Institutional Failure Quotes

“We should be judging the effectiveness and value of any of our solutions by how well they'd work for people with the least institutional power.”
― Zoe Quinn, Crash Override: How Gamergate (Nearly) Destroyed My Life, and How We Can Win the Fight Against Online Hate

“Those who were gay were told they were ‘too close’ to the work, and, according to one former senior clinician, anyone who spoke out was ‘made to feel hysterical’ in some way. ‘The more anxious and worried you became, the more it was framed that you weren’t really someone who could handle it.’ It was ‘a brilliant way to divert it away from what we’re actually doing, which was changing children’s bodies’, they say. It is not credible to explain away the concerns of so many experienced clinicians either by accusations of transphobia or allegations that they are simply not up to the task at hand.”
― Hannah Barnes, Time to Think: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Tavistock's Gender Service for Children

“The pioneers of the Dutch protocol were well aware that the pathway they had devised – puberty blockers, followed by cross-sex hormones and surgery – would not work for all. They acknowledged that by lowering the age at which puberty was blocked, it might ‘increase the incidence of “false positives”.’ It is this group, the group for whom this pathway will not be of benefit, say Hutchinson and others, that has been ignored by gender clinics across the Western world, including GIDS.”
― Hannah Barnes, Time to Think: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Tavistock's Gender Service for Children

“The response provided by the Trust’s leadership each time it heard clinical concerns over GIDS appears to have been to criticize the way those concerns have been voiced – the tone of them – or to argue that such remarks are upsetting to other GIDS staff. What seems to have been lacking is a willingness to grapple with the substance of concerns, and put patients first and foremost.”
― Hannah Barnes, Time to Think: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Tavistock's Gender Service for Children

“As well as personal vindication for Appleby, the employment tribunal proceedings again highlighted how, rather than tackle the safeguarding concerns being raised about GIDS, the Tavistock Trust had instead attempted to penalize the person raising them. Appleby described a ‘full blown organizational assault’ against her in response to the concerns she had raised.”
― Hannah Barnes, Time to Think: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Tavistock's Gender Service for Children

“It is mad,’ was the reply.
Hutchinson paused. When one of the leaders of a service that helps children to access powerful, life-changing drugs comments that what they’re doing is ‘mad’, there is clearly a very big problem.”
― Hannah Barnes, Time to Think: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Tavistock's Gender Service for Children

“It took the wind out of me,’ one senior staff member at the time tells me. And made them furious. The Executive had found time to write papers about ‘postmodernist, high-level theoretical ideas and stuff’, they explain, but the service was not following up the children and young people it had cared for. GIDS could not even tell the High Court how many of the young people put on blockers were autistic, they say, in despair. ‘We don’t fucking care about post-structuralist ideas.”
― Hannah Barnes, Time to Think: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Tavistock's Gender Service for Children

“The Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) has undoubtedly helped some people. It has unquestionably harmed others.”
― Hannah Barnes, Time to Think: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Tavistock's Gender Service for Children

“GIDS’s own limited data, which found ‘no evidence of change in psychological function’ with puberty-blocker treatment.”
― Hannah Barnes, Time to Think: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Tavistock's Gender Service for Children

“NHS England. Why did they allow the early blocking of puberty to be rolled out as routine practice without demanding to see some data supporting this radical shift? Why didn’t it insist on seeing any data at all?”
― Hannah Barnes, Time to Think: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Tavistock's Gender Service for Children

“The initial proceedings and judgment throw into sharp focus how a clinical service that had been running for thirty years, referring young people for medical treatments about which little is known (in terms of long-term side effects at least), had collected next to no data.”
― Hannah Barnes, Time to Think: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Tavistock's Gender Service for Children

“The spongey-chinned Vice Principal told me high school was about separating wheat from chaff. He repeated the phrase as often as he could and he liked to say it as if it were a truth, one originating exclusively from him.”
― Scott Pearce, The Rider on the Bridge