Last Friday, the United Kingdom’s National Health Service announced that it would limit the use of puberty-suppressing drugs going forward. Only those children enrolled in clinical trials may be prescribed these drugs. The decision comes in response to an interim report about the infamous Tavistock gender clinic, which found there were “gaps in evidence” in the use of the drugs. New guidelines will “strongly discourage” families from seeking out these drugs from other sources.
The U.K. is not alone. In March, the Norwegian Healthcare Investigation Board announced its intention to revise clinical recommendations around so-called “gender affirming care” for minors. The updated guidelines restrict the use of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and transition-related surgeries only to clinical research. Finland and Sweden have also pulled back on the medical experimentation on children in the name of gender ideology.
These European countries are reversing course not because they have experienced some religious revival or have been subjected to conservative culture-war politics. Rather, their more publicly rationed form of health-care provision, severely constricted by public budgets, puts a premium on showing good results and thereby limits the reach of ideological fantasy disguised in medical language.
This is quite a contrast with the U.S. federal government, where progressives and the Biden administration are still pushing full steam ahead. The off-label use of puberty-blocking drugs has been championed in the United States by gender ideologues in the media, envelope-pushing medical providers at “gender clinics,” and the White House itself. In the more open but bureaucratized system of American health care, buccaneering gender clinics and ambitious hospitals team up with government officials in a common effort to fund their ideological and medical experiments by sluicing into the seemingly endless funds made available by medical insurers.
So far twelve states, led by Republicans, have passed restrictions on the use of off-label drugs or experimental gender surgeries on children. More red states may do the same. That is all to the good. There is a clear public interest in limiting the damage done to children by an ideological mania and superstitious moral panic that says our children are somehow born into the wrong bodies.
We hope that the example set in Europe is one that bothers the conscience of progressives in America. They should be made, perhaps by the Republican interlocutors, to answer the question of why societies far more secular than the United States are giving up on surgeries for children and the use of hormone therapies and puberty blockers. Are these societies less tolerant? More in thrall to superstition? More aligned to traditional patriarchal values? Of course not. They have traveled down the path where gender ideologues would lead them, have seen the results, and are running away, horrified.
Whether you attribute our being to Nature alone, or Nature’s God, nothing in evolutionary theory, or in the natural world itself, suggests that mammals are misfit to their sex. We should stop treating our children as if they were.