Britain’s National Health Service has tightened its ban on the prescription of gonadotrophin-releasing hormone analogues — so-called “puberty blockers” — for children experiencing gender distress on the grounds that “there is not enough evidence of safety and clinical effectiveness.” In June 2023, the NHS limited the drugs to research settings only. The new rules remove loopholes in current practice.
Just five years ago, the NHS website asserted that the effects of “puberty blockers” were “considered to be fully reversible.” However, whistleblower testimony, a high-profile lawsuit on behalf of a former minor patient who regretted taking the drugs, as well as an independent review led by Hilary Cass, former president of the Royal College of Pediatrics and Child Health (to name but a few), have rendered such claims indefensible.
There has always been a small number of children distressed by their developing sexual characteristics, though when counseled appropriately (i.e., not lied to that they can change sex) most grow out of these feelings by the end of puberty. The reasons for this distress can be complex and multifaceted. In recent years, the huge and unprecedented surge in teenage girls with no prior history of gender confusion suggests social contagion as a likely factor.
What the evidence does not point to is the sinister fiction of the “transgender child”: the pseudoscientific idea that children are “born in the wrong body.” Or are capable of consenting to life-altering medical interventions to try to “fix” their appearance, all while impairing and irreparably damaging their healthy sexual development and functioning.
As for how trans activists captured the NHS to begin with, the Times of London notes that as far back as 2015, staff from the NHS gender youth clinic “told a select committee hearing that its treatment protocols were safe, regulated and based on guidelines from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health [WPATH].”
Recently leaked internal messages from WPATH destroy whatever credibility the organization had left. In the WPATH files, activist doctors admit that their young patients are incapable of giving informed consent. One prominent surgeon discusses children whose puberty is blocked never experiencing orgasms in adulthood while another muses on the potential links between so-called “gender-affirming” hormones and cancer.
In a recent cover story for New York Magazine, trans writer Andrea Long Chu argues that “everyone should have access to sex-changing medical care, regardless of age, gender identity, social environment, or psychiatric history.” Of course, “sex-changing medical care” is at best a euphemism — what it offers is literally impossible. Chu nonetheless adds that children, as well as adults, “have a right to the hazards of their own free will.”
Which argument is more compelling? That children distressed by their sexual characteristics should be given counseling that acknowledges sex is immutable and aims to resolve their distress by treating its root psychological causes? Or the argument that asserts that sex can be changed, dismisses the cause of distress as irrelevant, and declares that any children who ask to have their sexual characteristics disfigured through drugs and surgeries should be given the go-ahead on the understanding that if they later regret it, it’s their problem?
Thanks to the tireless work of whistleblowers, journalists, and concerned citizens — the British public has given the only sane and responsible answer.