I wake up on a cold steel table with a colorless, artificial fluorescent light numbing my face. Despite my aching head and limp body, I can see pink-haired Dr. Paula sharpening a large machete in the distance. I try to pull my arms up, but I’m strapped down. I look toward the viewing gallery, which is packed with drag queens and wig-clad doctors who look just like my medical captor. One fruitcake in the peanut gallery holds a placard that reads “Chop it off.” Above the audience, I can see a comic sans sign fixed to a wall covered in a rainbow collage that reads: Welcome to Tavistock!
My ordeal began two weeks earlier, when on assignment for America’s Number One Source of Newstainment, GWU! I infiltrated the world-famous gender-affirming clinic Tavistock in London, England, posing as Professor Johnson “Johnny” Jaques from UMass Chan Medical School. I assumed that being from a school in the self-proclaimed Trans Sanctuary city of Trump’s America, Worcester, MA, I would fit right in a loony bin like this.
Tavistock first came under scrutiny about 10 years ago when the UK ‘hospital’ started misdiagnosing children as trans. What began as a place to provide counseling and therapy to pronoun-confused children ended up becoming a chop shop for any child who felt a bit different. The children’s clinic has been officially closed for a year, but Dr. Paula (not his/her real name) and others have manipulated the law to still welcome underage teens to their House of Horrors under the guise that on their 18th birthday, the procedures will take place.
The Chop Shop
On my first day, I found myself in Dr. Paula’s office with Chad, a 17-year-old who will turn 18 in a week. Dr. Paula’s office is decorated with trans flags and posters of Ru Paul, Katlyn Jenner, and a Thai ladyboy band called “Oops, We’ve Done It Again.” Dr. Paula tells me this is to make the “young adults” comfortable. He/she wears a kilt and light pink blouse and when he/she bends over, I can see a black thong barely covering his banger and mash, and a lower back tattoo that visibly and unironically reads: Life’s a drag!
“Gender is a social construct,” Dr. Paula proudly explains to Chad. Through the office window, I stare at a gloomy North London skyline as a double-decker bus packed full of the third world’s finest speeds by. No wonder everyone here is depressed, I think.
“I didn’t know that,” nods impressionable Chad. His voice hasn’t yet dropped, which I assume is a welcome bonus for Dr. Paula.
“It says here that you don’t like football (soccer),” the gender-bending doc prods.
“Well, not really.”
“We can help with that,” Dr. Paula smiled, revealing smoke-stained teeth in braces. I note that something is off about Dr. Paula. I later learned that Dr. Paula was born male. “Most of the world is assigned the wrong gender at birth,” proclaims Dr. Paula, citing statistics from a made-up gay alliance group in communist Canada.
“Could I see those stats?” I ask Dr. Paula, but she/he hisses at me and shoves the misinformation back into a drawer.
As an investigative reporter, it’s my ‘beat’ to embed myself for months, sometimes years, at a time. Previously, I joined a Gaza university encampment, posed as an international student at a donut shop in Canada, and even lit it up with Matchbox 2030 arsonists during the LA fires, but nothing could prepare me for the house of horrors in Tavistock.
Manic Street Maniacs
Harrison is a tall, lanky Scot with a broken smile that would make any dentist shout, Cha-ching! He worked as an orderly at Tavistock during its child trans factory days but left a year ago. He arranged to meet me at a pub in Camden.
I ask him about those eight years that he worked at Tavistock, during the insanity. He says it was a circus. We’re both drinking a Pimm’s cocktail. Harrison is wearing a dark blue Chelsea game shirt and sweatpants. He tells me he supports Chelsea despite their questionable ties to Russian Oligarchs. Harrison left Tavistock in March 2024 but says he is still haunted by the images of crying children who regretted their gender surgery decision and parents who ended up feeling duped by “doctors” like Paula.
Harrison explains that the clinic prescribed puberty blockers to more than 1,000 children, some as young as six years old, without adequate psychological evaluations. In total, 382 children aged six and under were referred to the gender identity service at the clinic. It was accused of serving as a conveyor belt funnelling confused youth who often had concurrent mental health diagnoses into gender transitions, side-stepping proper medical scrutiny.
He was there through most of it and, until today, remained silent. A karaoke machine starts up, and a few drunk Brits are singing Born a Girl by the Welsh band Manic Street Preachers.
“It made hell seem like a holiday on the Riviera,” Harrison says as we sip our second round of cocktails. “Think of just a sweet, confused child who doesn’t like footie and all of sudden, Ma and Da are shipping them off to have their family jewels pried off.” Harrison has a tear in his eye thinking of all the children he indirectly may have affected by working at Tavistock. He goes off the record to reveal that everyone from Hollywood celebrities (you know them—ed) to famous Democrats (Harris-Walz—ed) in the US and left-wing nut bars in the EU were sending their designer children to Tavistock for Frankenstein makeovers. He even reveals that the current Prime Minister of Canada, Mark Carney, has a they/them daughter who, as a teen, attended therapy sessions at the radical transgender clinic.
