Tavistock's problems predate the Cass Review
Dr Helen Webberley on Times Radio: the gender debate, with Jo Coburn, Times Radio
The Cass Review exposed fundamental problems with treating transgender children, and those problems prove that the international standards for their care were wrong all along. The Tavistock was the model, the model failed, so the whole approach must be abandoned.
What I was pointing to there is that the Tavistock's failures were specific and structural: one clinic, operating alone, running its own protocols, and criticised by the Care Quality Commission long before Hilary Cass was ever commissioned. That is a governance failure, not a failure of the international evidence base. Every other country with a functioning health system runs multiple specialist centres for services like this, precisely so that no single institution becomes a law unto itself. The lesson from Tavistock should have been "build more, build better, follow the international standards." Instead, politicians and commentators used a clinic's operational failures as a reason to dismantle care for trans children entirely. Those are two completely different things, and collapsing them has caused enormous harm to children who needed help and got a ban instead.
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