I told the truth about what was going on at the Tavistock clinic

More than 20 publishers rejected Hannah Barnes’s book on the gender ID service at the NHS. But her story triumphed in the end

- Hannah Barnes

IAM not your friend.” Imagine the feeling. You’re a teenager. A sensitive and well-behaved one at that, and the person you love and look up to more than anyone else in the world tells you this. “I’m your mum,” she continued. “And I’m going to tell you things you don’t want to hear; things your friends won’t say to you. Because I love you.”

My mum was right. Sometimes, parents have to do or say things their children don’t want to hear, things that might upset them or make them angry. It’s done not to hurt them, but to keep them safe, to equip them for life, and to help them flourish.

Sometimes journalists have to say things people don’t want to hear too. Not for reasons of maternalism —journalists are not parents — but in the pursuit of knowledge and truth. These matter. And can be deeply uncomfortable.

When I began looking into the care being provided to gender-questioning children and young people for BBC Newsnight in 2019, I had no idea that this would come to be seen — rightly or wrongly — as one of the most controversial topics of our time. I didn’t know what I would later find. Together with my then-colleague Deborah Cohen and editor Esme Wren, we simply felt this was part of the NHS, involving often vulnerable children and the use of off-label medication, that was receiving relatively little detailed attention. We should look into it.

It didn’t take long to recognise the strength of feelings involved. As a team, we received criticism, complaints and came under external pressure not to pursue this as an area of inquiry. Yet the programme remained convinced of the public interest value of our journalism and we continued to investigate, carefully but undeterred. This wasn’t brave.