GenderGP is a menace to children

Doctors only make headlines for being exceptionally good or downright menacing. For anyone in possession of a functioning frontal lobe, GenderGP founder Helen Webberley falls squarely into the latter camp. She’s not quite in the Crippen-Shipman-Mengele league yet, but she’s certainly loitering in the waiting room, flicking through the pamphlets.

Despite having her licence to practise revoked first in 2021, and again last year, Webberley is currently on a self-promotion spree. Yesterday brought a double bill: first podcaster Daniel Hodges released a video of her being expertly filleted by formidable feminist Julie Bindel, and then Times Radio aired a live debate between dodgy doctor Webberley and the reality enthusiast, Helen Joyce.

A cynic might suspect this sudden burst of publicity is simply a panicked marketing drive, arriving just as medical authorities across the civilised world slam the brakes on gender medicine. England, Sweden and Finland have already walked away from puberty blockers. This week, New Zealand joined them, announcing a halt to their use outside research trials. Clinicians and policymakers are finally freeing themselves from the grip of lobbyists and beginning to acknowledge that turning confused kids into lifelong medical patients wasn’t a great idea.

It seems to have come as a shock to Webberley to find herself not on the ‘right side of history’. On her website, she boldly lists herself as ‘the hormone expert, international trans-rights advocate, speaker, writer, broadcaster, entrepreneur and founder of the ground-breaking informatics company, GenderGP’. She claims that not reapplying for her medical licence allowed her to ‘speak more freely and advocate for trans rights’. ‘I may not practise medicine today’, she says, ‘but I do practise something far more urgent: I practise advocacy and truth-telling. I practise standing behind, beside and for the people who are too often left behind.’

GenderGP operates as a subscription-driven telemedicine outfit that promises accelerated access to puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and ‘transition packs’. The clinic is registered offshore (in Singapore under GenderGP PTE Limited) rather than within the UK’s regulated medical framework. Prospective clients pay a one-off ‘set-up’ fee of £195 plus a monthly subscription of £30, while additional fees apply for ‘consent check-ins’ and lab tests. GenderGP was the preferred provider for disgraced child-transition charity Mermaids. The latter would refer stressed-out parents and confused kids to GenderGP, to bypass the NHS. Both Webberley and her husband have been repeatedly taken to court over their actions, including for running an independent medical agency without proper registration and putting patients at risk.

In one case last year, the High Court found that the testosterone regimen given to a 15-year-old girl via GenderGP wasn’t just unconventional but actually outright dangerous. The court-appointed paediatric endocrinologist condemned GenderGP for adopting a ‘highly abnormal and frankly negligent approach’ to the girl in question, involving a ‘top-end dosage to a testosterone-naïve child’ that pushed her levels ‘dangerously high’ and left her ‘presently at risk of sudden death due to thromboembolic disease’. That, in normal-people language, means a confused and by definition vulnerable child could have died because of Webberley’s arrogant and yet conveniently lucrative stance on ‘trans rights’.

When watching Webberley calmly deliver wild assertions, such as that ‘transgender women are female’ and that calling them men is a ‘hate crime’, it becomes hard to decide whether she is mad or bad. There’s a distinct glazed sheen to the eyes; the messianic glimmer of someone convinced she can bend biology to her will and save the marginalised and maligned.

Yet even the devout slip. When Jo Coburn pressed her on Times Radio about predatory men, Webberley began by insisting it was ‘dangerous’ to associate trans-identified males with male violence. Moments later she referred to ‘some men, whether they are transwomen in identity or whether they are men’.

It seems that somewhere beneath the carefully curated image she knows what she cannot afford to admit: that biological sex cannot be overwritten by self declaration or doctored into obedience. But as with those who insist they are the opposite sex, her life’s work and lifestyle rely on maintaining a fantasy. And so, with admirable commercial focus, she simply chooses not to acknowledge reality.

Jo Bartosch is co-author of Pornocracy. Order it here.