content of the first sentence was that when I was nine months old, I learned to walk and led my elder brother astray. She then listed every time she had been unhappy and blamed me. Of course my mother has her own horrific story.
When my son was born, I wanted one thing – that he would grow up knowing my love was unconditional. I never told him this, but he thanked me and his father for our unconditional love in his acknowledgments for some academic work. For me, there is nothing I can or could have done that is or would be more worthwhile. Of course I got things wrong and made mistakes, but I understand the power and the value of the mother.
A familiar story. Women who have nothing else in their lives besides their families seem to be particularly prone to this over- indentification with their children as a form of abuse. It is why female education and careers and dispassionate, professional childcare providers are so important. Most children are better off away from their mothers.
Some, I accept, but mostly not. You might as well be raised by robots as by a “dispassionate professional childcare provider”. What have we become to think like that?
Why do people downvote this? I disagree with you, but so what?
I really don’t agree with you but I accept that’s how you see it. I do think every late teen or young adult has to break away for a time even if get come back. If you don’t or can’t do that due to circumstances you do get subsumed into the stronger character. That’s if your Mum is like was. Maybe I am agreeing with you a bit. But I don’t agree about the best childcare being dispassionate. Children should be brought up with passionate involvement. Also I object to your “women who have nothing else” like unless you’re a poxy human rights lawyer or CEO of Harvey Nichols you’re life is worthless. “Not people die,but worlds die in them” as that Russian poet Yevtushenko said.
Seriously? Speak for yourself.
I think you need help !!!
Thank you for sharing these sad, wise words
Beautifully written. Many thanks.
I half saw that coming (because of the tone of your previous comment). I sympathise with you.
Bravo for this response. Medical psychiatry, the pharma industry and the insurance companies have pushed psychoanalysis to the sidelines. Furthermore children are often too lacking in self awareness to benefit from what a competent psychoanalyst is capable of….which is why parents need to delay as long as possible any extreme decisions regarding their children’s gender ‘identity’. Which raises a second point. Why are we such a genitally obsessed (fixated?) culture? Does my P or my V really define me as a human. Can’t I perform, or even feel, feminine or masculine without lopping off or constructing a body part? If sex is primarily taking place in the brain what does it really matter if I use Slot A or Tab B. An orgasm is an orgasm…and if I feel the need to be penetrated there are options galore for all types of bodies. I have met homosexual men who are ‘feminine’ as hell but wouldn’t dream of changing their bodies. Likewise there are many ‘straight’ men who like to dress in women’s clothes who wouldn’t dream of having sex with anyone but a woman. In the glory days of psychoanalysis both Freudian and Jungian therapists, if they were wise and competent, would help people with these mixed identities to find the narratives and symbols in their psyche’s allowing them to live comfortably in the world. Given what’s at stake for their future happiness, children should not be victims of either social or medical experiments. The issue is real, but the ‘cures’ discussed above are dangerous and far from proven. What needs to change are not children’s bodies but society’s banal binarism and lack of tolerance for diversity, complexity and ambiguity, especially among the young.
Oh, I am afraid, this is very much rooted in psychoanalysis as well.
I too had picked up on that. I posted questions about it on another private forum where there are Jungians. I am not one but am interested in the subject due to the lectures of Jordan Peterson.
Thanks for the description/explanation.
Also, not being a Jungian, is Jung being maligned or do you think Stock is saying that his ideas were appropriated and misunderstood and misapplied?
It seems to me she is connecting the abuse to Jungian psychology otherwise she would be careful to emphasise that she is in no way suggesting the particular therapist is representative of Jungian analysts in general, but saying that, my understanding of Jung is based on extensive reading and study of his written work. I have no idea if those who call themselves Jungian psychoanalysts have remained true to his ideas. Jung cannot be held responsible for individual malpractice. I could be wrong but I doubt Kathleen Stock has in-depth knowledge of Jung.
I copied this of the internet. I think it is far more representative of Jung’s views regarding children.
Jung also observed that children, in their unconscious state, exist in what he called a participation mystique (a term borrowed from the French anthropologist Lévy-Bruhl) or a state of undifferentiated psychological unity with their parents’ unconscious. In fact, he often treated the neurotic complaints of his child patients by analyzing the dreams of the parents, and said that much of a child’s early difficulties in adapting to the world was due to the unlived lives of the parents.
