Two medical experts who were previously sharply critical of the state’s medical services for adolescents with gender dysphoria have separately lodged actions against Journal Media Limited, the publisher of TheJournal.ie.
The cases are being taken by Dr Paul Moran and Dr Ian Schneider, who are both psychiatrists and who have worked extensively with the National Gender Service. Both doctors – along with their colleague Prof Dónal O’Shea, a consultant endocrinologist – previously revealed their grave concerns regarding the ‘unsafe’ treatment of adolescents in the Tavistock Clinic, and said that their concerns were being suppressed.
All three doctors said that they warned in 2019 the provision of Tavistock gender services for children through Children’s Health Ireland (CHI) at Crumlin Children’s Hospital was unsafe – and called for the Tavistock service to be terminated immediately. They felt their warnings had not been heeded.
Tavistock was eventually closed down by the NHS in 2022, because it was deemed ‘not safe’ for the children who were rushed along a path of medical treatment for gender transitioning.
Dr Moran and Dr O’Shea conducted an audit of the patient files of 17 teenagers who had been to Tavistock as children before they had subsequently been referred to the National Gender Service in Ireland.
In seven of the cases, the audit found no record of a proper assessment, which should have included detailed patient histories and reasons for treatment decisions.
Nine of the teens had been prescribed puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones, but in eight of the cases it was unclear from the documentation whether they had been prescribed medication at all.
“What that audit told us was that… we were sending our young people to a very inadequate service. We wanted that data to go and show the HSE why we had to stop the Tavistock,” Prof O’Shea said.
Dr Moran emailed the audit to a senior doctor within the HSE and says his email was ignored until two years later.
Prof O’Shea and Dr Moran last year sought a judicial review of HIQA’s alleged failure to review the HSE’s care of children with gender dysphoria – saying that the continued referral of young people for assessment abroad poses a possible risk to children.