THERE’S A PARTICULARLY REVEALING moment in Time To Think, Hannah Barnes’s story of the collapse of the Tavistock’s Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS). It’s 2017 and senior clinical psychologist Anna Hutchinson has approached service lead Polly Carmichael to raise some serious concerns.
Hutchinson is worried that thinking within the service has become too narrow, with many children being prescribed puberty blockers without due consideration of the factors causing their distress. “Oh, Anna, you can’t think like that,” Carmichael responds. “You’ll go mad!”
Alongside the many themes explored in Barnes’s excellent account — the medicalisation of childhood gender dysphoria, the influence of transgender politics on public institutions, the neglect of safeguarding protocols — is that of how far some people will go to avoid uncomfortable truths.
is about not thinking, and how it can infect a workplace, community or entire culture. It is only through this prism that we can understand how so many