“You have to question the kind of people who are making decisions for the world if they’d allow their own children to be treated by these witch doctors.”
Gender Bender or Gender Blender?
I’m back at Tavistock, and this time I’m doing the rounds with Dr. Paula. The more patients I meet, the more I wonder if maybe they’re just a little depressed or confused, whether more sunlight, a trip to a beach in Spain, or a Taylor Swift concert might be a better solution than chopping off their genitals.
In one room, a group of counsellors are working on a propaganda piece to share with prospective clients. The slideshow consists of testimonials of people who got the surgery too late and turned into social pariahs. How puberty blockers will give them the genderless look that will attract unknowing people on the outside. I slip up when I say “Kathoey,” but Dr. Paula doesn’t seem to understand. Instead, he/she looks at me and asks, “What about you Johnny? Have you ever questioned your gender?” I laugh, thinking he’s joking, but Dr. Paula is dead serious.
I have to admit I was a bit uncertain about the question. Of course, I had never questioned my gender, but then, staring into Dr. Paula’s deep blue hypnotic eyes while his/her smoke breath seeped into my nose. I admitted that growing up, I had found myself not as interested in sports as the other guys and sometimes I found myself tearing up during a rom-com starring J-Lo.
“Maybe you’re not male,” he stated and then shuffled down the hall to join the team as they analyzed Chad’s testicles in preparation for his life-altering surgery.
Snip, Snip, Hooray
That night, I couldn’t sleep. I wondered if Dr. Paula was right; maybe I was a woman trapped in a hulking six-foot-five body that chicks dig. I had always been the perfect specimen of manhood: CrossFit trainer body with an appetite for Chick-fil-A and adventure. Later, I watched an American football ‘match’ on TV and then tried to order something from the Adult channel but it was too expensive with the exchange rate. I thought back to my childhood. I didn’t recall playing with dolls or wearing my mother’s bras. No, I was for sure a man, but over the night, I thought maybe I could be a woman. Was it something in the Tavistock water supply?
I finally fell asleep around 5 a.m. and was back at Tavistock for a 10 a.m. meeting with Dr. Paula and Nurse Ringo. Chad was ready to be levelled up, Dr. Paula announced. Assuming there were no complications, the wacko doctor confirmed to his co-conspirators in a Joker-like intonation: “We’ll remove his genitals and fit him with female genitals.”
Harrison has just finished a crowd-pleasing falsetto rendition of “Take Me Home, Country Roads” by John Denver. “The problem,” Harrison assured me as he sat back down, is that at “18 they no longer need to deal with parental consent. Often you’d have one parent who was gung-ho about switching, but the other, more reasonable parent questioned the whole thing. This led to troublesome issues and lawsuits. Dr. Paula doesn’t like issues or lawsuits.”
Chad’s year of transition would happen quickly, Nurse Ringo told me; he’ll become more emotional, grow breasts, and his junk would stop working. In about a year he’ll notice thinner shoulders, more fat in his hips, and likely be attracted to men or at least both men and women.
“What if he regrets his decision?” I ask.
“Why would he regret it? He’s already in the wrong gender?”
“But how do you know for sure?”
Nurse Ringo stared at me in astonishment. “What kind of professor are you?”
I retreated from my line of questioning and asked about the 15% discount that Tavistock employees got for gender-affirming care.
A second later, I smell Dr. Paula’s rancid brown teeth breathing behind me and before I can react feel something long, hard and rubbery smack against the back of my head.
Dildo or Didn’t He?
So here I am watching Dr. Paula, blade in the air, stalk toward my immobile body, ready to slice through me like an Amazon rainforest. In a last-minute effort, I spot the very tool used to knock me out lying at the side of the operating table. Grabbing frantically at the giant black dildo, I use it to break my arm free. I slide off the table and run out of the OR half-naked. Outside, I continued running to an approaching double-decker bus. Hoping someone had some spare change in their turban.
A few weeks later, I’m back in Miami, relaxing poolside at my North Beach condo.
I’ve filed my explosive story, and Tavistock and Dr. Paula are a world away. The phone rings, and it’s Harrison.
“Professor Jaques,” he says. “They’re coming for you.”
“Who? I ask. I can hear the sound of someone singing out of key in the background. “Harrison, what are you saying?” but the line goes dead.
I reach down and cup my family jewels, making sure they’re still there, which they are …. for now.
