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Famous Hannah Barnes Quotes

“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.”

MadnessInstitutional Failure
Book:Time to Think: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Tavistock's Gender Service for Children
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“The sex ratio of those being referred had shifted dramatically too. The number of girls (known at that time at GIDS as ‘natal females’, now ‘birth-assigned females’) seeking help had equalled the number of boys for the first time in 2011. Previously, GIDS’s caseload had been nearly three-quarters male for those referred in childhood, or two-thirds overall. At first, this change was understood to be positive – a sort of balancing-out – and attributed to the fact that the girls were perhaps being better supported to seek help. But by 2015 it was clear that, in fact, something bigger was happening. There had been a complete reversal. Referrals for natal girls made up 65 percent of the total. In 2019/20 girls outnumbered boys by a ratio of six to one in some age groups, most markedly between the ages of 12 and 14 … Moreover, the majority were girls whose gender-related distress had begun after the onset of puberty, during adolescence. They didn’t have a history of childhood dysphoria.”

Gender Dysphoria
Book:Time to Think: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Tavistock's Gender Service for Children
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“Self-diagnosed adolescent trans boys – natal females – started to fill up GIDS’s waiting room with similar stories, haircuts, even names – ‘one after another after another’. They’d talk about their favourite trans YouTubers, many having adopted the same name, and how they aspired to be like them in the future. Given how complicated these young people appeared to be, could something else be going on that explained this, something other than them all being trans?”

Gender Dysphoria
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“Clinicians like Anna Hutchinson and Melissa Midgen have posited that ‘there are multiple, interweaving factors bearing down on girls and young women’ that help explain why so many are experiencing gender-related distress. They say they have witnessed a ‘toxic collision of factors: a world telling these children they are “wrong”; they are not doing girlhood (or boyhood) correctly’, girls struggling with their emerging sexuality, and girls who ‘struggle in puberty because it is uncomfortable, weird and unpredictable (particularly heightened if they happen to be on the autistic spectrum)’.”

Gender DysphoriaSystemic Sexism
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“This is not a story which denies trans identities; nor that argues trans people deserve to lead anything other than happy lives, free of harassment, with access to good healthcare. This is a story about the underlying safety of an NHS service, the adequacy of the care it provides and its use of poorly evidenced treatments on some of the most vulnerable young people in society. And how so many people sat back, watched, and did nothing.”

Mental HealthTrans Rights
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“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.”

HealthcareHomophobiaTransphobiaInstitutional Failure
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“In 2022, more than three years after stopping puberty blockers, Jacob is 19 and still trans. He uses a male name and male pronouns, and dresses in a way that he says is typically male. His passport and driving license say male. But he’s not on any medication. He hasn’t chosen to take testosterone and has no plans to. ‘I’m quite content with just being me at the moment.”

Transgender Lgbt
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“He experienced a range of intense and unpleasant side effects [on puberty blockers], as he tried different doses. ‘On one of them I had really bad insomnia. And another one, I had really bad anger problems.’ … ‘Your mood goes like it’s a roller coaster,’ he explains. ‘There are moments when you’re euphorically happy. The next day, you crash really bad and you are exhausted. And then you’re really, really depressed, like, suicidal depressed.’ Jacob says he had felt depressed before starting on puberty blockers and had experienced anxiety… ‘On the blockers I broke my wrist twice, my knuckles, my toe. It really ruins your bone density.’ Four broken bones in just a few years…As Jacob’s health deteriorated and his puberty continued to ‘break through’, he grew increasingly distressed…After more than four years on the blocker, Jacob felt worse than he ever had before the medication. While his friends were getting their first boyfriends and girlfriends, experiencing their first kisses and sexual experiences, he felt nothing. ‘You have no desire, no drive whatsoever,’ he says. ‘You don’t even feel attracted to people.’ … Emotionally, he felt years younger than his peers. Michelle noticed it too. And physically, Jacob had stopped growing.”

PubertyMedication Side Effects
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“Reconstructive surgeon and ‘world-renowned vaginoplasty specialist’ Marci Bowers voiced concerns over blocking puberty too early in those born male. Not only can surgery be more difficult because of lack of penile tissue to use (a warning that GIDS clinicians had been issued in 2016 and the Dutch team have discussed), but those children would not be able to achieve orgasm as adults. ‘If you’ve never had an orgasm pre-surgery, and then your puberty’s blocked, it’s very difficult to achieve that afterwards…I consider that a big problem, actually. It’s kind of an overlooked problem that in our “informed consent” of children undergoing puberty blockers, we’ve in some respects overlooked that a little bit.”

Medication Side Effects
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