Dr Helen Webberley would not divulge the exact number of children in the UK using her online gender clinic — but she did say that overall patient numbers were staggeringly high.
The former GP from south Wales said that there were “definitely” more than 10,000 people of all ages, including children, on the books of GenderGP.
How many patients has the controversial clinic — which facilitates treatment for children as young as eight — seen since its inception in 2015?
“I don’t know the numbers — but 10, 20, 30,000?” she said. “It’s just huge, and obviously not just from the UK. We have people from over 40 different countries at the moment.”
To put that into context, the Tavistock NHS children’s gender clinic, which closed in the spring, treated an estimated 9,000 patients from 2009 to 2020.
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Webberley, 55, who co-founded GenderGP with her doctor husband Michael, 65, styles herself as an advocate for transgender people in the UK and across the world.
However, Michael has been struck off for treating transgender children, Webberley herself was taken to a tribunal (her suspension was later quashed), and the High Court has been told how a patient at the clinic was prescribed “dangerously high” hormone levels.
The issues have prompted concern about GenderGP, including from Dr Hilary Cass, the author of the comprehensive review of transgender healthcare in the UK.
One former GenderGP employee, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that staff at the clinic had been told they were treating 10,000 patients.
“When I started GenderGP I thought: ‘We’ll get a cohort of people that need us and then it’ll just stop’,” Webberley said this week in London. “(Then) everyday more and more. The demand… we’ve just never caught up. We have tens of thousands of people needing our care and more all the time.”
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GenderGP is registered in Singapore, a country where gay marriage is illegal, and is not registered with England’s Care Quality Commission.
• Hilary Cass: I can’t travel on public transport after gender report
Webberley denied that the decision to base it in Singapore was to avoid scrutiny, explaining that they chose the nation due to GenderGP’s “mission to serve globally”.
She said that GenderGP was owned by a company called Digi Health, but later clarified that Digi Health was dormant. Webberley said that she was a director of GenderGP and not directly involved in care.
GenderGP assesses people with gender dysphoria and connects them to doctors outside the UK, in the European Economic Area, for prescriptions.
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GenderGP has ditched health advisers in favour of providing transgender people with “self-service” treatment recommendations using an AI algorithm.
It means, for example, that a person’s blood test can be analysed by an algorithm, instead of a human health adviser, to provide a treatment recommendation for the patient to take to a doctor.
Webberley said: “We fed the algorithms the respected clinical guidelines.” It removed the “human interpretation of protocol”, she added.
Webberley joked that she had seen the clinic referred to as “GenderGPT”, like the AI tool ChatGPT, but insisted the changes made the service safer.
However, the revelation may deepen concern about its transgender care.
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The Times has been told that even members of GenderGP’s clinical team raised concerns about the AI changes. Some staff, including healthcare advisers, were let go in March.
Webberley said: “Not everyone likes change. The healthcare advisers that were doing it loved their job, but it wasn’t sustainable.”
GenderGP also sends the AI-generated recommendation — which could include information on hormone treatment — to a patient’s GP.
“The aim is to empower that person’s own doctor to provide the care,” Webberley said.
“If their own doctor doesn’t want to, or can’t… we can refer to one of the prescribers that we know understand trans care.”
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Webberley’s husband, a former gastroenterologist, was struck off in 2022 for “wide-ranging failings” in prescribing hormones to patients as young as nine without proper assessments. He is no longer involved in GenderGP.
Helen Webberley was found to have committed serious misconduct by a Medical Practitioners Tribunal Service panel in 2022 by putting three young patients at “unwarranted risk of harm”.
However, she successfully appealed against the decision to the High Court and her suspension was quashed. The couple now split their time between the UK and Spain.
By 2020 GenderGP claimed to have started almost 2,000 people on hormones.
Earlier this year, the High Court was told that GenderGP had prescribed “dangerously high” levels of hormones to a 16-year-old boy that could have resulted in sudden death.
Webberley said that she could take legal action against the doctor who made the court claim, adding that it was “untrue”. She said they had not been given notice of the court case.
Webberley prefers to dwell on the praise she has received over the years. “The amount of times I’ve had a young person’s parents thank me and say: ‘You have saved my child’s life,’” she said.
To join GenderGP, customers must pay an upfront fee of £195 and £65 for an information-gathering session, followed by a monthly £30 subscription.
Drugs are charged separately, with a three-month supply of puberty blockers costing £265. Testosterone gel costs £135.
Now, as part of its “future-proofed” service, GenderGP has replaced a team of healthcare assistants answering questions with an AI-generated online “knowledge base”.
It means there is no phone number or email address and subscribers must pay £7.99 for a 15-minute “live chat”.
One patient, calling themselves Theo, who spent £1,000 with GenderGP, said that he was left feeling like “a cash cow” and accused the service of making money from the vulnerable.
Webberley said: “Everybody’s vulnerable if they need something — so we’re not targeting a vulnerable population. My personal life, my professional life, has been sacrificed to help this community.”
