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

Time to Think goes behind the headlines to reveal the truth about the NHS’s flagship gender service for children.

The Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS), based at the Tavistock and Portman Trust in North London, was set up initially to provide ― for the most part ― talking therapies to young people who were questioning their gender identity. But in the last decade GIDS has referred more than a thousand children, some as young as nine years old, for medication to block their puberty. In the same period, the number of referrals has exploded, increasing thirty-fold, while the profile of the patients has changed, from largely pre-pubescent boys to mostly adolescent girls, who are often contending with other difficulties.

Why had the patients changed so dramatically? Were all these distressed young people actually best served by taking puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones? While some young people appeared to thrive after taking the blocker, many seemed to become worse. Was there enough clinical evidence to justify such profound medical interventions in the lives of young people who had so much else to contend with?

This urgent, scrupulous and dramatic book explains how, in the words of some former staff, GIDS has been the site of a serious medical scandal, in which ideological concerns took priority over clinical practice. Award-winning journalist Hannah Barnes has had unprecedented access to thousands of pages of documents, including internal emails and unpublished reports, and over a hundred hours of personal testimony, to write a disturbing and gripping parable of our times.