Helen Webberley is a Welsh GP who set up various online consultation and prescribing websites, including Gender GP. This specialises in gender medicine and has been prescribing puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for children adolescents and adults, no questions asked, despite her having no specialist training. She was suspended by the General Medical Council in 2017:
She and her husband, Michael, were operating an unlicensed gender clinic, charging patients £75 - £150 per hour for their services and prescribing hormones to children as young as twelve. In December 2018 Webberley was found guilty of providing healthcare services illegally.
The Webberleys’ clinic was connected to the death of teenager, Jayden Lowe, who had purchased testosterone from them online several months before tragically taking her own life. Jayden’s mother had no idea the clinic supplying these drugs was unregulated and she demanded a second inquest into her child’s death after learning the truth.
The General Medical Council set up a tribunal to investigate:
The General Medical Council’s charge sheet against her is long and focuses primarily on what they describe as failure to provide good clinical care to 3 young people with gender dysphoria. Other charges include inappropriate prescribing and follow up of more typical GP patients, poor safeguarding and dishonest behaviour. She has already been found guilty and fined for running a separate online medical practice without being properly registered. She remains at Gender GP, owned by Hong Kong-based shell company Harland International, as a non-medical advisor on trans rights but retains a Welsh address.
We shouldn’t forget the damning character report from her appeal against her initial suspension in 2018, which makes for a sobering read. The Tribunal found she had lied to investigators saying “She has deeply ingrained attitudinal flaws which make it impossible for her to reflect in any real sense..." and "She does not show any recognition of proper governance. She is unsuitable.”
That was last year. Now the tribunal has come to some conclusions:
A doctor who ran an online clinic for transgender children left a 12-year-old patient in “anguish” after failing to provide adequate follow-up care, a medical tribunal has found.
Dr Helen Webberley, founder of the website GenderGP, was accused of failing to give good clinical care in 2016 to three patients, aged 11, 12 and 17, who were transitioning from female to male.
However, a Medical Practitioners Tribunal Service panel has found that 83 of the allegations made against the doctor by the General Medical Council were not proved.
The hearing concluded that she was competent to provide treatment but failed to provide some follow-up care.
In a determination of facts, handed down on Friday, the panel found that 36 allegations were proved, including failing to provide adequate follow-up care to a 12-year-old who was prescribed testosterone.
Damning, then - but not as damning as it surely should be:
The panel was told that Webberley did not reply to emails from the patient’s mother when their prescription ran out, which left the child in a state of “anguish”. The panel did not find that testosterone was inappropriate for use in children of that age.
At the time of the allegations, transgender healthcare was “an evolving medical discipline” and opinion among experts was divided, the panel was told.
Angus Macpherson, the tribunal’s chairman, said: “The tribunal finds that the reluctance of the Endocrine Society and others to embrace enlightened views of transgenderism is symptomatic of the tendency in all professions to be slow to move with the times.
“This inertia in respect to medical attitudes to transgenderism mirrors past attitudes to homosexuality, which was classified by the APA [American Psychiatric Association] as a mental illness until the 1973 edition of their [Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders].”
Macpherson said that Webberley may have been considered as being “at the vanguard” of the evolving approach to transgender healthcare.
He said that at the time of the allegations there was “immense pressure” on the NHS England Gender Identity Development Service, and some service users were “left in a state of desperation” so it was “hardly surprising” some patients sought out Webberley as an alternative.
So the panel concluded that testosterone was not inappropriate for use in children of that age, ie 12 years old. What?? The provision of life-changing drugs to troubled 12-year-olds is not a problem? And the tribunal's chairman talks about"enlightened views of transgenderism", clearly implying that he agrees with Webberley and her prescription of puberty blockers willy-nilly as an appropriate and enlightened treatment, but was just a little concerned by her lack of follow-up. In other words this Angus Macpherson has been ideologically captured, and has no business chairing a GMC tribunal given his unscientific and distorted views. How very disappointing.
A decision on whether Webberley’s fitness to practise is impaired because of her misconduct or conviction is still to be determined. The hearing is expected to reconvene in June.
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