In 2019, I discovered that the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust's Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) had covered up the results of
its experiment with puberty blockers (Gonadotropin-Releasing Hormone agonist, or GnRHa)
for children under 16.
It was left to me to publish these results, in
Archives of Sexual Behavior.
This discovery led me to investigate the outcomes of puberty suppression and the history of this treatment,
subsequently published in two book chapters, articles in Archives of Sexual Behavior, Journal of Sex and Marital Therapy, and Medico-Legal Journal,
and letters in New England Journal of Medicine, Journal of Sexual Medicine, and Journal of Pediatric Endocrinology and Metabolism.
Read the full story here.
My research was crucial for a judicial review against the GIDS (Keira Bell and Mrs A. versus Tavistock NHS Trust, 2020), and was used by the Independent Review of Gender Identity Services for Children and Young People (2024). The Tavistock closed the GIDS in 2022; the NHS stopped prescribing GnRHa for gender dysphoria in 2024.
In 2023, I discovered anomalies in the figures for transgender people counted by the Census of England and Wales. My analyses of these figures were eventually published in Sociology and the British Journal of Sociology. Read the full story here.
The Office for National Statistics acknowledged the error in 2024, and these numbers lost their official status. This was the first time in the history of the census (since the first in 1801) that its results were admitted to be incorrect.
