David Bell

Dr David Bell was a consultant psychiatrist in the Adult Department at the Tavistock where he worked in adult services from 1995 until his retirement earlier this year. In his role as Staff Governor at the Tavistock, Bell was approached by a large number of clinicians who were working or had worked on the Tavistock Gender Identity Development service (GIDS). They raised very serious concerns about GIDS and Bell wrote a report which was critical of GIDS in 2018. In this episode, David Bell discusses his report, the retaliation he has weathered from the Tavistock and the lobbies that are steering public institutions while terrorising clinicians with the tyrannical politics of gender identity. Bell also queries some of the reasons behind the increase the sharp increase of adolescent referrals at the Tavistock detailing the “penetration of the commodity form into everyday life” and the commodification of the self and the misogyny driving this movement.