Yes, it’s worth noting that some of the therapists who have spoken out against this idea of total affirmation and medical transformation of children have been Jungians.
Verty good article. It’s important to remember, though, that senior psychoanalysts at the Tavistock were the principal whistle-blowers of this abuse. Psychoanalysis is a rigorous process and what was going on at GIDS was, quite simply, child abuse.
True, but seemingly not senior enough to stop the madness and abuse.
No, psychoanalysis is NOT a rigorous process. It was not psychoanalysists whi blew the whistles, it was psychologists and psychiatrists. And some therapists, as well – and, mind, psychotherapy and psychoanalysis are not necessarily the same thing. Most schools of psychotherapy are not psychoanalysis, and psychoanalysis has the poorest record of them all in terms of efficacy.
Such a terrific writer and thinker.
The suicide risk usually comes after transitioning. I know of one such case of a friend’s daughter who transitioned only to find that is not what she wanted after all. That’s after irreversible surgery and hormone treatment. Appalling.
Sadly no surprise. The treatment creates expectations that can not possibly be fulfilled. Incidentally this is the main reason for the ever radicalizing demands of transactivists. They live in a state of permanent cognitive dissonance. To them, the only way to overcome this is to have the public – meaning: each and every member of the public – constantly affirm what they want to be and have invested so much in trying to be. This of course can only cover up reality – of which they are very well aware – for so long. So they even have to invest even more willpower to convince themselves that they are what they want they want to etc. etc. Hence the vehemence and the publicness of their Creeds. This is a vicious circle.
Now, luckily, some transsexuals do find a way out of it, such as Debbie Hayton. But I’m afraid that many got swept along by transideology, which charges the public with sorting out their internal mental problems.
Even if we leave aside political and social considerations for a bit and for argument’s sake pretend it would be a good thing if we all bowed to transideology’s demand – in the end what they think of as paradise would turn out to be hell for transpeople themselves. If everyone plays along just perfectly, they are still left with their own cognitive dissonance, and unlike now, they would have no one to blame for not really feeling how they want to feel.
Excellent article. We need many more other informed contributors like Kathleen Stock and Debbie Hayton to stand up against this insanity.
More Kathleen Stock, less Tavistock.
Lovely!
“… an NHS service appears to have been been potentially “sterilising” a cohort of minors dominated by homosexual and autistic children, leaving some unable ever to experience orgasm at all.”
It seems to me that some of what was being done to young people at the Tavistock may have amounted to child abuse. Some of these treatments sound horrendous and inhumane. Surely those responsible for such an egregious régime at least should be investigated – and, if appropriate, convicted and/or struck off the medical register? Ditto the top management people in the NHS who permitted this service to flourish for so long.
As I have said for many months, this is a child abuse scandal. It is not enough to close the clinic, the purveyors of this need to be investigated and if found guilty of abuse, prosecuted. Savile had fewer victims.
For four decades, my family has been dragged through every form of destructive psychiatric quackery inflicted on one of our members by “trained professionals”. He was an experiment for them; they wrote papers, published articles, appeared on Oprah, made scads of money. He was bounced from pricey private clinics to group homes to hospitals to his parents back to hospitals. Their interventions resulted in turning a young man with common, manageable anxiety into a drug-dependent, permanently institutionalized old man existing now in a form of half death.
The fact that there are medical doctors drugging and mutilating children caught up in craze perpetrated by mentally ill adults is further proof that few “experts” can be trusted. Many will lie for money and prestige, and enough are willing to commit Mengele-level crimes in plain sight, with the support and backing of governments and institutions.
Closing this Tavistock house of horrors is a start. I pray it is but the first domino to fall in a long and grisly row.
I think psychiatrists destroy lives. I highly recommend the YouTube video – psychiatry and big pharma exposed by Dr James Davies if you want know how shocking psychiatry really is.
I lived it, Aphrodite, and completely agree. If my family member weren’t still alive, I’d write/film my own expose on what he – and we – have endured.
I understand Alison your desire that people should be held accountable and your reluctance to cause suffering to the living. I am really sorry to hear you have suffered so much and probably almost completely unnecessarily.
