The Tavistock clinic ignored evidence that 97.5 per cent of children seeking sex changes had autism, depression or other problems that might have explained their unhappiness, a new book claims…Seven in ten children had more than five “associated features” such as abuse, anxiety, eating disorders or bullying, and a social worker estimated that as few as 1 in 50 children treated at the clinic would have stayed transgender for life if they had not been given controversial drug therapy…The NHS’s Gender Identity Development Service for children (Gids), which is based at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust in London, will close later this year after it was criticised in an independent review by Dr Hilary Cass.

Less than two per cent of children in the UK are thought to have an autism spectrum disorder, but according to Gids’s own data, around 35 per cent of its referrals “present with moderate to severe autistic traits”.

Children referred to Gids were ten times more likely than the national average to have a registered sex offender as a parent,