The Times Companion to 2017

by Ian Brunskill

  However, there is still much inside those archives that should be fully opened to the light of scholarship. They undoubtedly contain revealing information on Prince John, George V’s mentally disabled and epileptic youngest son, who was removed to a farm on the Sandringham estate and died young. Similarly, papers relating to Edward and Mrs Simpson and the abdication crisis remain inaccessible to the public.

  The most controversial part of the archive, though, relates to the interwar years, when members of the royal family, in common with others of the British ruling class, were great admirers of Hitler. Some of the more embarrassing material is believed to have been filleted out and destroyed in 1945, but undoubtedly a great deal survives that would elucidate, once and for all, the complex relationship between the royals and the Third Reich, a key to understanding British foreign policy in the run-up to war.

  The royal family needs to take a leaf out of MI5’s book and open up its past to public scrutiny. In the wake of the Spycatcher scandal, the Security Service came to the realisation that excessive secrecy was damaging its credibility. In the absence of documentary evidence, historians were forced to rely on snippets of gossip and rumour, occasional explosions of scandal and the semi-reliable accounts of disgruntled former employees. (These are precisely the same sort of sources that tend to inform royal stories.)

  Starting in the 1990s, MI5 began to release its files to the National Archives on a systematic and logical basis: releasing nothing that could affect national security, compromise the secrecy of other organisations or embarrass living individuals, but everything else, warts and all. MI5’s extraordinary role in the Second World War is now largely declassified, but last year the Security Service also released files on the spies Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, whose escape to Moscow in 1951 was one of the most spectacular cock-ups in spy history.

  The royal archives should be placed in the public domain in the same transparent way: material genuinely distressing to living persons could be excluded, but everything of political relevance should be released under the 30-year rule. This would hugely benefit the royal family too, by enabling its 20th-century history to be written on the basis of hard evidence rather than speculation and rumour.

  That seems unlikely to happen soon, for the royal archivists seem more concerned about brand management, secret-keeping and damage limitation than history. Last year’s discovery of home-cinema footage showing a very young Elizabeth performing the Nazi salute (which any historian worth their salt would publish) prompted outrage among royalists and a promise to investigate how the material had been obtained from the royal archive.

  The results of that investigation, if one ever took place, have never been revealed: a secret inquiry, into a secret archive, by a most secretive organ of state.

  INSIDE BRITAIN’S ONLY TRANSGENDER CLINIC FOR CHILDREN

  Louise France

  NOVEMBER 5 2016

  NINE-YEAR-OLD ASH skips across the main road, a blond ponytail swishing from side to side. She — Ash was born a boy but has wanted to be known as a girl since she was four — has just emerged from an appointment at the Tavistock and Portman Hospital’s Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) in north London and what she really fancies is chicken and fries from the local KFC.

  She’s jittery. A cocktail of relief and adrenaline. Ash is bright and she’s researched the facts (Google is useful like that). She knows about hormone blockers: monthly injections that will, if she is prescribed them, put her puberty on hold. She enjoys talking to the child psychotherapists and family therapists. They understand where she’s coming from. But sometimes they want to know how she feels, and that is tough to articulate when you’re not ten yet. You’re being asked to talk about big, embarrassing stuff like puberty when you don’t want to look at your body in the bath; when you’ve convinced yourself you are developing breasts although this is biologically impossible.

  At least for now.

  She tells the consultant that when she’s older she’ll have a womb transplant and have a baby. (She’s read about it online. “They do it in Sweden,” Ash says.) The consultant explains that it isn’t always straightforward, but that’s not what she wants to hear. When the questions feel too difficult, Ash, who wants to be a trans model when she grows up, gets teary and asks to leave the room.

  It’s at home in southern England where she lets rip and it’s her mother, Terri, on whom she takes out the fear and confusion. Shouting, slamming doors. In the past she’s been taunted at school, beaten up, called a “she-male”. When she was seven she sent her mother suicidal texts. Sometimes family life revolves around how Ash feels from moment to moment.

  GIDS at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust (or Tavi, as it’s known by locals in the leafy, affluent streets near by) is Britain’s only multidisciplinary clinic specialising in children and adolescents who are concerned that they were born the wrong sex. Eighteen years ago, when GIDS began, a team of five received about 30 referrals from children a year. By 2009 referrals totalled 96. In 2014 it was 697. This year about 1,419 children came for help, referred by GPs faced with a condition that they’ll most likely have very little experience of.

  While, to put the figures into perspective, these numbers account for only 1 in 10,000 young people, the service is under huge pressure. Sixty new members of staff are about to start. Builders have been employed over the summer to carve up the office space in the Tavistock building, an incongruous, anonymous block with a statue of Sigmund Freud in the car park.

  The average age of the young people who arrive in reception, with its gender-neutral toilet, is 14, but they are increasingly receiving inquiries from parents of children at primary school. Occasionally there are referrals for children as young as three. One concern is that if these children socially transition — dress as the opposite sex, change their names — at this age, what happens if they change their minds?

