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 not-for-profit social science organisation, working with challenging issues for the public good: providing practical help for people and organisations to learn, lead, change and innovate, especially in difficult times.
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.
Gillick competence is a term originating in England and Wales and is used in medical law to decide whether a child is able to consent to their own medical treatment, without the need for parental permission or knowledge.
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 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 to treat other conditions, such as precocious puberty in young children and some hormone-sensitive cancers in adults.
Psychoanalytic infant observation is a distinct empirical case study method in psychoanalytic and psychotherapy training which was developed at the Tavistock Clinic in London by child psychoanalyst Esther Bick. In 1948 she collaborated with John Bowlby to develop the approach as part of psychotherapy training. It has since become an essential feature of pre-clinical training in child and adult psychotherapy, psychoanalysis and related fields throughout the Western world.
Hilary Dawn Cass is a British paediatrician known as chair of the British Academy of Childhood Disability, for establishing the Rett Clinic for children with the Rett syndrome neurodevelopmental disorder, for developing palliative care for children, as well as for leading the Cass Review completed in 2024. In the 2024 Dissolution Honours, Cass was nominated for a life peerage as a crossbencher.
Transgender rights in the United Kingdom have varied significantly over time, with transgender Britons facing many issues not experienced by non-trans individuals. These include various laws and public attitudes in regards to identity documents, as well as anti-discrimination measures used by or pertaining to transgender people, in the areas of employment, education, housing and social services, amongst others.
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.
Laverne Antrobus is a British child psychologist. She trained at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust in the 1990s. Throughout the 2000s and 2010s, Antrobus has hosted documentaries and appeared as an expert on the BBC and Channel 5.
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.
Current research indicates that autistic people have higher rates of LGBT identities and feelings than the general population. A variety of explanations for this have been proposed, such as prenatal hormonal exposure, which has been linked with sexual orientation, gender dysphoria and autism. Alternatively, autistic people may be less reliant on social norms and thus are more open about their orientation or gender identity. A narrative review published in 2016 stated that while various hypotheses have been proposed for an association between autism and gender dysphoria, they lack strong evidence.
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.
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.
