Lisa Lunt is suing the Tavistock Clinic for rushing children toward so-called gender affirmation. She expects 1,000 families to join the suit.
When Lisa Lunt heard that the sole “gender clinic” in England was ordered to close after a review found that it recklessly encouraged confused children to irreversibly alter their bodies, she knew she had to act.
As the head of medical-product cases at the law firm Pogust Goodhead, Lunt was in a unique position to strike a blow for families that were harmed by the Tavistock clinic’s unquestioning approach to puberty-blocking hormone treatments for children as young as twelve years old.
Disturbed by the report’s finding that “gender curious” children were rushed down a pathway toward stunting their natural development, she decided to take on the case, fully aware that she and her firm would likely be subjected to the kind of abuse that has followed J. K. Rowling since she dared to speak out against the more extreme manifestations of gender ideology several years ago.
The gender clinic was ordered to close in July after an interim report led by doctor Hilary Cass and commissioned by NHS England found that clinic doctors felt “pressure to adopt an unquestioning affirmative approach” to addressing gender dysphoria “that is at odds with the standard process of clinical assessment and diagnosis.”
Doctors at the clinic “were quick to take an affirmative approach, a non-questioning approach to somebody who came to them and presented to them as gender dysphoric and they were quickly diagnosed, and perhaps too quickly diagnosed in some cases,” Lunt told National Review in an interview.
Lunt allows that there “are genuine gender dysphoria cases out there” but predicts that as many as 1,000 potential plaintiffs might come forward to collect damages after being rushed down the path of so-called “gender affirmation.” She expects patients to come forward who fall into a number of categories: those who have been misdiagnosed; those who “weren’t fully informed that this is essentially experimental treatment and that there is no long-term data”; and those who had psychological conditions that were “overlooked.”
A representative for Tavistock told National Review that “the [Gender Identity Development Service] has not heard from Pogust Goodhead about this matter, but it would be inappropriate to comment on any current or potential legal proceeding.”
“The service is committed to patient safety. It works with every young person on a case-by-case basis, with no expectation of what might be the right pathway for them, and only the minority of young people who are seen in our service access any physical treatments while with us,” Tavistock’s head of communications, Mike Smith, added.
Smith claimed there was an “average [of] 10 appointments before referral to endocrinology for blocker assessment” in 2019 to 2020 and that he does “not know how the firm arrived at” the expected number of 1,000 clients, given that “around 1,000 young people” were “referred on to the endocrinology teams (where they may access hormone suppressants)” in the past decade.
While the clinic insists that each and every child was dealt with on an individualized basis, Lunt claims that in recent years staff became “overwhelmed with the number of referrals” they were receiving and resorted to rushing patients into hormone treatments.
Whistleblowers have said “they were told to take an affirmative, non-questioning approach” from the top, Lunt said. She hopes that the clinic leadership’s decision-making process will “be teased out during the legal process.”
The interim report concluded that Tavistock will be replaced by two regional centers at existing children’s hospitals.
“That is really good news,” Lunt said, “because those local hospitals won’t be as overwhelmed as the one clinic that was providing that service in the entirety of England and Wales” and children will hopefully get a more holistic approach when being diagnosed.
Tavistock has previously been sued by Keira Bell, who underwent a gender transition at the clinic. Bell argued that the clinic was diagnosing patients with gender dysphoria too quickly and conducting “uncontrolled experiments.”
After filing the suit, Bell wrote, “The consequences of what happened to me have been profound: possible infertility, loss of my breasts and inability to breastfeed, atrophied genitals, a permanently changed voice, facial hair. When I was seen at the Tavistock clinic, I had so many issues that it was comforting to think I really had only one that needed solving: I was a male in a female body. But it was the job of the professionals to consider all my co-morbidities, not just to affirm my naïve hope that everything could be solved with hormones and surgery.”