Cancel culture fears are discouraging Tavistock Centre victims from speaking out, a City lawyer leading legal action against the controversial transgender clinic has said.
As reported in the Telegraph, Thomas Goodhead, chief executive of Pogust Goodhead, said social media attacks have left former patients of the NHS’s gender identity service too scared to sign up to his class action.
The London-based law firm is currently representing former Tavistock patients who claim they were misdiagnosed and recklessly prescribed puberty blockers with harmful side effects.
The Tavistock’s Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS), based at London’s Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust, was formerly the UK’s only specialist provider of gender dysphoria and gender identity services for children and young people. The Centre has been earmarked for closure by NHS England since July 2022 when a damning interim review by paediatrician Dr Hilary Cass – the Cass Review – found that its model of care was “not safe” for children.
Clinicians at the Centre felt under pressure to ‘affirm’ children in their ‘new’ gender, the review found, while some were too readily prescribing young children with puberty-blocking drugs, and teens with cross-sex hormones, often without due consideration of the potential risks.
Former clinicians at the Centre have also told of how “incredibly complex” children would sometimes be handed the life-altering drugs after just one assessment – despite having a multitude of mental health or background issues.
According to Hannah Barnes, between 2014 and 2018, 302 children aged 14 or under were referred for puberty blockers, which many studies now suggest may have long term implications for bone density, and potentially cognitive and sexual development.
Mr Goodhead announced plans to launch a medical negligence class action in 2022 in the wake of the Cass Review.
“When it came out, my instinct was that there would be hundreds, if not thousands of potential claimants coming forward because to me, this is one of the biggest medical negligence scandals of all time,” said Mr Goodhead.
Although Pogust Goodhead is preparing to launch serious claims on behalf of a number of victims, Mr Goodhead says it is nowhere near the scale of litigation initially anticipated.
“That could be for a number of reasons,” he added. “It could be that actually, people are satisfied, and they don’t regret the treatments despite all of the evidence that has come out.
“It could also be – and I have suspicions about this – that there is such a fear for people to come forward and admit that they aren’t happy about the treatment they received or that parents are afraid to speak out on behalf of their children.”
Mr Goodhead pointed to the online shaming and social media attacks against so-called de-transitioners, people who decide to stop or reverse their gender transition.
A Reddit group called ‘r/detrans’ has 41,500 members who share their experiences about stigma and other issues, including online vitriol, doxxing, harassment and death threats after they make the decisions to detransition. One de-transitioner told the Mail that trans people eschew de-transitioners for “invalidating their narrative”.
Fears of being caught in toxic culture wars have seen rival law firms avoid taking on gender-critical disputes altogether.
Mr Goodhead said the “ideological barriers” that hold back City businesses have also left many claimants without legal representation and access to justice.
“I quite relish taking those issues forward,” Mr Goodhead said. “I think that they relate to fundamental freedoms and protections.”