  I meet Ash and Terri again at home two weeks later. Ash is just back from school, quiet and hungry. She desultorily kicks a football about in her uniform (T-shirt, short grey skirt) and disappears to her bedroom (cluttered, shocking pink). Make no mistake, she looks like a girl. I catch myself staring at her, searching for clues to her biology. Ash is one of the main characters in the first episode of an ambitious and revealing new Channel 4 documentary series — three years in the making — about the Tavistock. It’s directed by Peter Beard, who won awards for his last documentary, My Son, the Jihadi. The first episode focuses on GIDS. It’s the first time they have allowed cameras inside.

  We sit in the back garden and her mother explains why she’s decided to let Ash appear on television. “I wanted people to see that my kid is not a freak,” she says. Terri has wholly taken on board Ash’s feminine identity: she lets her wear nail varnish and crimp her hair, although she draws the line at lipstick on school days. “She is not a boy in the wrong clothes; she is actually a girl in the wrong skin. I wanted people to see how hard this is — this is a massive thing for a little kid.”

  Ask Ash about being born a boy and she makes sense of it by splitting off her masculinity. She says the male part of herself was an older brother “that died or fell off a cliff”.

  “From the moment Ash could talk, she has been like this,” Terri says. “She wanted to have dolls and wear princess dresses.” At first she was not concerned. She had other children and they’d wanted to dress up. “It wasn’t an issue.”

  At nursery Ash wore dresses. “I’ve never seen her play with a boy,” her mum tells me. She sat down to pee despite having brothers. When her father, a scaffolder — Ash’s parents split up when she was two — gave her trains for Christmas she refused to play with them. (Recently he has begun to accept Ash’s trans status, to the point of accompanying her to a meeting at the Tavistock. “I wouldn’t have her any other way,” he says in the documentary.)

  Did Terri ever think, maybe my son is simply a girlie boy? Yes, she tells me. Her hunch was that Ash would grow up to be gay. “She just se
emed to be an extremely camp gay man. And that was fine. We’re an open family. We have a lot of gay friends. It wasn’t an issue.”

  Then, when Ash was four, she said: “Why do you keep calling me a boy? Why do you keep saying he? I am a girl. I am a she.” Terri remembers the moment vividly. Her distressed son was sitting on her lap in the living room, dressed in a Rapunzel dress with a wig. “She asked me, ‘Who is going to take my willy off?’ She wanted to know if I would take her to the doctors or would it fall off? That’s when I thought, this is a bit more than dressing up.”

  Might Ash’s behaviour just be a phase? It’s common for children to experiment with gender roles. Terri explains that she has never once wavered. When school started, every morning was a battlefield. (Start talking about gender and you realise how traditional schools still are about the sexes: boys told to go on one side, girls on the other, unisex school uniforms uncommon.) “For the first year I tried to get her into the boy’s uniform, but she hated it. She’d be punching me, biting me, scratching me.” In the end, Terri asked the head teacher if Ash could wear a skirt and he agreed.

  Any ambivalence has been around whether to tell strangers. Is it better to be taken for a girl and carry the burden of the secret, or to be open about what is happening, with all its complexities? But what Terri would like are answers. “I’d really like to know why,” she tells the consultant at the Tavistock. “Where did this come from? She can’t have made it up, because she was too small. We didn’t know anyone who was trans. She’d never even heard of it. I know it’s normal for little boys to play with dolls but to never be interested in one car? To never be interested in Spider-Man? I’d like a reason. But it looks like I’m never going to get one.”

  There is just one photograph left of Ash as a boy. It’s on Terri’s phone. All the others have been deleted or shredded. “We did it together,” Terri tells me.

  What would Freud make of Ash, born Ashton Andrew, name changed by deed poll this year to Ashley Julianne? In a very short space of time the idea that someone can be born into the wrong body has become mainstream. The word “trans” — short for transgender — has become part of our language. So much so in the LGBT world (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender), it can seem as though it’s the T that’s taking up all the oxygen. And now it’s trans children who are making the headlines. The award-winning US drama series Modern Family has introduced an eight-year-old trans character. Last month CBBC aired an online drama about a boy who wants to be a girl. Tumblr and Reddit have become a virtual space where children share their treatment options.

  Yet I’d suggest that Dr Polly Carmichael, the consultant clinical psychologist who leads the GIDS unit, has one of the most challenging jobs in the NHS. Until now she has turned down media requests, concerned that their work will be misrepresented. (The most common misconception, she says, is that the service’s main job is to prescribe hormone drugs.)

  Carmichael is a softly spoken, cheerful woman, who laughs easily. Watch her in the consulting room and she has a stillness about her that is calming. She also chooses her words carefully. This is an area where even the language used is hotly debated. (For instance, a trans teenager who was born a boy is referred to as a “natally assigned male”. An outsider can start to tie themselves up in verbal knots.)

  On the day we meet Carmichael has to choose the new colour scheme for the department’s revamp. Much trickier is the task of negotiating the demands of a vocal trans community together with meeting the needs of children with complex emotional lives. Not to mention parents coming to terms, or not, with a child who says they are trans.

