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Dear Editor,
I write in response to the review “Trying to Pass off Transphobia as Psychoanalysis and Cruelty as ‘Clinical Logic’,” by Avgi Saketopoulou.
There are many serious inaccuracies in this review and the whole tone (of mockery and accusation) did not seem to me to be appropriate to an academic journal. I am reminded of the great literary critic Northrop Frye who once mused, “If you read a piece of literary criticism written by someone who has sympathy with the work, you learn a lot about the work. If you read a similar piece by someone who hates the work, you learn only about the critic.”
However, for the purposes of this letter, I wish to confine myself to Saketopoulou’s reference to whistleblowers. I was the person who raised the alarm about the Tavistock Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) for children and young people and thus was, technically, a whistleblower. I would like to explain the context. I was at the time the Clinical and Academic Staff Representative on the Council of Governors of the Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust (“The Tavistock”), a body of stakeholders and staff that is charged with oversight of the Board. It was in that role that I was approached, over a period of about ten months in
2017-18, by about one-third of the staff of GIDS who raised with me very serious clinical and ethical concerns. There is not the space here to give details of the concerns, but these were among them:
Children were being inappropriately fast-tracked onto the medical pathway. Ninety-eight percent of children who started puberty blockers went on to opposite sex hormones. Thus, the decision to commence puberty blockers was in almost all cases a decision to embark on an irreversible medical pathway. This was occurring with inadequate assessment and lack of appropriate consent procedures.
Many of the children had other complex problems which were not appropriately addressed (such as autism, mood disorders, eating disorders, histories of trauma, serious famil