With science being viewed as an alternative to religion, should we be surprised when Drs and scientists start to see themselves as Gods. The representatives of the reprehensible Mermaids speak like a warrior priest class too. Egos are dangerous things.
These people create the problems they want to experiment on live humans to learn manipulative techniques about, profit from and exert power over.
It’s sick and they have known about intrauterine hormonal influences on sexuality since DES daughters as detailed in the DSM III r.
Now they are experimenting on gender non conforming children. The really funny part is watching these unethical idiots parrot each other’s absurdities like stepford wives whilst pretending to intellectual superiority.
The tragic part is I have the feeling we have “enjoyed” the golden years of homo history and the world has proven yet again we are just experimental subjects for the elites who lack the humanity to authentically allow homosexuality to coexist.
The Nazis did A LOT of sexual experimentation and I’ve often wondered if all their very accurate records of the results was destroyed after the War or is in an Archive to be studied by later practitioners of all the aspects of sexuality like the developers of the contraceptive pill,and the early originators of the trans movement. I suspect its all there,all intact in some archive available to be studied if you are accredited. How do I know about this? I once read an article about it in a newspaper and I once saw ten minutes of a late night tv documentary and ten minutes was enough for me. We are told about The Kinsey report all the time but this Nazi research is never mentioned at all presumably because its so insalubrious,but so is the Kinsey.
Its like a step too far to say,like its almost normal and acceptable to say “vagina” but it’s a huge I’ll mannered and coarse faux pa’s to say “c******s” . Oh shucks,I just said it. Oops.
Thank you for a very *thoughtful* article. I am saddened by the loss of the original Tavistock and its betrayal of its purpose. I believe medicalised psychology inevitably becomes a contradiction of terms.
Excellent piece and we can be grateful that a prominent academic, and lesbian, is standing with 95% of the population who think that pharmaceutical and surgical interventions to tamper with normal sexual function should not be available to children.
Maybe 20 years ago I taught psychology to psychotherapists. In the press at the time was the story of a Scottish surgeon who had been discovered performing amputations of healthy limbs (on the NHS) to patients with a diagnosable disorder that caused them to seek amputations.
When the press got hold of the story, the surgeon desisted, but the practice was defended as being ‘life saving’ for some individuals who might otherwise self injure.
I think the underlying lesson is surprisingly simple. If a disorder is said to require the mutilation of a healthy body, the problem is not medical and should not be treated as such. Giving antidepressants and/or antipsychotics to suicidal or dangerously ill patients has perhaps blurred the lines of what is and is not a psychological versus a medical problem.
Medications that can treat or ease psychiatric disorders, by acting on the brain, can have troublesome side effects that are assessed and taken into account during treatment. Medications to treat physical maladies can, likewise, have side effects that are assessed and taken into account.
To prescribe a medication that deliberately interferes with normal bodily functions, for no benefit to the body, in the vain hope that it acts on the brain (or psyche) seems utterly bizarre. Who has been assessing and documenting the side effects, both short and long term, and where is the data to prove that outcomes justify ‘treatment’?
The use of estrogen in men started in the US in the 1950s. Dr John Money, Mr Alfred Kinsey and Mr Harry Benjamin administered the new human sex hormone (major ingredient in birth control pill) to a small group of transsexual men who were very pleased with the emotional and physical effects. Dr Money had to justify his experiment so he just invented the idea of “gender” as sex of the mind which, he postulated, was the opposite of the sex of the body of these men. There was not and there still is not any scientific evidence to support this theory – or ideology as it is more properly called. “Gender identity” ideology is quackery.
Who ever allowed all our Institutions and services to be taken over by such mentally ill and evil people?
That s one of the great questions of our time. And until all these people – and there are, perhaps, millions of them – are swept away, our society will continue to decline.
WE DID! Maybe not you and I but it’s “Our” fault for letting them creep up on us.
The ‘rot’ received a major impetus from the 13th August, 1964, when the UK state supinely abrogated its responsibilities.
Very important piece, and with much wider application – how many other institutions have also “assumed meaning is constructed, not found. They have denied that there is any certain or timeless knowledge, but only specific cultural dynamics to navigate in the here and now”? At the risk of being very controversial and unpopular, I would suggest that a flaw in this otherwise excellent piece is the assumption at the end that there is such a thing as “homosexual children”, as if this is some empirically observable, innate and unchangeable characteristic. Why is that not “constructing meaning”, while the idea of “transgender children” is?
