The Tavistock centre’s gender identity service has been embroiled in court cases and criticism. This balanced look at its closure talks to those it helped – and those it failed
“How did you go bankrupt?” a character is asked in Hemingway’s novel The Sun Also Rises. “Two ways,” he replies. “Gradually, then suddenly.” So it is with medical scandals, too. Disquiet builds and eventually, suddenly – often when someone goes to the press – a reckoning falls.
The Clinic traces the rise and fall of the Tavistock Clinic’s Gender Identity Development Service (Gids) for children. It was founded in 1989, primarily to provide talking therapy for young people suffering from a recently identified phenomenon called gender dysphoria – the feeling that there was a mismatch between the sex they were born and the sex (or gender – the conflation of the terms goes in many ways to the heart of the problem) they should have been.
The Clinic aired on ITV1 and is available on ITVX.
