Nothing is more dangerous than victory. It tempts the victors to go too far, believe their own propaganda and close their minds to mounting evidence that they are by now making the most dreadful mistakes.
To face the possibility of failure becomes impossible. On the once triumphant invader plunges into Russia, or nowadays into Ukraine.
These melancholy reflections are prompted by a failure nearer home, expounded in The Sunday Times Magazine, which draws on a new book by Hannah Barnes, Time to Think: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Tavistock’s Gender Service for Children.
Barnes recounts how over a thousand “highly disturbed and distressed” children were prescribed puberty-blocking drugs by the Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust in North London.
The theory was that by delaying the onset of puberty, they would have “time to think”, but very little thought seems to have occurred, if by that is meant mental activity which leads sometimes to a change of mind.
GIDS itself did research which showed that although children’s mental health and gender-related stress either stayed the same or worsened as a result of the drugs administered, all of these patients went on to take cross-sex hormones, “a treatment with irreversible consequences”.
The Tavistock is renowned for its talking therapies, but talking is time-consuming, as indeed is thinking. The question of whether, in the case of a particular child, gender dysphoria is a cause of mental distress, or a symptom of it, is evidently a difficult one.
GIDS was founded in 1989, and when in 2000 it compiled a report on who its patients were, most of them were boys, with an average age of 11, and 25 per cent of them had spent time in care, 38 per cent came from families with mental health problems, and 42 per cent had lost at least one parent either through separation or death.
By 2019, the number of referrals to GIDS had greatly increased, and most of them were girls, who unlike the boys, had not begun to suffer from gender dysphoria until after the onset of puberty.
Throughout this period, GIDS treated gender dysphoria as a cause rather than a symptom of mental illness, and tended to discount other conditions such as autism, or a history of having suffered either at school or at home from homophobic bullying.
It would be unfair, in a period when child and adolescent mental health services are notoriously inadequate, to blame GIDS for sometimes making mistakes. The problem is rather that it stuck so dogmatically to the belief that prescribing hormone blockers and setting children on a pathway towards surgery was the answer.
For over 20 years, many serious concerns were raised about this approach. Evidence was presented that the treatment was not working, or was causing actual harm, and fears were expressed by clinicians that GIDS was performing “conversion therapy for gay kids”.
Desperately distressed children, and their parents, naturally wished to believe they were being given a course of treatment which would relieve that distress. Better, they were persuaded, to take puberty blockers than to “go away with nothing”, as one clinician put it.
What lessons can be drawn from this unhappy story? The first is that it would be wrong to imagine such mistakes can be avoided simply by persuading all concerned to behave in a rational way.
The trans row has been waged with such bitter hatred that moderate, reasonable people have often been deterred from taking part.
Rebecca Lowe and Victoria Hewson set up a campaign called Radical and published a series of pieces on ConHome in which, as Lowe put it on 17th February 2020, they took a stand against the powerful trans lobby which
“has taken over, and is in the process of capturing our institutions — our schools, our universities, our police force, our healthcare services. It comes dressed in the language of rights; it comes with knives for our children, and refutation of the mental health concerns of our teenagers. It comes to take away our freedom, and crowd out our norms of civility and kindness.
“Brave people on the Left have led the charge on this topic so far. Please, ConHomers, consider joining us in joining them against those who have hijacked this important debate. Armed with science and with compassion, we can work together on this, for the good of all.”
On being asked this week why their series of articles at length came to an end, Lowe said she found it “intellectually hard to keep writing the same stuff”.
James Kirkup, interviewed on ConHome on 24th October 2018, noted the fear felt by many MPs of being attacked as “transphobic”, and the horrible abuse heaped on such journalists as Janice Turner, Helen Lewis, Julie Bindel and Sarah Ditum who had defied the trans lobby, far worse than anything flung at him as a man for the pieces he had written for The Spectator.
Kirkup observed that in the summer of 2017 many Conservatives assumed that reforming the Gender Recognition Act (GRA) “was the new social-liberal, modern issue”. Reform was supported by Theresa May as Prime Minister, with Penny Mordaunt as Minister for Women and Equalities declaring from the Despatch Box in July 2018:
“trans women are women and trans men are men. That is the starting point for the GRA consultation, and it will be its finishing point too.”
She was wrong about the finishing point: Liz Truss, who had by then succeeded her as Minister for Women and Equalities, scrapped plans for reforming the GRA.
Kemi Badenoch, the present holder of the post, takes a conservative line on the GRA, and on Sunday tweeted a link to the story in The Sunday Times and commented:
“Let the tragic Tavistock scandal remind us to always stand up for the truth as we see it…no matter how inconvenient or impolite some may find the truth to be.”
Public opinion has shifted. Nicola Sturgeon seems to have overplayed her hand on the trans issue. As Matthew Parris, one of its founders, noted in May 2021 in The Times, Stonewall, set up in 1989 to oppose Section 28, the then Conservative Government’s law against the promotion of homosexuality in schools,
“has lost its way. The sun we all thought we saw has gone behind clouds of anger, intolerance and partisanship. The organisation is tangled up in the trans issue, cornered into an extremist stance on a debate that a charity formed to help gay men, lesbian women and bisexual people should never have got itself into.”
Stonewall had since 1989 won victory after victory, building itself into the greatest organisation of its kind in Europe, before seizing on the trans issue as a new world to conquer and finding too late that it had overreached itself.
When I began this piece, I felt depressed that it had taken over 20 years for the grievous mistakes made at the Tavistock to be rectified.
But as I reach the end, I think I have described how, with infuriating slowness, politics does sometimes work.
Arguments which for a long time seem to get nowhere do at length, when the time is right, get somewhere after all, while causes which had seemed invincible crumble.
Voters demand instant satisfaction, and if they are lucky will get it in 20 years’ time.
There is no way of knowing, in advance, when or indeed whether some cause such as extending the suffrage to all adult men and women will triumph: that process took a century. It is a question of political judgment, and however good that may be, there is still an element of unpredictability.
It is not, by the way, the case that social media have increased the level of hatred and vituperation in public life. Those played a prominent part in earlier centuries too.
“The worst of the present day,” as Lord Melbourne, Prime Minister in 1834 and from 1835-41, remarked, “is that men hate one another so damnably. For my part I love them all!”