(ZENIT News – La Bussola Quotidiana / London, 29.12.2023).- On December 27, the Daily Mail revealed that more than 70 children who were just three and four-years-old were sent to the National Health Service (NHS) Tavistock Clinic for transsexuals.
The official figures show that dozens of children, not yet of school age, have been sent to the Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) over the last decade in a massive tragic and horrible child experiment. Jackie Doyle-Price, former Health Minister, criticized the continuous postponements of the Clinic’s definitive closure, already established, stating that the Clinic “should never have visited three-year-old children,” and stressing that politics and the government must send a clear message: “Let children be children. Let them play and use their imagination. We should not medicalize something that only has to do with growing,” she said to the Daily Mail.
At present there is no age limit to go to the GIDS Clinic, run by the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust in North London. However, the NHS is studying the possibility of introducing a minimum age of seven years for sending children to clinics, in order to protect the smallest children who might not be able to express themselves properly to the doctors. The figures published show that the Clinic had 12 three-year-old children sent to it between 2010 and 2020, as well as 61 four-year olds, 140 five-year-olds and 169 six-year-olds. The number of youngsters sent to the GIDS year after year, shows the speed with which the concept it spreading, with 136 sent in 2010-11 to 3,585 a decade later, which implies a total of 19,000 children of all ages in 25 years of care.
Stephanie Davies-Arai, of the Transgender Trend Group, an organization of British parents, professionals and academics concerned about the current tendency to diagnose children as transsexuals, worried about a legislation that puts first the rights of transsexuals to the right of girls for security, said to the Daily Mail that “some parents are concerned because their gender non-conforming child could have been ‘born in a mistaken body’ and needs professional help.” The closure of the NHS’ only gender Clinic for children in England and Wales has been postponed until March 2024, approximately one year later than initially planned.
The Gender Identity Development Service, with headquarters in Tavistock and Portman [Square] of the NHS Foundation Trust of London, will be substituted by two regional centers. The Tavistock Clinic was described as “inadequate” by inspectors that visited it at the end of 2020, after the BBC’s Newsnight program reported the concerns and abuses denounced by many. In July of last year, NHS England announced that GIDS would close in the spring of 2023, following the provisional report of Dr Hilary Cass, which described the only current service as “unsustainable.” The UK’s Association of Clinical Psychologists (ACP-UK) stated that the closure of the Clinic was necessary due to systemic failures,” including a “predominantly affirmative,” instead of an exploratory approach.
It seems that more than 1,000 families have initiated legal actions against the Clinic, especially as a result of the extraordinary and dramatic case of Keira Bell, for diagnosing her children incorrectly and, in many cases, causing enormous harm, including the extirpation of adolescents’ body parts. This latest scandal follows the little alarm of the Tavistock Clinic itself, which at the end of November had to admit how the number of children who were prescribed puberty blockers duplicated since 2022, despite the fact that the NHS committed itself to reduce the treatment to 83 children. However, the Sunak Government has taken the matter very seriously with a series of initiatives.
The first is the public consultation on the new guidelines for transsexuals clinics. Children will only be sent to transsexual clinics if their parents and a specialist are in agreement, whereas up to now teachers, social workers and family doctors could send children to Tavistock, without the need to obtain parental consent. On the other hand, the Minister of Equality and Women, Kemi Badenoch, is leading the battle against the transsexual epidemic in British schools and societies.
In an open letter published in the Daily Mail on December 19, Badenoch reiterated that British children have been “led to believe that they can be born with a mistaken body and that we have an abstract ‘gender identity’ separate from our biological sex.” It is a controversial and confused ideology . . . [but] it has spread to our schools, causing concern among well-intentioned parents and teachers who want to do the correct thing with the children entrusted to them . . . In this regard, the government ‘s position is clear. In the first place, we believe in dignity, respect and individual freedom . . . In the second place, to teach children that they can be born in a “mistaken” body is harmful. The legal sex of children is always the same as their biological sex . . . In the third place, one’s biological sex is real and must be protected. Schools and Universities have legal obligations and specific regulations that depend on the child’s biological sex.” A decisive step to conciliate the reality, the nature and the rights of parents and children which the new Guide for teachers of the Ministry of Education makes clear, although it could be improved.
Translation of the Italian original by ZENIT’s Editorial Director and, into English, by Virginia M. Forrester
