Gids, which opened in 1989, was established to provide talking therapies to young people who were questioning their gender identity (the Tavistock, under the aegis of which it operated from 1994, is a mental health trust). To shrug in the face of that story – to refuse to listen to the young transgender people whose treatment caused, among other things, severe depression, sexual dysfunction, osteoporosis and stunted growth, and whose many other problems were simply ignored – requires a callousness that would be far beyond my imagination were it not for the fact that, thanks to social media, I already know such stony-heartedness to be out there. This is the story of the hurt caused to potentially hundreds of children since 2011, and perhaps before that. To do so, a person would not only have to be wilfully ignorant, they would also – to use the popular language of the day – need to be appallingly unkind.

Several of her interviewees say they are happy either with the treatment they received at Gids, or with its practices – and she, in turn, is content to let them speak. It comes with 59 pages of notes, plentiful well-scrutinised statistics, and it is scrupulous and fair-minded. A journalist at the BBC’s Newsnight, Barnes has based her account on more than 100 hours of interviews with Gids’ clinicians, former patients, and other experts, many of whom are quoted by name. H annah Barnes’s book about the rise and calamitous fall of the Gender Identity Development Service for children (Gids), a nationally commissioned unit at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust in north London, is the result of intensive work, carried out across several years.

Time to Think by Hannah Barnes