Nearly 300 pages into BBC journalist Hannah Barnes’s bold account of the collapse of the Tavistock Clinic—the UK’s premier “gender service” for minors—she describes the case of “Harriet,” a teen girl who abruptly decided to identify as a boy and who later “detransitioned.” Barnes careens between the pronouns “he” and “she” to reflect different points in Harriet’s story. A quick example of the resultant muddle:

He knew he wasn’t a man. What’s more he knew he was a woman attracted to other women. He stopped taking testosterone in November 2020 and identified once more as female. Ollie is now Harriet again.

For the remainder of the chapter, Barnes refers to Harriet as “she.” In the series of anonymous case studies that appear throughout the book, Barnes engages in similarly confusing pronoun-switching. In addition to making the stories difficult to follow, this peculiar style choice underscores a central problem with Barnes’s Time to Think: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Tavistock’s Gender Service for Children. The attempt at journalistic objectivity makes the book far more opaque than necessary; it leaves the reader wondering what she is actually trying to say.