Time to Think Quotes

“As well as personal vindication for Appleby, the employment tribunal proceedings again highlighted how, rather than tackle the safeguarding concerns being raised about GIDS, the Tavistock Trust had instead attempted to penalize the person raising them. Appleby described a ‘full blown organizational assault’ against her in response to the concerns she had raised.”
― Hannah Barnes, Time to Think: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Tavistock's Gender Service for Children

“Many trans adults say that, in retrospect, puberty blockers were helpful, life-saving even. Both Hannah and Phoebe, each of whom has her own chapter in this book, have made this point when speaking to me. But these drugs have not been helpful for everyone – both for those who continue to identify as trans, like Jacob, and for those who do not.”
― Hannah Barnes, Time to Think: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Tavistock's Gender Service for Children

“The response provided by the Trust’s leadership each time it heard clinical concerns over GIDS appears to have been to criticize the way those concerns have been voiced – the tone of them – or to argue that such remarks are upsetting to other GIDS staff. What seems to have been lacking is a willingness to grapple with the substance of concerns, and put patients first and foremost.”
― Hannah Barnes, Time to Think: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Tavistock's Gender Service for Children

“The pioneers of the Dutch protocol were well aware that the pathway they had devised – puberty blockers, followed by cross-sex hormones and surgery – would not work for all. They acknowledged that by lowering the age at which puberty was blocked, it might ‘increase the incidence of “false positives”.’ It is this group, the group for whom this pathway will not be of benefit, say Hutchinson and others, that has been ignored by gender clinics across the Western world, including GIDS.”
― Hannah Barnes, Time to Think: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Tavistock's Gender Service for Children

“Those who were gay were told they were ‘too close’ to the work, and, according to one former senior clinician, anyone who spoke out was ‘made to feel hysterical’ in some way. ‘The more anxious and worried you became, the more it was framed that you weren’t really someone who could handle it.’ It was ‘a brilliant way to divert it away from what we’re actually doing, which was changing children’s bodies’, they say. It is not credible to explain away the concerns of so many experienced clinicians either by accusations of transphobia or allegations that they are simply not up to the task at hand.”
― Hannah Barnes, Time to Think: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Tavistock's Gender Service for Children

“Many clinicians told Sinha of the homophobia they witnessed: how young people appeared to be experiencing internalized homophobia and how some families would make openly homophobic comments… some parents appeared to prefer the idea that their child was transgender and straight than that they were gay, and were pushing them towards transition.”
― Hannah Barnes, Time to Think: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Tavistock's Gender Service for Children

“In 2022, more than three years after stopping puberty blockers, Jacob is 19 and still trans. He uses a male name and male pronouns, and dresses in a way that he says is typically male. His passport and driving license say male. But he’s not on any medication. He hasn’t chosen to take testosterone and has no plans to. ‘I’m quite content with just being me at the moment.”
― Hannah Barnes, Time to Think: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Tavistock's Gender Service for Children

“He experienced a range of intense and unpleasant side effects [on puberty blockers], as he tried different doses. ‘On one of them I had really bad insomnia. And another one, I had really bad anger problems.’ … ‘Your mood goes like it’s a roller coaster,’ he explains. ‘There are moments when you’re euphorically happy. The next day, you crash really bad and you are exhausted. And then you’re really, really depressed, like, suicidal depressed.’ Jacob says he had felt depressed before starting on puberty blockers and had experienced anxiety… ‘On the blockers I broke my wrist twice, my knuckles, my toe. It really ruins your bone density.’ Four broken bones in just a few years…As Jacob’s health deteriorated and his puberty continued to ‘break through’, he grew increasingly distressed…After more than four years on the blocker, Jacob felt worse than he ever had before the medication. While his friends were getting their first boyfriends and girlfriends, experiencing their first kisses and sexual experiences, he felt nothing. ‘You have no desire, no drive whatsoever,’ he says. ‘You don’t even feel attracted to people.’ … Emotionally, he felt years younger than his peers. Michelle noticed it too. And physically, Jacob had stopped growing.”
― Hannah Barnes, Time to Think: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Tavistock's Gender Service for Children

“Speaking to BBC Newsnight in 2020, Taylor was explicit. ‘If you try to set out to please or comply with someone, whether you’re a parent or a clinician, then you won’t be helping them.’ It is vital for clinicians to keep an independent perspective, he added.”
― Hannah Barnes, Time to Think: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Tavistock's Gender Service for Children

“Clinicians like Anna Hutchinson and Melissa Midgen have posited that ‘there are multiple, interweaving factors bearing down on girls and young women’ that help explain why so many are experiencing gender-related distress. They say they have witnessed a ‘toxic collision of factors: a world telling these children they are “wrong”; they are not doing girlhood (or boyhood) correctly’, girls struggling with their emerging sexuality, and girls who ‘struggle in puberty because it is uncomfortable, weird and unpredictable (particularly heightened if they happen to be on the autistic spectrum)’.”
― Hannah Barnes, Time to Think: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Tavistock's Gender Service for Children

