I'm flairing this as "positive" because this is an awesome article. Share it with your friends!!! I have already.

If you have friends or family IRL who you are trying to educate about LGB topics, I highly recommend this as an article to share with them because:

• it summarizes all the most relevant info about child transitioning

• it includes even a lot of details that I had never heard about!

edited to add: shared from r/TumblrInAction (archive link)

Some quotes are below.

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Gay clinicians at GIDS began to discuss how they had experienced an adolescent phase of gender dysphoria as “effeminate” boys or “butch” girls. Spiliadis says that trans clinicians were revered for having superior insight and authority, but the testimony of gay staff was dismissed as irrelevant, even transphobic. “So we formed a thinking group and said to management, ‘We are medicalising some people who would later identify as lesbian, gay and bisexual, not trans.’ ” How did Carmichael react? “I was repeatedly told by Polly to stop asking questions. Anyone who challenged the status quo and tried to think about complexity was perceived as the problem and scapegoated.”

Dr. David Bell emphasizing the difference between LGB and T:

Bell was horrified to learn that gay clinicians were silenced. “Freud’s most famous book is called Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality and, while there are things we’d disagree with now, sexuality remains a core part of the psychoanalytical understanding of who we are. And here is a clinic that doesn’t talk about sexuality, only gender. It’s so peculiar.”

New information, at least new to me: Apparently the current director of GIDS, the child transition clinic in the UK, is not medically trained. Seems like that'd be a very relevant factor in pushing terrible medical practices on the staff working there...

He notes that the current GIDS chief executive, Paul Jenkins, is the first not to be a clinician. “Almost every time he spoke at a meeting he talked about patient involvement.” While Bell agrees that we must all be involved in our medical decisions, “At a certain point it corrodes – it becomes a vehicle for attacks on expertise. So if the child or the family say they want this, we affirm them, without any interest in knowing why they want it.”

This article outright states that the original Dutch protocol was violated (quoting the interim, not-yet-complete Cass report). I think this is pretty huge; I've met straight people who denied that this was even happening, so it's great to see a mainstream news article acknowledging it!

After Bell’s 2018 report on clinicians’ concerns was suppressed by GIDS, he resigned. But what he wrote is echoed in Hilary Cass’s interim report. Cass notes that at GIDS the original Dutch protocol was violated: puberty blockers were prescribed to neurodiverse or mentally ill young people who then received less therapy, not more. She talks of a “clinician lottery” and lack of formal clinical guidance. On the highly charged issue of hormone treatments she writes in her opening letter to young people, “There is still a lot we don’t know about the long-term effects.”

The article even alludes to how that "right side of history" saying is misleading:

It looks ever more certain it will be the Tavistock whistleblowers, rather than those advocating sterilising drugs and double mastectomies for troubled children, who will end up on the right side of history.