Smuggling hormones to Irish youth

The European Professional Association for Transgender Health (EPATH) was held in Killarney, Ireland from April 26th to April 28th, 2023. Killarney was chosen as its meeting site in part due to support from the Transgender Equality Network of Ireland (TENI), an advocacy group that is partly funded through Ireland’s nationalized healthcare service, Health Service Executive (HSE).

I was in Killarney, Ireland on April 27th to attend the Genspect Bigger Picture conference and to encounter and have conversations with attendees to the EPATH conference. Although I was originally escorted out of the conference (a story I’ll recount later), I was later allowed to purchase entry. At the end of the second day of the conference I found myself sitting across from Susie Green of GenderGP and Tara Hewitt of TENI. Much to my shame, I have the habit of occasionally eavesdropping, and so I caught a fair bit of their conversation.

GenderGP is a private clinic specializing in cross-sex hormones run by Helen Webberley and formerly by her husband Michael Webberley. Helen Webberley has had a long history of legal problems related to medical misconduct. Last year, she had her medical license temporarily suspended, although a judge later granted her appeal to overturn the suspension. Michael Webberley is permanently unable to practice medicine following a finding that he’d improperly prescribed cross-sex hormones to children, including one who took her own life. The Webberleys have a long history of flaunting medical standards for working with the vulnerable population of gender dysphoric youth.

Susie Green is the former leader of the troubled Mermaids charity, where under her management Green brought a pedophile to serve on the board, among other lapses of judgment. Green is also detailed in Hannah Barnes’s book Time to Think where she is noted for pushing for the medicalization of children to the point of making clinicians with the NHS youth gender clinic uncomfortable.

Tara Hewitt is a transgender male and a long-time activist from the UK. Hewitt recently moved to Ireland to work for the Transgender Equality Network of Ireland. TENI was pivotal in bringing EPATH to Killarney and was rewarded by having its president Tina Kolos Orban give an opening address at the conference, in which she indulged in paranoia by describing critics of cross-sex medicine as “… a totalitarian and genocidal force that targets not just trans people but all institutions that uphold democracy and individual human rights.”

What I overheard was a conversation between Green and Hewitt about the challenges of getting GenderGP to gain access to Ireland. Green spoke about how GenderGP being a private service makes it challenging to position the group in countries with national healthcare services. Among the challenges Green detailed was the need to “whitewash” Helen Webberley’s ethics problems. Green and Hewitt discussed some tactics to “shift the HSE” by pressuring politicians within Ireland’s legislative body, the Oireachtas. Green and Hewitt mentioned severals legislators by name (TDs), but unfortunately I was not prepared to record the names as I heard them, however it’s likely that one of them was Roderic O’Gorman who advocates for teaching transgender topics to gradeschool children.

Here’s the bottom line: TENI, a group that has received millions from HSE, brought EPATH to Killarney, Ireland, where its representative Tara Hewitt plotted with Susie Green to undermine the very service that was helping to fund the event. GenderGP is infamous for bypassing all the standards that WPATH (and by extension EPATH) attempts to establish for ensuring that there are minimum guidelines for the treatment of all people seeking cross-sex medicalization.

Parents in Ireland should be paying close attention to the machinations of these groups, and they should write to their own representatives to ensure that GenderGP and TENI are not allowed to subvert the HSE.

I recount my story with Nina Paley, Lisa Selin Davis, and Alasdair Gunn on the Heterodorx podcast (May 4, 2023)