The digital health entrepreneur Eren Ozagir has been privately advising Webberley. He founded Push Doctor, an app that allows people to pay for an instant consultation with a GP.
A 2017 CQC report found that Push Doctor was not providing “safe, effective or well-led services”. At the time, Ozagir said Push Doctor took the report very seriously and had made changes. He left the company in 2018.
Webberley said that Ozagir was not an employee, but was “very knowledgeable” in supporting GenderGP’s health tech development. Ozagir declined to comment.
Another GenderGP critic, posting on Facebook, said that she had paid out hundreds of pounds for her young son — who was “desperate” for treatment — but had heard nothing for months.
In response, Webberley insisted that the service was the same as it used to be “except it’s not run by a team behind an email”.
“It’s run like self-service now,” she added, saying: “When you’ve got 10 or 20,000 people emailing every day… you have to change your model.”
And how much is this model making GenderGP? Webberley dodged the question. “I don’t want to get into business and politics — it’s not my expertise”, she said.
The Times reported last month that bailiffs had knocked on the door of Webberley’s former home in Abergavenny, looking for the couple.
The former GenderGP worker Dolly Osborne was awarded £84,599 in April 2023 by a judge in an employment tribunal against GenderGP PTE Ltd for disability discrimination.
The payment has not yet been made. Osborne, a wheelchair user, claimed that she was fired after crying and correcting a few spelling mistakes in a document.
Tribunal documents showed that GenderGP did not respond to the claim. Webberley said that GenderGP was not invited to the tribunal.
She said: “GenderGP is too big an organisation for me to be responsible for every single facet of it. Whoever owes her needs to pay it, but I’m not writing the cheque.”
Scrutiny has intensified on private gender clinics since the closure of the Gids clinic at the Tavistock Centre, which was shuttered after whistleblowers warned that children were being rushed through the service and set on a medical pathway.
Webberley agreed that the clinic needed to be closed, but said that it wasn’t affirmative enough. Traumatised parents told her that clinicians asked children “horrifically abusive” questions and conducted “horrific examinations”.
She added: “A few years later, we have the Tavistock scandal. And the Tavistock scandal is: they’re giving our children treatment too soon.
“And I’m like: ‘You could not be further away from the truth here’. So the Tavistock… got closed down for being too affirmative, when it was completely the opposite.”
But what about the whistleblowers?
“They don’t like trans people”, Webberley exclaimed, before defending the use of gender medicine.
She described puberty blockers as “the most natural medicine”. Testosterone, when used on people whose testicles don’t work, was the “most natural drug in the world”.
“People are alarmed at the side effects — well, these are the natural hormones we produce every day”, she added.
However, Cass, the paediatrician and ex-president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, concluded that the field of gender medicine was “built on shaky foundations”.
Her review found no good evidence to support the global clinical practice of prescribing hormones to under-18s to pause puberty or transition. Researchers found “wholly inadequate” evidence to support medical interventions.
Webberley said: “She (Cass) read a different set of papers and research papers to the world’s medical experts in transgender health. It’s completely stymied our children’s service.”
In response, the World Professional Association of Transgender Healthcare (WPATH) claimed that the review had “selective and inconsistent use of evidence”.
Webberley agrees, saying: “She (Cass) read a different set of papers and research papers to the world’s medical experts in transgender health. It’s completely stymied our children’s service.”
A spokesman for the Cass review said that its systematic reviews looked at 237 papers from 18 countries, providing information on 113,269 children and adolescents.
They added: “The systematic reviews undertaken by the University of York, which underpin the review’s findings, are the largest and most comprehensive to date.”
Webberley also claimed that the Cass review would have already led to deaths in the transgender community.
She added: “I wonder how many mums and dads at the moment are saying that she has put their children at risk? Hundreds.”
Cass criticised Webberley in an interview with The Times in April, claiming her care didn’t come anywhere near adequate in terms of “a proper assessment and exploration”.
When discussing the effects of puberty blockers on brain maturation — something mentioned in the Cass review — Webberley conceded they may temporarily affect older teens. However, she added: “Permanently? They haven’t got the data on that.”
Should children still be put on that particular medical pathway, then?
“The alternative is saying ‘no’ and then you’ll never have the data,” Webberley said.
But should we be experimenting on children?
“All of medicine is experimental when it starts,” Webberley added. “We’ve got this new language that’s being tainted by an anti-trans narrative, which is, ‘Oh, they’re experimental’.
“And actually we have enough data to know that it’s definitely a positive thing to do.”
In the wake of the Cass review, the government announced an emergency three-month ban on puberty blockers to close a loophole that allows under-18s to access them via private clinics.
But Webberley revealed that the parents of children at GenderGP were getting around the ban by picking up puberty blockers — not available to children on the NHS — abroad.
She said: “I know mums and dads who are just going on holiday to get their puberty blockers instead.”
