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"A London psychiatrist who spent 12 years working with children at the United Kingdom's government-funded Tavistock gender clinic is warning that 'transitioning' patients to a new gender identity isn't the answer to gender dysphoria.
Countries embracing 'gender-affirming care' risk needless mass sterilization, Dr. Az Hakeem told The Epoch Times. He is the author of the new book 'Detrans: When Transition is Not the Solution.'
'I say affirmation therapy is not therapy—it's grooming' them to accept the idea they were born in the wrong body, said Dr. Hakeem, a fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists and honorary associate clinical professor at University College London Medical School.
He predicts in the next 5-10 years, society will see a massive number of so-called detransitoners, people who try to reverse steps they took in an attempt to medically change their gender. That's because of an expected 8,000-fold increase in patients undergoing procedures and taking medications meant to try to alter their gender.
'I'm critiquing the whole of gender ideology,' he said. His book, he said, 'debunks all the myths and dissects' transgenderism.
A False Solution
When a person is feeling confused about his or her identity, he or she may assume that it has to do with gender, especially with the current climate of affirmation of that kind of thinking, he said.
'It's a false solution to a different problem,' Dr. Hakeem said.
The causes of gender dysphoria—or unhappiness with one's gender—often are linked to autism, underlying trauma, or internalized homophobia, he said.
In many cases, vulnerable children are 'groomed' to transition, often by parents, teachers, doctors, governments, or social media influencers, who plant the idea they might be transgender.
'It's the only medical intervention that I know of for which there was no evidence,' Dr. Hakeem said. 'There are no outcome studies for this.'
To medically castrate children with hormones or surgery is akin to the use of lobotomies or thalidomide in the 1950s and 1960s, he said.
Thalidomide was a tranquilizer given to pregnant women around the world, resulting in thousands of severe birth defects. A lobotomy is a surgery that disrupts nerves to lobes in the brain. It formerly was used as a treatment for mental illness until the practice was deemed inhumane.
There have been enough dissenters to pause, at least temporarily, the headlong plunge into gender-affirming care in the United Kingdom. But it is still a popular course of action there and across Europe, Dr. Hakeem said.
The mental health profession has been captured ideologically, he said, even to the point of affirming children's beliefs that they are cats and dinosaurs.
He sees the pressure applied to people to coerce them to agree with gender ideology and ignore science as 'Orwellian.' That's a term often used to equate happenings today to the dystopian, future, totalitarian state described in the 1949 novel 'Nineteen Eighty-Four' by George Orwell.
In the literary classic, the protagonist eventually succumbs to pressure to write 2 + 2 = 5, even though he knows it's incorrect. That's much like how people are expected to affirm adults and children who say they were born in the wrong body.
Though Dr. Hakeem no longer counsels patients on matters of gender identity because it's 'too politically dangerous,' he does meet with parents of children with gender dysphoria.
One mother who sought his advice has a daughter who was being affirmed as a boy at school against her wishes. But the mother took some comfort in knowing it could have been worse, he said.
'She said, "The only consolation I can take is that in class—she's 15—she sits next to someone who the teachers are affirming as a pterodactyl, and someone who the teachers are affirming as a cat,"' Dr. Hakeem said.
Teachers and college lecturers in the United Kingdom recently have attended training courses to learn how to interact with students who identify 'as cat gender,' he said.
"Horrified By What I Saw"
Psychiatrists don't affirm the beliefs of schizophrenic patients who say they hear voices, Dr. Hakeem said. Yet, he marveled, they affirm gender confusion by allowing irrevocable chemical or surgical sterilization.
His stint working at Gender Identity Development Services (GIDS), the gender clinic for minors at The Tavistock Centre, was disturbing, he said.
GIDS started as a small part of the clinic that's funded by the National Health Service (NHS). But it grew and took over, he said.
It was there Dr. Hakeem encountered incidents of what he considers 'transhausen by proxy.'
The term refers to parents who want to transition their children to a different gender to meet their own narcissistic needs. It's adapted from Munchausen by proxy, a medical condition in which a parent or caregiver invents medical problems of a child in his or her care in order to gain attention.
The U.K. government has ordered the Tavistock gender clinic to close—scheduled to happen in the spring of 2024—over concerns that diagnoses of gender dysphoria were being confirmed in patients with little investigation into the cause. The review found no solid evidence that 'treatment' with puberty blockers or hormones benefited patients.
'I was horrified by what I saw,' Dr. Hakeem said.
'My role was every week to challenge and be a troublemaker, standing up for what I thought was common sense, while they were just a transition factory for little kids.'
The Epoch Times reached out to the clinic for comment. In an emailed response, a spokeswoman, who declined to be identified by name, wrote, 'GIDS works on a case-by-case basis with every young person, their family and local services, working thoughtfully and holistically with them to explore their individual situation, with no expectation of what the right outcome for them might be.'
Dr. Hakeem recalled how the parents of a 4-year-old boy discussed steps they were taking to transition him.
'Parents who are saying, "Oh, yes, well, Johnny's told us that he's a girl, and we've told him he's trapped in the wrong body. We bought him a wig. We've told the school we're changing his name. He knows he's going to get puberty blockers."'
Things didn't change after he left.
Some 70 children under the age of 5 were referred to the gender clinic from 2010 to 2022, according to GIDS data.
Dr. Hakeem remembers thinking that most of the children coming through the clinic would resolve their dysphoria over time, with many coming to realize they were gay.
'We know that most kids who are gender nonconforming or questioning their gender grow out of it, especially at puberty,' he said.
Those running the clinic appeared to think transitioning children and chemically castrating them was a better option than letting them be gay, he said.
'So they literally were transitioning the gay away.'"