  At the same time there is another group gaining ground: people who argue that we are at “peak trans”, that we’re living in a sexualised culture within which there is enormous pressure on children to fit gender stereotypes and where being trans has become a glamorous “lifestyle choice”. There is a view that this is a generation for whom, unconsciously perhaps, becoming the opposite sex is actually more acceptable than being gay, or not fitting clichéd ideas of what it means to be male or female.

  No one can agree on what causes gender dysphoria. And why so many children now say they are experiencing it, or even what it is exactly. Is it a biological condition? A psychological one? Is it genetic or learnt behaviour? Is it nature or nurture? Nor is there one reason why there has been such a dramatic rise in cases — a 100 per cent increase in the past 12 months in Britain. Research is patchy.

  What is indisputable is that this is an area that is moving faster than anyone might have imagined, even two years ago. “We are all learning,” says Carmichael. “There is no certainty in this area. Certainty is about being closed, which is unhelpful. It’s all about being thoughtful, and careful, and treating everyone individually. We don’t take a view on the outcome of a young person’s gender identification. Our job is not to presuppose anything about what they are going through.”

  She goes on: “Some adolescents come here who are very troubled. They have only just told their parents.” There are a few who contact the unit directly, without having told their parents or their GP. “There is a feeling that you have to act as quickly as possible, often because of fears of self-harm.” According to a survey by the trans charity Mermaids 48 per cent of trans people under 26 say they have attempted suicide. “But on the other hand,” she says, “there are many young people we see who are doing really well. It’s all about promoting resilience in these young people.”

  The difficulty is that building emotional confidence takes time and for some young people whose bodies are developing — and their parents who may just want this “sorted” — time feels like the enemy. “For families it can be very difficult because they are seeking certainty, but the reality is that we don’t have certainty.”

  The explosion in the figures has led to the impression in the media that there are swathes of children gaily changing gender. The reality is more complicated. About 80 per cent of the children who come to the service before adolescence eventually change their minds. Most decide that they are gay, or bisexual. Conversely, for those who come during adolescence, the figures are reversed and about 80 per cent do pursue sex reassignment.

  I’m allowed to sit in on a staff meeting where therapists bring along cases they want to discuss. Young children like Ash may be unusual, but they are not rare. Some have been coming to the unit for 12 years. Many of them, like Ash, will have been living as the opposite gender since they were at nursery and have built up long-standing relationships with their case workers. But one of the therapists mentions the case of a “natally assigned girl” who has been taken by his parents to America for a mastectomy. Children in a hurry to change gender — and parents who fear for their psychological wellbeing — are making potentially traumatic life-changing decisions that cannot easily be reversed.

  This is what Carmichael and her team must grapple with. The increase in demand means that children who used to be seen within 18 weeks currently have to wait nine months (although it is hoped that the recruitment drive will change that). Transgender groups complain about the delay and argue that experts at units like the Tavistock are too cautious. Much of the debate swirls around hormone injections: both hormone blockers — prescribed at puberty to inhibit the development of secondary sexual characteristics such as breasts or facial hair — and cross-sex hormones, which the Tavistock prescribes at 16 to masculinise or feminise the body. Thus, a girl who wants to be a boy (a natally assigned girl) will be given testosterone (or “T”, as it’s known in the chat rooms). It’s after this that, when the person is 18 and goes into the adult service, they can opt for surgery.

  Hormone blockers are seen as a chance to put the brakes on development, to pause and think about the future. However, 90 per cent of patients go from hormone blockers to cross-sex hormones, hormones that leave teenagers infertile. And it’s these cross-sex hormones that cause the most controversy. In America they are prescribed at private clinics to patients as young as 12. T
here are some in the trans community who argue that the age limit is too high in the UK.

  Helen Webberley, a GP in Wales, has set up a private gender clinic and recently started treating children, a “handful” of whom, according to news reports, she has started on cross-sex hormones, including a 12-year-old. Meanwhile, the internet means that there is little to stop under 16-year-olds from buying cross-sex hormones online.

  “Currently the zeitgeist is that you go with the child, following the child’s lead and wish at every step,” says Carmichael. “There has been a large decrease in the age at which cross-sex hormones are available, particularly in the US.

  “The big debate at the moment is the pressure to introduce cross-sex hormones earlier and earlier. We have done so at around 16 and we might introduce some flexibility around that. But 12? That is a big departure. The reality is that for some young people, things change all the time. For example, starting a relationship with someone can be associated with them thinking very differently about their gender. This isn’t straightforward.

  “If young people are being given the strong message that it is the end of the world if they don’t get hormones immediately — perhaps the suggestion you should fast-track people who are self-harming — that is potentially damaging.” As she says, with some understatement, “It is tricky, really tricky.”

  Matt, born Matilda, is one of the increasing numbers of natally assigned girls who wish to change gender. The trend at the Tavistock used to be more boy to girl by 3:1, but in the past five years the ratio has reversed.

  Matt is also on the autistic spectrum, which complicates the issues (according to the documentary, as many as 30 per cent of male-to-female cases are on the spectrum, a link no one can explain). Matt’s diagnosis means that he finds it especially hard to talk about his emotions and the therapists must try to work out if the gender dysphoria is real or an obsessional fantasy. As Carmichael says, “We know he has an incredible imagination. Might it be a story he has created for himself?”