My (heterosexual) sexual orientation was “empirically observable” well before I ceased to be a child and indeed before puberty. That’s not to say that it was an “innate and unchangeable characteristic” or is that being asserted here. Plenty of people change or discover their sexual orientation later in life.
Identifying a child as transgender does however seem to be an assertion of something innate, and the construction element comes in when it is used as a catch-all explanation for a number of of different behaviours (such as same-sex preference or autism). And then for this projection to be used as a justification for a drastic medical intervention–nothing of the sort happens or is required when you simply notice that your child is or may be gay.
No, strictly speaking there are no such entities as homosexual children – or as heterosexual children either. Nonetheless, as they grow up, the great majority of children will discover that their sexual orientation is heterosexual, and a small minority will discover that their sexual orientation is homosexual. Since more of the latter than of the former are likely, during childhood, not to conform in various ways to so-called “gender” stereotypes, they tend to be more vulnerable than the former to the kind of medical abuse which some call “gender medicine”. That is the point that is being made here.
I need hardly add that the increased likelihood of “gender” non-conforming children growing up with a homosexual or bisexual orientation is not a justification for subjecting them to some other form of officious tampering.
Perhaps another Homeric metaphor is that of the frenzied Achilles fighting the river Scamander. After slicing up hundreds of young people and discarding their bodyparts into the seething river, Achilles is approached by Scamander. The bloodied water god angrily berates proud Achilles, who in his arrogance charges into the stream of gore with his blade meaning to fight nature itself. Foaming with blood, the furious river tries to drown Achilles and his hubris forever, forcing him into a retreat.
Prof. Stock very nicely expresses a clash here that is also fundamental to the so-called culture wars more generally: on the one side of the argument, there is the postmodern making of meaning, where everything is a social construct and ‘there are no prior fixed facts about identity, or truth, or morality here to discover’; while on the other side, there is the science of ‘evidence-based medicine according to whatever gold-standard methodology is available at the time’, applying ‘stringent standards of truth and falsity, and a thoroughly old-fashioned belief in the existence of prior standards of right and wrong’.
It is tempting to take sides and simply ignore what the other side is saying. But both sides have their severe limitations: Meaning making that ignores medical realities leads, as Stock points out, to, for example, ‘potentially negative effects of GnRHa on brain maturation, bone density, kidneys, height, sexual function, and mature genitalia formation’.
But on the other side, most medical researchers produce evidence that leads not to cast-iron guidance but to enabling a patient to make ‘an informed choice’. Of course, it’s absurd to expect a 15-year-old to make an informed choice even if they were to follow evidence-based medicine. But adults are still left with this issue of what to decide – based on the evidence, in part, but also based on a lot of other factors. And following the science is not an approach that has covered itself with glory recently (during the pandemic, etc.).
Furthermore, consider, for example, Paul Kingsnorth’s excellent essay this weekend (‘The West Needs to Grow up’), where new meaning making is presented as the only approach that is going to resolve our current ‘cultural inversion’ and bring us out of this period of the destruction of all of those old-fashion beliefs in prior standards.
So perhaps we should not be too quick to throw out meaning making and social constructs in favor of simply following the science, and the point is to learn how to balance the two. Quite clearly, the Tavistock got that balance woefully wrong, but what the correct balance is going to be is still an open question – it will require not just respect for the science (and its limiations) but some new narratives to make sense of it all.
Timothy Corwen (author, The Worth of a Person)
You can never have the wrong brain in the wrong body. Treating problems of the brain by mutilitating the body is abuse. Doing it to Children is child abuse.
I would not be too optimistic about the science evidence narrative. It is to be noted that the editor of the Lancet in 2015 wrote: i now realise that 80% of articles published in peer reviewed medial magazines are either wrong or useless for medicine.
