Hannah Barnes On The Scandal Of Tavistock

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Hannah is an award-winning journalist with 15 years at the BBC. She is currently the Investigations Producer at Newsnight — the BBC’s flagship program for news and current affairs — and before that she was in BBC Radio, producing and reporting documentaries. She just published her first book, Time to Think: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Tavistock’s Gender Service for Children. Twenty-two publishers turned down the book in the UK, it has no US publisher, yet it’s already a Sunday Times (of London) bestseller.

For two clips of our convo — on the unfounded activist claims of trans-kid suicide, and the dramatic shift toward girls getting hormones with little oversight — pop over to our YouTube page. Other topics: Hannah first encountering the trans issue as a new mother; the Dutch story of the very first patient to receive puberty blockers and hormones; Jesse Singal’s pioneering journalism; the destruction of Ken Zucker’s career and clinic by activists; the old standard of “watchful waiting” swept aside; the whittling away of the Dutch protocol; Tavistock keeping very little data on patients; the vast majority of medicalized kids being gay or lesbian or bi; the hushed dissent at Tavistock over gay kids being misdiagnosed as trans; the bullying and self-hatred of gay kids; the troubled homes of patients; conflating gender dysphoria with other mental-health problems; and a few specific stories of trans and detrans kids. She is fair and measured throughout. If you have bought the line that concerns about child transitions are entirely from the bigoted right, Hannah Barnes is an antidote.