Australia’s Largest Christian News Site

In a letter to Dr Hilary Cass, the author of the Cass Review, on 7 August, John Stewart, national director of Specialised Commissioning at NHS England and Professor James Palmer, medical director of Specialised Commissioning at NHS England wrote that one of its actions in response to the recommendations in her review would be “establishing a program of work to explore the issues around a detransition pathway by October 2024”.

The Daily Telegraph reported that this project would include “examining the rate at which patients detransition and their reasons for doing so, as these are currently unknown”.

Dr Hilary Cass had noted in the “Independent Review of Gender-Identity Services for Children and Young People” (the Cass Review), that young people who decide to detransition may not want to return to the same clinic that transitioned them.

At “Recommendation No. 25” on page four of her review, she wrote: “NHS England should ensure there is provision for people considering detransition, recognising that they may not wish to reengage with the services whose care they were previously under.”

This precise view was expressed by British detransitioner Ritchie Herron in an interview with Times Radio. Herron welcomed the news of the NHS setting up a detrans-specific service, saying: “Getting care is very difficult, no one wants to go back to the place that caused harm.”

Instant Regret

The Daily Telegraph ran an extensive story on Herron on 13 August 2024.

The 37-year-old recounted that he underwent gender surgery to complete his physical transformation to live as a woman, under the name “Abby”, in 2018.

Herron had refused to undergo surgery twice before he eventually agreed. Over a year and a half, and being asked repeatedly to undergo surgery, he got the message from the gender clinic in the north of England that he had been attending that being directed to surgery was what he was there at the gender clinic for.

When the surgery eventually went ahead, he says, it was a traumatic experience in which he lost almost three pints of blood. Immediately on regaining consciousness, he knew he had made a huge, irreversible mistake.

His first thought, he says, was: “Oh God, what have I done?”

In the years that followed, he grappled with the dreadful consequences. He lost bone density; he was afflicted with incontinence and chronic skin conditions, and was numb across his entire crotch area.

In 2022, he decided to stop living as “Abby” and return to being “Ritchie”.

But there was nowhere for him to turn to for help. Returning to the gender clinics at which he had originally been treated, he says: “I told them that I thought I had regret and they told me that I didn’t.”

“Instead they said I had OCD and that what I was feeling was all part of my OCD. This made me very angry because I felt like they were just trying to cover their own backs.

“All I really wanted was an acknowledgment that I’d made this huge mistake, but no one would let me say that.”

The proposal to establish a detransition clinic has given Herron hope that “detransitioners” like him may finally get the “right care” for the physical and mental pain that many have been suffering silently with for years.

That the number of detransitioners is not trivial is shown in previously unseen data obtained under freedom of information laws in Britain. Those data give the number of “regretful” transitioners who changed their gender at the Tavistock child gender identity service, now closed by the NHS, as at least 64. Those data cover detransitioners between only the years 2010 and 2020.

The news that the NHS planned to establish a service specifically for “individuals who choose to detransition” raised Herron’s spirits.

“We definitely need this,” he said. “I cannot wait for the clinic to open. I would use the service straight away once it’s up and running.”

“People who have detransitioned don’t want to go back to gender clinics,” he added.

Adult Clinics Too

It seems that it is not only Britain’s youth gender clinics that have problematic internal practices. The Guardian reported on August 16 that the NHS has set out plans for a review into the safety of adult gender services. This also comes in response to concerns raised by Dr Hilary Cass in a letter to NHS England dated 16 May 2024.

Dr Cass listed several concerns about the quality of treatment being offered to adults at gender clinics. In response, NHS officials will undertake a review of these services, beginning with clinic inspections in September.

Dr Cass said that during her investigation into children’s gender services, she had been approached by staff working in adult gender clinics. Among other shortcomings, they reported inadequate consent processes, limited explanation of the risks involved in treatment, “out of control” waiting lists, an absence of national treatment guidelines regarding use of hormones, and a lack of systematic processes for follow-up.

She was told that patients were not always informed of “the irreversibility of some of the effects” of treatment.

___

Republished with thanks to News Weekly.