The value of the ‘gold standard’ double blinded trial, which has lead to much of what many consider evidence based medicine, is currently slowly being downgraded…
Further: evidence based medicine is based on 3 pillars: 1) best available evidence (of which there is sadly too little in medicine), 2) the experience of the practitioner and 3) the wishes/preference/sensitivity of the patient
(Sackett DL, Rosenberg WM, Gray JA, Haynes RB, Richardson WS. Evidence based medicine: what it is and what it isn’t. Bmj. 1996 Jan 13;312(7023):71-2)
an interesting Dutch report : https://www.raadrvs.nl/documenten/publications/2017/6/19/no-evidence-without-context.-about-the-illusion-of-evidence%E2%80%90based-practice-in-healthcare
Ah well. Riki Tiki Tavi the mongoose is gone. Children saved from the child savers. Dispensing with yet again more corpulent crops of psycho-babble. The kind that spring like flocks of crows at that always interesting question, what indeed, is a woman? That second sight at a self-imposed blindness.
Ever notice that nobody ever bothers to ask, well then, what is a man? Could it be perhaps that 95% or more of those humans who actually nod in any transitional direction toward some concept of manhood, probably don’t want to be a man at all? They just don’t want to identify as anything particularly female. Which is one of the more interesting head-twisters of our times.
But then, really. When organizations fluffed up with ungodly importance and self-aggrandizement, based on the concerted efforts it takes to step outside of factual science, rigorous exploration of observed results, honest accounting, and most especially, the laws of nature and of reality itself, what can we expect but a sort of ongoing dysphoria of the mind? How does one argue with all of that? Rolling the dice endlessly back to that Orwellian answer that insists 2+2 = 5. Only it never did, and never will, excepting only for the power to insist it be so, and make it stick. Which has nothing to do with harmony, humanity, or any further upward mobility in our affairs.
Which no doubt, was the point all along. The turning of this tide invites not so much celebration as deeper resolve.
It’s true that hardly anyone now asks “What is a man?” (although philosophers did so until very recently). This is at least partly because almost everyone for the past half century, certainly everyone who retains legitimacy in the public square, has assumed that only women have distinctive needs and distinctive problems. Men are innately “privileged,” supposedly, and therefore cannot have any of those. From this gynocentric point of view, there’s no need to ask about the condition, let alone the identity, of men at all. Never mind the stats on male suicides, male drop-out rates, male mass murderers and other evidence of severe pathologies.
The notion of transgender identity really does create serious problems for girls and young women, and feminists really do have good reasons for opposing trans activism. But this does not mean that transgender ideology has no effect on boys and young men. In fact, the underlying problem of manhood has been growing for centuries and remains largely unnoticed. I refer to their increasing inability to form a healthy collective identity, a problem that is partly (but not originally and by no means entirely even now) due to the prevalence of misandry throughout society.
Why am I reminded of Josef Mengele and the other nazi doctors experimenting in the concentration camps during WWII? Carl Clauberg sterilised over 300,000 people over a period of 4 years,
Mermaids and Stonewall are deeply sinister organisations who amazingly have infiltrated seemingly every organisation in the uk in recent years. They must be stopped asap.
yes, but this is nowadays normal practice: see the experiment of covid vaccines on the population
“True to the relativism of these philosophers, in Wren’s intellectual vision there are no objective truths but only a series of subjective narratives.”
Puberty blockers, mastectomies, and castrations are not subjective narratives. They are permanent realities. And the clinic hasn’t found itself in the middle of a controversy but rather are on one side of a controversy.
Ha! Great minds think alike, I’ve just bought a boat and named it Charybdis.
Charybdis aided her father Poseidon in his feud with her paternal uncle Zeus and, as such, helped him engulf lands and islands in water. Zeus, angry over the land she stole from him, captured and chained her to the sea-bed. Charybdis was then cursed by the god and transformed into a hideous bladder of a monster, with flippers for arms and legs, and an uncontrollable thirst for the sea. As such, she drank the water from the sea thrice a day to quench it, which created a whirlpool.
The menopause had a similar effect on me.
Never mind the Sirens – I was thinking of the Furies when I considered what the future for these criminals should look like.
Why did it take so long? Because, according to Kemi Badenoch, a small cadre of complicit civil servants was keeping ministers at bay.
Youngsters thinking that they need to change their sex, should be encouraged to read this article together with the many comments.
The most upsetting aspect of the treatment of these young people is the risk presented by irreversible surgical interventions which are proving to be life spoiling.
