The Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) was set up initially to provide talking therapies to young people who were questioning their gender identity.
But in the last decade GIDS has referred more than a thousand children for medication to block their puberty. In the same period, the number of young people seeking GIDS’s help exploded, increasing twenty-five-fold. The profile of the patients changed too: from largely pre-pubescent boys to mostly adolescent girls, who were often contending with other difficulties.
Award-winning journalist Hannah Barnes has had unprecedented access to thousands of pages of documents, and well over a hundred hours of personal testimony from GIDS clinicians, former service users and senior Tavistock figures. The result is a disturbing and gripping parable for our times.
Shortlisted for The Orwell prize for political writing.