May Book Club: TIME TO THINK, by Hannah Barnes

Join me and Eliza Mondegreen for a discussion of this must-read book.

Hi, all. I’m going to start doing book club Zoom meetings with subscribers, and for the first one, I asked Eliza Mondegreen of gender:hacked if she’d join me to discuss BBC reporter Hannah Barnes’ TIME TO THINK: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Tavistock’s Gender Service for Children. (Can you get it in the States somewhere besides Amazon? Please let us know in the comments.)

Exact time and date TBD, but we’re thinking around May 4, and wanted to give folks time to read. Here’s a discount subscription if you want to sign up and join. More details to come soon.

Edited to add: Please request it at your local bookstore and local libraries, too!

Here’s more about the book:

“Time to Think goes behind the headlines to reveal the truth about the NHS’s flagship gender service for children.

The Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS), based at the Tavistock and Portman Trust in North London, was set up initially to provide — for the most part — talking therapies to young people who were questioning their gender identity. But in the last decade GIDS has referred more than a thousand children, some as young as nine years old, for medication to block their puberty. In the same period, the number of young people seeking GIDS’s help exploded, increasing twenty-five-fold. The profile of the patients changed too: from largely pre-pubescent boys to mostly adolescent girls, who were often contending with other difficulties.

Why had the patients changed so dramatically? Were all these distressed young people best served by taking puberty blockers and then cross-sex hormones, which cause irreversible changes to the body? While some young people appeared to thrive after taking the blocker, many seemed to become worse. Was there enough clinical evidence to justify such profound medical interventions in the lives of young people who had so much else to contend with?

This urgent, scrupulous and dramatic book explains how, in the words of some former staff, GIDS has been the site of a serious medical scandal, in which ideological concerns took priority over clinical practice. Award-winning journalist Hannah Barnes has had unprecedented access to thousands of pages of documents, including internal emails and unpublished reports, and well over a hundred hours of personal testimony from GIDS clinicians, former service users and senior Tavistock figures. The result is a disturbing and gripping parable for our times.”

See you in May!

Lisa