The UK's best-known sex change expert continued to treat a paedophile who he knew had lied about his sexual offending, an inquiry has heard.
Russell Reid did not know that the patient, identified only as C, had been convicted of indecently assaulting a 15-year-old boy until the man wrote to him from prison, the General Medical Council disciplinary panel was told yesterday.
The consultant psychiatrist and chief NHS sex change expert James Barrett criticised Dr Reid for continuing to treat the sex offender even after it emerged that the man concealed his conviction. Dr Barrett, one of the complainants in the serious professional misconduct hearing, said it was "startling" that Dr Reid failed to verify all the information patient C had provided once his dishonesty came to light.
He accused Dr Reid of relying "desperately heavily" on what his patients told him without checking their stories.
"I don't believe that his interviews are properly searching," said Dr Barrett. "In some respects they are a sort of collusion between him and the patient."
The inquiry heard that patient C had been encouraged to change sex by his boyfriend, who had told him what to say and what to wear when seeing Dr Reid. The patient later regretted it, grew a beard and wanted a phalloplasty to reconstruct his penis, said Dr Barrett.
The head of the UK's largest gender clinic in Charing Cross, London, said Dr Reid's standards of care "were not good enough and patients had suffered as a consequence". He suggested that Dr Reid took activities such as self-publishing poetry and collecting Def Leppard records as signs patients were responding to treatment.
Dr Barrett referred to the case of patient B who was left feeling trapped in gender limbo, believing he should not have had a sex change. He said the patient's history of depression and two marriages - in which he enjoyed a healthy sex life - should have led Dr Reid to proceed with caution.
Dr Reid denies serious professional misconduct. His QC, Adrian Hopkins, told the inquiry that the complaint was the result of a turf war between the Charing Cross gender psychiatrists and Dr Reid. He said there had been an exodus of Charing Cross patients to Dr Reid and this raised questions about the reliability of the complainant's evidence.
The hearing continues.
