Children in the UK Will No Longer Be Prescribed Puberty Blockers at Gender Clinics. What will happen next?
Open Discussion for Premium Members
Yesterday, on March 12, 2024, the NHS England confirmed that children will no longer be prescribed puberty blockers at gender identity clinics.
According to SkyNews:
The government said it welcomed the "landmark decision", adding it would help ensure care is based on evidence and is in the "best interests of the child".
It follows a public consultation on the issue and an interim policy, and comes after NHS England commissioned an independent review of gender identity services for children under 18 in 2020.
This was inspiring news on a day that coincided with Detrans Awareness Day.
The use of puberty blockers may still remain in a research setting, although the details aren’t clear. According to the Guardian:
From now on, children and young people will only be able to get them if they are taking part in a clinical trial. At least one such trial is due to start later this year, but no details, such as who will be eligible to join it, have been published.
Most American media outlets reported on this as a negative thing, focusing on the activist talking points. Time reported it this way, before going on to quote Jack Turban.
While the recent decision by the NHS cites a lack of research surrounding the long-term effects of puberty blockers, the treatment has been a medically accepted practice since the late 1980s, according to Scientific American. Gender-affirming-care is supported by numerous associations, including the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.
Yesterday, we published a special episode of Gender: A Wider Lens featuring our conversation with Scarlet. Scarlet told harrowing stories of the effects of puberty blockers, which made reading this news out of the UK extra emotional for the entire team here at GWL.
If you haven’t listened to our conversation with Scarlet yet, you can do so here.
The question is: What do you think will happen next? Will this decision stick? Will the U.S. finally follow suit? What will be the future of other medical interventions for gender distressed kids and young adults?
Please share your thoughts, hopes, fears and predictions in the comments below.
It's a welcome first step but I worry that people don't see the bigger problem. There is an excessive focus on the issue of capacity in children, and not enough acknowledgement that the reason capacity was ignored (often deliberately) by doctors is that "gender affirmative care" was classed as "medically necessary care" which means that paternalistic doctors could decide it was in the interests of a patient *even if they lacked capacity*. Even in some cases over the objections of parents. This also explains why they felt it was appropriate to gloss over capacity issues of people with mental health problems.
We won't deal with this until we challenge the core justification for such treatments being paid for by insurance / socialised health as well as given to those with out capacity. That is that this is not gender dysphoria anymore but a physical malady that comes from the body being out of alignment with a person's innate gender. These are not gender distressed children or young adults. They are "trans people" in an essential sense and doctors have a duty to repair their bodies. Healthy breasts or testicles are treated as if they are cancerous tumours that must be removed. No evidence is necessary. Informed consent is not necessary either except as a formality, the same as for a patient with a ruptured appendix who would die without urgent surgery.
We have to grapple with the fact that the medical field has been invaded by queer theory (with its idea of true trans). Nobody at all should be getting medicalised gender transition services aside from those already medicalised who need aftercare and cannot just be left to suffer.
The children are just the tip of the iceberg. Young adults are also so so vulnerable to the lies still being propagated by doctors, right here in the UK.
I started out feeling very hopeful with the two punches of the WPATH files and the puberty blockers, but then I'm reminded of the marathon nature of this. I think we've taken a step forward in that the American media even covered puberty blockers being banned in the UK, and for the life of me I want to scream that for a treatment to be evidence based it has to be falsifiable and subject to discrediting.
I do find it interesting that the TRAs are running with the Holocaust narrative. Part of me hopes that this is a last, desperate attempt to play the victim narrative that has worked so well for them in the past. Given that my echo chamber has shifted since all this started I can't get a feel for how successful it is though.
I hope that this is the dying fury of this movement. A year or so ago I'd read a history of the Salem Witch Trials that talked about how the accusations from hysterical you girls became more fantastic with time and started to target increasingly powerful people, but then one day people started telling them to knock it off and started to ignore them and sanity was restored. I hope falsely inserting themselves into the Holocaust story is their last, desperate gamble. I honestly think people are getting tired of this movement and walking on eggshells around them as they tear everything down.
But I also don't want to bet on it.