Time to Think: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Tavistock's Gender Service for Children

Hannah Barnes

Time to Think won the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction shortlist and the Orwell Prize for Political Writing shortlist. Time to Think goes behind the headlines to reveal the truth about the collapse of the world's largest gender service for children. "Are we hurting children?" That's the core question at the heart of Time to Think, which exposes the truth about the rise and fall of the United Kingdom's flagship gender identity clinic for children. Answering in the affirmative, it exposes how ideology triumphed over evidence within this part of the healthcare system. In the process, child safeguarding was overlooked and pediatric patients were medically harmed. As investigative journalist Hannah Barnes reveals, the Tavistock's Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) was set up initially to provide talking therapies to young people who were questioning their gender identity. But in a little over a decade, it referred around two thousand children, some as young as nine years old, for medication to block their puberty. In the same period, with ever-greater numbers of children in need of treatment, the profile of the patients changed from largely pre-pubescent boys to mostly adolescent girls, who were often contending with other medical and psychological difficulties. GIDS was shut down by English health authorities in March 2024 and new services will not be able to prescribe these profound medical interventions. Yet, GIDS's approach to treating children with gender identity distress was, in fact, more cautious than that observed in other countries— including, notably, in the United States. This urgent, scrupulous and dramatic book explains how GIDS was the site of a serious medical scandal. As this scandal continues to unfold and even accelerate within other institutions and across countries, it is a gripping parable and disturbing cautionary tale for our times.