First, Do No Harm
First, Do No Harm
The beginning of the end for Mermaids?
Justice is served. Michael Webberley has been struck off.
Those keeping up with the unfolding scandal around the treatment of ‘trans kids’ in recent years can’t help but be familiar with the Doctors Webberley, who set up and operated an unlicenced online gender clinic.
Helen Webberley’s medical tribunal concluded in April with the panel finding that 36 of the allegations made against her were proved. She remains suspended until a decision on her fitness to practise is determined. The hearing is expected to reconvene in June.
For the past few months her husband, Michael Webberley, has also been the focus of a medical tribunal. He faced 89 separate charges spanning the period between February 2017 and June 2019. The charges concerned the care provided to 18 patients for whom Dr Webberley provided androgen treatment and seven transgender patients, to whom he prescribed puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones.
On Wednesday, The Medical Practitioners Tribunal Service (MPTS) ruled that Webberley’s actions were ‘fundamentally incompatible with being a doctor’ and amounted to ‘serious misconduct’. It handed down its most severe sanction, erasing him from the medical register. It also imposed an immediate order of suspension, meaning that he cannot practise during the 28-day appeal period prior to erasure coming into effect.
The tribunal found that Webberley’s behaviour was “outside the limits of his expertise” and he was without the requisite qualifications and training in general practice, transgender medicine or paediatrics. (He was a gastroenterologist.) It deemed his treatment of the 24 patients to have been ‘a catalogue of failings’.
The seven transgender patients in question were treated through GenderGP, the private online clinic Webberley set up with his wife, Helen. In all seven cases, the tribunal found that he had provided treatment which was not clinically indicated or had been prescribed without sufficient examination or assessment. He had diagnosed gender dysphoria based on inadequate information and he had failed to gain informed consent from the patients concerned.
The tribunal found that, in every case, Webberley had validated the diagnoses being sought by the ‘trans’ patients.
The tribunal heard about a patient Webberley treated in 2018, a nine-year old girl, to whom he prescribed off-licence puberty blockers.
Webberley had a 20-minute Skype call with the family during which he only spoke to the child for ten minutes. There was no physical examination of the child and the questionnaire he’d provided for her was ‘inadequate for the assessment of a minor’.
The tribunal was struck that Webberley’s first email response to the girl’s parents “Appeared to anticipate puberty blocker treatment before he could possibly have known that a diagnosis of gender dysphoria was appropriate”.
The tribunal also heard about a 17-year-old known as Patient W, a trans-identified girl who contacted Webberley in June 2018. In an email to him, she expressed her desire to transition as soon as possible. Webberley diagnosed her as gender dysphoric and prescribed her testosterone.
Patient W had been diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome and had ‘complex’ and long-term mental health issues. However, Webberley ‘did not appear’ to be aware of these co-morbidities as he’d failed to obtain the patient's medical records. The tribunal concluded that Webberley had prescribed testosterone when it was not clinically indicated and without fully examining the risks to the patient.
It is thought that ‘Patient W’ refers to teenager, Jayden Lowe, whose suicide in September 2018 was linked to the treatment she received from GenderGP. She had purchased testosterone privately from the clinic for three months before tragically taking her own life. Jayden’s mother told a local newspaper that her daughter’s treatment was ‘all done via the phone or the internet’. She believed a second inquest was necessary after she learned that GenderGP was an unregulated clinic and that both of the Webberleys had subsequently been suspended.
Michael and Helen Webberley are no longer directors of GenderGP but they still seem to feature on the website.
The organisation made a statement in light of the tribunal’s conclusions this week. “We as an organisation, and our patient community, are here in part because of his [Michael Webberley’s] efforts and courage in putting everything on the line to provide the best care possible for his patients.”
Of course, we have written previously about GenderGP. In 2017 it was discovered that the clinic was operating without a licence. Helen Webberley was suspended by the General Medical Council, pending an investigation into her conduct. In December 2018 she was found guilty of providing healthcare services illegally and fined £12,000.
Helen and Michael Webberley then moved their clinic to Spain and GenderGP remained in business, operating online and offshore. It was later acquired by Harland International, a company about which little is known other than it was registered in Hong Kong in 2018. Helen Webberley still featured on the GenderGP website and was listed as working at the clinic as a ‘non-medical advisor’.
In December 2020, The Times reported on GenderGP’s determination to continue prescribing hormones to minors despite a High Court ruling that under 16s are unlikely to be able to fully consent to this ‘experimental’ treatment.
In February 2021, The Telegraph discovered that GenderGP was supplying cross-sex hormones to minors without their parents’ knowledge and after only a cursory consultation.
An undercover reporter posed as a 15-year-old girl and had only three Skype appointments with GenderGP staff before being prescribed a four-month supply of testosterone. GenderGP Staff did not request any parental consent or involvement. A single email from the girl’s 20-year-old half-brother, confirming that he would pay for her treatment, was the only contact with an adult which they required.
There are long-standing links between the Webberleys, GenderGP and Mermaids.
Helen Webberley told Gay Star News herself that she prescribed puberty blockers to a 12 year old who had been referred to her clinic by Mermaids.
Mermaids used to link to GenderGP’s webpage from its own site. That link was removed following advice from The National Lottery which had just granted it £500,000. However, GenderGP was still being discussed on a private forum hosted on the Mermaids' website. Even though Mermaids is supposed to moderate this forum, GenderGP has been mentioned hundreds of times by parents who are using its services and are seemingly unaware that the clinic is unregulated in the UK.
Even as late as September 2020 (long after Helen Webberley had been suspended for operating the clinic illegally) Mermaids were promoting GenderGP on social media.
This excellent thread from Malcolm Clark demonstrates the extent to which the Webberleys and their unlicenced clinic were supported, promoted and applauded by trans activists and their enablers. As he points out, GenderGP’s affirmation method and propensity to medicalise even very young and vulnerable children was not an aberration, but the goal of the trans lobby.
Pink News have written in very supportive terms about the Webberleys and their clinic in the past.
This article was written in July 2021, at the start of Helen Webberley’s tribunal, after she had been found guilty of operating the clinic illegally.
It talks of her ‘long standing commitment to patient-centred trans healthcare’ and how the clinic’s service has been ‘a lifeline’ and provided ‘vital support’ to ‘trans communities’.
This article, written only a few months ago at the conclusion of Helen Webberley’s tribunal, again describes GenderGP as providing ‘a much-needed lifeline’ to patients.
Such praise seems very much at odds with the findings of Michael Webberley’s tribunal which ruled, “In the absence of any expression of regret and/or remorse, insight and/or remediation, Dr Webberley is liable in the future to put patients at risk, bring the medical profession into disrepute, breach fundamental tenets of the profession and act dishonestly”.
Remember, the patients to which the tribunal refers were being treated through GenderGP.
“Erasing Dr Webberley’s name from the medical register is the only appropriate sanction in order to meet the overarching objective which is to protect patients, maintain public confidence in the medical profession and uphold proper professional standards”.
Greed is a terrible thing. The number of people making shed loads of money from this ideology and young people’s distress is appalling. I wish the final part of the Cass Review would hurry up
While it's important to remove apparatchiks of the gender medicalization industry like the Webberleys, let's not forget that there are no controls on the agents of the Id of Gender Ideology, PinkNews. A thorough examination of writers and the husband team at the top of PinkNews is long overdue, including their financial enablers like Google.