“Self-diagnosed adolescent trans boys – natal females – started to fill up GIDS’s waiting room with similar stories, haircuts, even names – ‘one after another after another’. They’d talk about their favourite trans YouTubers, many having adopted the same name, and how they aspired to be like them in the future. Given how complicated these young people appeared to be, could something else be going on that explained this, something other than them all being trans?”
― Hannah Barnes, Time to Think: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Tavistock's Gender Service for Children

“The sex ratio of those being referred had shifted dramatically too. The number of girls (known at that time at GIDS as ‘natal females’, now ‘birth-assigned females’) seeking help had equalled the number of boys for the first time in 2011. Previously, GIDS’s caseload had been nearly three-quarters male for those referred in childhood, or two-thirds overall. At first, this change was understood to be positive – a sort of balancing-out – and attributed to the fact that the girls were perhaps being better supported to seek help. But by 2015 it was clear that, in fact, something bigger was happening. There had been a complete reversal. Referrals for natal girls made up 65 percent of the total. In 2019/20 girls outnumbered boys by a ratio of six to one in some age groups, most markedly between the ages of 12 and 14 … Moreover, the majority were girls whose gender-related distress had begun after the onset of puberty, during adolescence. They didn’t have a history of childhood dysphoria.”
― Hannah Barnes, Time to Think: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Tavistock's Gender Service for Children

“This is not a story which denies trans identities; nor that argues trans people deserve to lead anything other than happy lives, free of harassment, with access to good healthcare. This is a story about the underlying safety of an NHS service, the adequacy of the care it provides and its use of poorly evidenced treatments on some of the most vulnerable young people in society. And how so many people sat back, watched, and did nothing.”
― Hannah Barnes, Time to Think: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Tavistock's Gender Service for Children

“The initial proceedings and judgment throw into sharp focus how a clinical service that had been running for thirty years, referring young people for medical treatments about which little is known (in terms of long-term side effects at least), had collected next to no data.”
― Hannah Barnes, Time to Think: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Tavistock's Gender Service for Children

“NHS England. Why did they allow the early blocking of puberty to be rolled out as routine practice without demanding to see some data supporting this radical shift? Why didn’t it insist on seeing any data at all?”
― Hannah Barnes, Time to Think: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Tavistock's Gender Service for Children

“GIDS’s own limited data, which found ‘no evidence of change in psychological function’ with puberty-blocker treatment.”
― Hannah Barnes, Time to Think: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Tavistock's Gender Service for Children

“The Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) has undoubtedly helped some people. It has unquestionably harmed others.”
― Hannah Barnes, Time to Think: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Tavistock's Gender Service for Children

“To all those who shared their experience of GIDS as service users or as their family members, thank you for telling your stories. Ellie, Jack, Phoebe, Hannah, ‘Jacob’, ‘Michelle’, ‘Diana’, ‘Harriet’ – thank you for trusting with me with such personal accounts, and, in some cases, highly sensitive information.”
― Hannah Barnes, Time to Think: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Tavistock's Gender Service for Children

“Reconstructive surgeon and ‘world-renowned vaginoplasty specialist’ Marci Bowers voiced concerns over blocking puberty too early in those born male. Not only can surgery be more difficult because of lack of penile tissue to use (a warning that GIDS clinicians had been issued in 2016 and the Dutch team have discussed), but those children would not be able to achieve orgasm as adults. ‘If you’ve never had an orgasm pre-surgery, and then your puberty’s blocked, it’s very difficult to achieve that afterwards…I consider that a big problem, actually. It’s kind of an overlooked problem that in our “informed consent” of children undergoing puberty blockers, we’ve in some respects overlooked that a little bit.”
― Hannah Barnes, Time to Think: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Tavistock's Gender Service for Children

“It took the wind out of me,’ one senior staff member at the time tells me. And made them furious. The Executive had found time to write papers about ‘postmodernist, high-level theoretical ideas and stuff’, they explain, but the service was not following up the children and young people it had cared for. GIDS could not even tell the High Court how many of the young people put on blockers were autistic, they say, in despair. ‘We don’t fucking care about post-structuralist ideas.”
― Hannah Barnes, Time to Think: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Tavistock's Gender Service for Children

“It is mad,’ was the reply.
Hutchinson paused. When one of the leaders of a service that helps children to access powerful, life-changing drugs comments that what they’re doing is ‘mad’, there is clearly a very big problem.”
― Hannah Barnes, Time to Think: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Tavistock's Gender Service for Children