Gender dysphoria (GD) is the distress a person experiences due to a mismatch between their gender identity—their personal sense of their own gender—and their sex assigned at birth. The term replaced the previous diagnostic label of gender identity disorder (GID) in 2013 with the release of the diagnostic manual DSM-5. The condition was renamed to remove the stigma associated with the term disorder.
The Standards of Care for the Health of Transgender and Gender Diverse People (SOC) is an international clinical protocol by the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) outlining the recommended assessment and treatment for transgender and gender-diverse individuals across the lifespan including social, hormonal, or surgical transition. It often influences clinicians' decisions regarding patients' treatment. While other standards, protocols, and guidelines exist – especially outside the United States – the WPATH SOC is the most widespread protocol used by professionals working with transgender or gender-variant people.
Great Ormond Street Hospital is a children's hospital located in the Bloomsbury area of the London Borough of Camden, and a part of Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children NHS Foundation Trust.
The Tavistock Institute of Human Relations is a British research and consulting organisation, specialising in how people behave in groups and organisations. Staff use social science methods to address research questions and creative, psychoanalytic and systems approaches to work with organisations and individuals. The Institute is a non-profit that aims to enable learning and change that will benefit people and the planet. There are sister organisations in China and Germany.
The Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust is a specialist mental health trust based in north London. The Trust specialises in talking therapies. The education and training department caters for 2,000 students a year from the United Kingdom and abroad. The Trust is based at the Tavistock Centre in Swiss Cottage. The founding organisation was the Tavistock Institute of Medical Psychology founded in 1920 by Hugh Crichton-Miller.
Evelina London Children's Hospital is a specialist NHS hospital in London. It is administratively a part of Guy's and St Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust and provides teaching hospital facilities for London South Bank University and King's College London School of Medicine. Formerly housed at Guy's Hospital in Southwark, it moved to a new building alongside St Thomas' Hospital in Lambeth on 31 October 2005.
Azadeh Moaveni is an Iranian-American writer, journalist, and academic. She is the former director of the Gender and Conflict Program at the International Crisis Group, and is Associate Professor of Journalism at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Institute of Journalism. She is the author of four books, including the bestselling Lipstick Jihad and Guest House for Young Widows, which was shortlisted for numerous prizes. She contributes to The New York Times, The Guardian, and The London Review of Books.
The Orwell Prize is a British prize for political writing. The Prize is awarded by The Orwell Foundation, an independent charity governed by a board of trustees. Four prizes are awarded each year: one each for a fiction and non-fiction book on politics, one for journalism and one for "Exposing Britain's Social Evils" ; between 2009 and 2012, a fifth prize was awarded for blogging. In each case, the winner is the short-listed entry which comes closest to George Orwell's own ambition to "make political writing into an art".
Yaroslav Trofimov is a Ukrainian-born Italian author and journalist who is chief foreign-affairs correspondent at The Wall Street Journal. Previously he wrote a weekly column on the Greater Middle East, "Middle East Crossroads," in The Wall Street Journal. He has been a foreign correspondent for the publication since 1999, covering the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. Prior to 2015 he was The Wall Street Journal's bureau chief in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Kenneth J. Zucker is an American-Canadian psychologist and sexologist. He was named editor-in-chief of Archives of Sexual Behavior in 2001. He was psychologist-in-chief at Toronto's Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) and head of its Gender Identity Service until December 2015. Zucker is a professor in the departments of psychiatry and psychology at the University of Toronto.
Puberty blockers are medicines used to postpone puberty in children. The most commonly used puberty blockers are gonadotropin-releasing hormone (GnRH) agonists, which suppress the natural production of sex hormones, such as androgens and estrogens. Puberty blockers are used to delay puberty in children with precocious puberty. They are also used to delay the development of unwanted secondary sex characteristics in transgender children, so as to allow transgender youth more time to explore their gender identity. The same drugs are also used in fertility medicine and to treat some hormone-sensitive cancers in adults.
Hilary Dawn Cass, Baroness Cass,, is a British paediatrician. She was the chair of the British Academy of Childhood Disability, established the Rett Clinic for children with Rett syndrome, and has worked to develop palliative care for children. She led the Cass Review of gender identity services in England, which was completed in 2024. Cass was appointed to the House of Lords as a crossbench life peer in the same year.
Transgender rights in the United Kingdom have varied significantly over time.
Mermaids is a British charity and advocacy organisation that supports gender variant and transgender youth. It also provides inclusion and diversity training. Mermaids was founded in 1995 by a group of parents of gender nonconforming children and became a charitable incorporated organisation in 2015.
A gender identity clinic is a type of specialist clinic providing services relating to transgender health care.
The Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) was a nationally operated health clinic in the United Kingdom that specialised in working with children with gender identity issues, including gender dysphoria. The service closed on 28 March 2024 after serious concerns were repeatedly raised over a number of years by several independent NHS whistleblowers.
Bell v Tavistock was a case before the Court of Appeal on the question of whether puberty blockers could be prescribed to under-16s with gender dysphoria. The Court of Appeal said that "it was for clinicians rather than the court to decide on competence" to consent to receive puberty blockers.
Genspect is an international group founded in June 2021 by psychotherapist Stella O'Malley that has been described as gender-critical. Genspect opposes gender-affirming care, as well as social and medical transition for transgender people. Genspect opposes allowing transgender people under 25 years old to transition, and opposes laws that would ban conversion therapy on the basis of gender identity. Genspect also endorses the unproven concept of rapid-onset gender dysphoria (ROGD), which proposes a subclass of gender dysphoria caused by peer influence and social contagion. ROGD has been rejected by major medical organisations due to its lack of evidence and likelihood to cause harm by stigmatizing gender-affirming care.
GenderGP is an online gender clinic founded in 2015 by English physicians Helen Webberley and Mike Webberley. It is based in Singapore but provides services worldwide. It has been the subject of controversy within the United Kingdom as a result of regulatory actions taken against its founders.
The Independent Review of Gender Identity Services for Children and Young People was commissioned in 2020 by NHS England and NHS Improvement and led by Hilary Cass, a retired consultant paediatrician and the former president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health. It dealt with gender services for children and young people, including those with gender dysphoria and those identifying as transgender in England.
