England’s National Health Service has declared that there’s not enough evidence of “safety and clinical effectiveness” for children and young people to be given puberty blockers to treat gender dysphoria.
“Puberty blockers (gonadotrophin-releasing hormone analogues) are not available to children and young people for gender incongruence or gender dysphoria, because there is not enough evidence of safety and clinical effectiveness,” the NHS notes on its site.
“From the age of 16, teenagers who’ve been on hormone blockers for at least 12 months may be given cross-sex hormones, also known as gender-affirming hormones.”
The NHS explicitly states that these hormones cause irreversible changes, including maturing girls’ development of breasts, the breaking or deepening of a person’s voice, and temporary or even permanent infertility.
The news broke on Tuesday, Detrans Awareness Day, a day on which detransitioners share their stories of transition regret, warning others to avoid falling into the medical and therapeutic manipulations they experienced. Detransitioners are individuals who sought to transition to the other gender before ultimately realizing that that’s not possible.
“I am in full support of what the United Kingdom is doing now,” detransitioner Abel Garcia told The Daily Signal on Wednesday. “I agree that we need to keep children safe, and I’m glad to hear that children in the United Kingdom are able to live healthy lives, at least through the stages of human puberty—which is a human right.”
Detransitioner Prisha Mosley similarly praised the news.
“It’s an incredible step in the right direction,” she told The Daily Signal. “It shows that politicians have finally been listening to what experts and detransitioners have been saying for years.”
Leaders in the movement combating gender ideology in the United States were quick to celebrate the news, emphasizing that European eyes are being opened to the dangers of indiscriminately greenlighting gender transitions for minors.
“It is only a matter of time before the American health care establishment follows the science and the wisdom of the National Health Service and begins to save children from this damaging enterprise called ‘gender-affirming care,’” Dr. Stanley Goldfarb, chairman of the organization Do No Harm, told The Daily Signal on Wednesday. “Children simply cannot give informed consent for these procedures.”
Jay Richards, the director of the DeVos Center for Life, Religion, and Family at The Heritage Foundation, celebrated the news while emphasizing that “gender-affirming” interventions are often “sex-erasing.” (The Daily Signal is the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation.)
“Gender-transition partisans have claimed for years that these drugs are reversible pause buttons for gender-dysphoric kids,” he explained. “In fact, they are very often irreversible, fast-forward buttons. We know they can harm bone and even brain development in children and put kids on a different timeline from all their peers.”
“And worst of all,” Richards added, “they usually serve to lock many kids into the transition pathway who might otherwise have resolved their feelings of gender discordance if they’d been allowed to go through natural puberty.”
Harmeet Dhillon is the CEO and founder of the Center for American Liberty, a law firm representing a number of young women like detransitioner Chloe Cole, who underwent transgender “treatment” in the United States, including puberty blockers and the removal of healthy breasts.
“It’s encouraging to see that increasingly in Europe, including this most recent decision from the U.K., both scientists and government officials are acknowledging that the risks and uncertainties of prescribing puberty blockers to children outweigh the demands of transgender extremists,” Dhillon said.
She added: “Great Britain’s decision will save lives and stem the destruction wrought by the junk-science peddlers claiming that a child is ever born in the ‘wrong body,’ or that gender is a social construct independent of binary sex.”
Richards likewise emphasized that the NHS’ move will have international effects.
“The NHS has shown intellectual and moral courage at following the evidence where it leads, rather than surrendering to a fashionable ideology that prevails because of marketing, intimidation, and institutional capture, rather than through evidence-based medicine,” he said. “The largest NHS decision serves as a rebuke to doctors’ lobbies like the [American Academy of Pediatrics] and Endocrine Society, which continue to push these harmful interventions for kids, despite the mounting evidence against them.”
Brandon Showalter, a journalist with the Christian Post who covers gender ideology and hosts the “Generation Indoctrination” documentary podcast series, is glad to see the NHS dialing back in this manner. But there’s far more work to be done, he said.
“[T]his entire scourge is predicated on a lie that it is possible to be ‘born in the wrong body,’” he said. “While some children will certainly be spared the horror of what blockers do to the body, the entire protocol of so-called ‘gender affirming care’ needs to be dismantled because it is impossible for any human to be the other sex, and therefore, any medical treatment that lends credence to a lie will, of course, be irretrievably flawed from the start.”
Showalter stressed the need to care for those “with mental health issues and distress over their sex.”
“But that doesn’t mean cross-sex hormones, or an irreversible surgery,” he said. “Restricting the use of blockers is but the first step in the reckoning over this enormous medical scandal.”
Prominent pro-LGBTQ organizations, including the ACLU and GLAAD, did not respond to requests for comment for this article.
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