The head of the world’s largest review into children’s care has said that gender medicine is “built on shaky foundations”... while doctors tended to be cautious in implementing new findings in emerging areas of medicine, “quite the reverse happened in the field of gender care for children”.

Most of the 23 clinical guidelines reviewed were not independent or evidence based, the researchers found.

Clinicians have become “fearful”. The available evidence is “poor”. Her efforts to conduct a vital and comprehensive study into the outcomes of all 9,000 children and adolescents treated at the Tavistock and Portman gender identity development service (Gids) clinic between 2009 and 2020 were “thwarted”.

“The toxicity of the debate is perpetuated by adults, and that itself is unfair to the children who are caught in the middle of it. The children are being used as a football and this is a group that we should be showing more compassion to.”

“The toxicity of the debate has been so great that people have become afraid to work in this area.”

Medical professionals experienced a sense of fear “of being called transphobic if you take a more cautious approach”, she said.

Others were worried that they might be accused of conducting “conversion therapy if, again, they take a cautious or exploratory approach” and some clinicians expressed “fearfulness about what colleagues might say if they speak up and express an opinion that is not consistent with theirs”.

“It’s a social experiment – we don’t know what that’s done for the generation that’s coming through – what has been good and what is bad,” she said.

She added: “There was some very dangerous influencing going on. Some of them give them very unbalanced information. Some were told parents would not understand so that they had to actively separate from their parents or distance their parents; all the evidence shows that that family support is really key to people’s wellbeing,” she said.

“Will there be bombing on Eid”