…I would dearly love to know how many of the people involved in this “medical?” lunacy…had been potential patients in the past, or knew somebody who had been…were, in affect, working out their own neuroses by drugging and mutilating children…and indeed if there is a Police investigation in the offing…because there clearly ought to be..!
Is that a vegan dog I see in the photo accompanying the article?
It sounds like a play creche for idealogues where the children patients were the plasticine models. I wonder, will there be any professional disqualification or criminal proceedings to follow for what seems to be systematic failings within this giddy playground of misery and abuse.
I think you nailed it, Professor: “these people think it a reasonable goal to alter a child’s healthy bodily tissue in order to accommodate a mind which is, by their own admission, constantly developing. ”
What a waste to the faculty at Sussex. Surely this must all end in prosecutions for child abuse? There must be many parents agonising about what has been done to their children and their role.
There is a fine piece by Tim Stanley in The Telegraph. All the more valuable for placing this in a wider context.
‘Meaning is constructed, not found’.
The founding statement of all thought control.
Is it the whole Tavistock centre that is closing, or just GIDS?
I think it is GIDS, not the Tavistock.
De-transitioners who have been through Tavistock tell a frightening story of a few short consultations leading to the medical professional deciding “I think you are trans”. As if “trans” is an objectively real statement about the patient on a level of their blood group or eye colour. They certainly exhibit symptoms of gender dysphoria, but the root cause and the appropriate treatment (if any) is another matter. When 75% to 95% of young people presenting with gender dysphoria eventually decide they are content with their natal sex, the case for puberty blockers and cross sex hormones is flimsy indeed. We can breathe a sigh of relief that Tavistock will close, and pray to God that the pernicious poison is not distributed to the regional centres proposed by Hillary Cass.
Why does no-one ever say to the pseudo-intellectual ‘experts’ quoted in the article – ‘Er, listen mate. That sounds like total bollocks to me’.
Well said
Yes Biological functioning is not merely a Jungian concept. Lucky the Brit NHS has a more rigorous research tradition and practice than most nation states. The US has no parallel check on such weird psycho/Lysenko sans evidence science. Plus it seems our dear, deluded leader has been scripted to support even sub 16 puberty blockers if their current identity preference requests satisfaction. Will their later take be I have no regrets??
There is a very interesting number of narratives here which are colliding.
There is deep unease amongst adults about formalising or medicalising treatment of gender dysphoria in children.
There is a deep unease about letting people self-identify, particularly among women who fear for their protected spaces.
Since the Gender Recognition Act was introduced only a small number, 5,000 according to your recent articles, have actually pursued reassignment with many more in a state of fluidity and I am told who resist the medicalisation of their “journey.”
The solution is easy. The vast majority of people with GFluidity simply carry on following their rooted gender. If their, birth certificate, driving licence and passport remains unchanged which Loo or Prison they go in is rather obvious. If they are going to suffer abuse it will happen in or out of a loo. Other laws protect them from such things.
The hand full of cases of people who wish to pursue change in adult hood are already protected by the GRA.
I suspect the reason why the number of re-assignments is so low is that for those people everything else (including playing sport in their acquired gender) is secondary to their lifelong journey for peace because they really do have an inexplicable but entirely profound need to realign and whilst Jan Morris knew she was a girl from the age of five and others at puberty they as well balanced thoughtful individuals will know there is a history from the moment this kind of journey has been possible however high the bar some regret it, and therefore nothing irreversible should be pursued until people are old enough (adults) and judged sane enough to understand the meaning of the question they are asking themselves.
I thought I was going to be anti this article because I think that children and their parents have a hand in this (it’s like abortion and blaming the abortionist – you didn’t have to avail yourself of this service, so are responsible for putting your life in someone else’s hands).
‘Thoughtful?’ Like I said in another post, I believe, the news kept on about office workers, working from home but ignored those providing actual ‘physical’ products to the public. We are more than mind, we also have a body and letting someone else talk us into doing something physical that we will have to live with forever, ignores this ‘verbal’ salesmanship (The Emperor’s New Clothes syndrome). It’s easy to change someone’s mind and through that the buyer’s body but it is a big con, that we can let ourselves get ‘talked’ into.
I hope a friend down the road or my brother doesn’t follow this course with their daughters, who both claim to be males in female bodies (funnily they both want to be called by the same male name, so have they been groomed on the same site?).
Of course it is not just changing sex that leads to bodily ‘enhancements’ that will have disastrous consequences for those foolish enough to mutilate their bodies because it is cool or rebellious, or have cosmetic surgery (bigger bums, bigger breasts, bigger lips etc). Conned into doing stupid things like school playground dares, others end up in hospital with life changing injuries also.
It’s a mad world my masters and its slowly getting worse.
I thought I was going to be anti this article because I think that children and their parents have a hand in this (it’s like abortion and blaming the abortionist – you didn’t have to avail yourself of this service, so are responsible for putting your life in someone else’s hands).
‘Thoughtful?’ Like I said in another post, I believe, the news kept on about office workers, working from home but ignored those providing actual ‘physical’ products to the public. We are more than mind, we also have a body and letting someone else talk us into doing something physical that we will have to live with forever, ignores this ‘verbal’ salesmanship (The Emperor’s New Clothes syndrome). It’s easy to change someone’s mind and through that the buyer’s body but it is a big con, that we can let ourselves get ‘talked’ into.
I hope a friend down the road or my brother doesn’t follow this course with their daughters, who both claim to be males in female bodies (funnily they both want to be called by the same male name, so have they been groomed on the same site?).
Of course it is not just changing sex that leads to bodily ‘enhancements’ that will have disastrous consequences for those foolish enough to mutilate their bodies because it is cool or rebellious, or have cosmetic surgery (bigger bums, bigger breasts, bigger lips etc). Conned into doing stupid things like school playground dares, others end up in hospital with life changing injuries also.
It’s a mad world my masters and its slowly getting worse.
Po-mo tosh building on a foundation of psychoanalytic thinking. Not the strongest intellectual foundation for real-world issues. Some people think other people’s lives and psyches are pieces in an intellectual game.
Po-mo tosh building on a foundation of psychoanalytic thinking. Not the strongest intellectual foundation for real-world issues. Some people think other people’s lives and psyches are pieces in an intellectual game.
My apologies to the perennial pedants but sincerely to Kathleen for misnaming her. I am sure she’ll get over it.
My apologies to the perennial pedants but sincerely to Kathleen for misnaming her. I am sure she’ll get over it.
In other words, ordinary binary notions of truth and falsity, or of discovering what is right and wrong, are inapplicable when it comes to the treatment of gender-dysphoric youth — because there are no prior fixed facts about identity, or truth, or morality here to discover. All meaning is up for grabs.[…] At least historically, senior clinicians at the Tavistock have never believed there is anything but certain context-bound forms of thought, floating about in a post-modern void. They have assumed meaning is constructed, not found. They have denied that there is any certain or timeless knowledge, but only specific cultural dynamics to navigate in the here and now…
I cannot recommend enough this discussion between a postmodernist (Thaddeus Russell) – and scientist and mathematician (James Lindsay) and historian (Helen Pluckrose), authors of the book Cynical Theories. It is, in my view, the most cogent presentation of what postmodernism is and what the scientific method is and its approach to truth and reality.
I recommend entering the discussion at the 1 hour mark or the 1 hour 18 min mark. Thaddeus may come across as arrogant but he is rather just being cheeky and a good devil’s advocate etc.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9sUkmBX8jUE&t=3633s
I keep the book on my coffee/laptop table for “ready reference” and edification of all who dare sit in my chair.
Thank you for saying the ‘unsaid’ and indeed unheard.
Wow. Thanks for digging this up.
Even by the standards of alternative medicine this is highly esoteric and most garden variety schools of quackery sound rational by comparison. Sadly, this has hiterto been considered established medicine, publicly funded and thrust upon the most vulnerable of children.
Doesn’t anyone care to have a look anymore? It is unfathomable to me how that could escape even the most superficial look into the service.
On a somewhat ironic note: The Jungian roots of this scandal make it rather surprising that Jordan Peterson hasn’t fully embraced this. He is an avid and avowed Jungian – which tells you all you need to know about him as a public thinker. Or whatever it is one would want to call him.
(As a public figure, he lives off his Canadian accent. It makes him sound thoughtful – there we go again – and sincere. Rather helpful when all you have to offer is hand me down reactionary ideas. With the exception of his criticism of trans ideology, but even there he gets the context wrong.)