England’s National Health Service announced Tuesday it will no longer provide puberty blockers to children nor will it transition them to the opposite sex except in clinical research trials.
America needs to do the same. In some cases, it has. So far, at least 21 Republican-led states have banned “gender affirming care,” according to U.S. News & World Report. More states should follow suit.
In the United States the battle over transitioning very young teens remains pitched and entirely political. Its locus is in the universities, where entire departments, such as gender studies, push a radical agenda that says you can choose your sex, regardless of birth.
It’s worth understanding what happened in England to help think about what needs to happen here to keep confused, generally unhappy, young teens safe from irrevocable medical decisions.
Dr. Hilary Cass, a pediatrician and former president of the Royal College of Pediatrics and Child Health, led the independent review and said that there was insufficient long-term evidence of what happens to youth who are prescribed puberty blockers, Time reported.
England is the latest relatively progressive European country to stop providing puberty blockers and early transitioning to minors. Sweden, Norway, Finland, and others have all ceased doing so, except in the course of clinical research trials. Their scientific establishments determined that the treatments had gotten way out in front of the actual science behind treatment of dysphoria. Like England, these countries began to see cases of very young people who regretted actions taken as children, and wished to see them reversed, which is not always possible.
Some teenagers go through a phase where dysphoria suggests transitioning, but the phase ends within a couple of years and they are happy with the sex they were born. The point of waiting is to see who wants to transition after that phase.
In England, the clinic at the heart of transitional treatment — the Tavistock Clinic – was sued for rushing young teenagers into using puberty blockers and opposite sex hormones. The clinic, also known as the Gender and Identity Development Service, or GIDS, was the epicenter of all gender dysphoria treatment in the National Health Service since 1989.
The clinic was found to have allowed many children to go on life-altering medications to block puberty and start down the road to sex reassignment after only one face-to-face assessment.
Many of those children had mental health and family issues. A high percentage of them had been diagnosed with autism, compared to a mere two percent of the general population.
In Europe, which was out in front on providing this care, the scientific consensus about what is appropriate treatment for very young people making life altering decisions that include the possibility of infertility, sexual dysfunction, and other enormous life issues, has changed. The medical establishment has decided to be cautious going forward.
The thought, in England, is that young people who claim to have gender dysphoria will benefit from a few years of talk therapy. Not rushing into irreversible actions will calm the issue down.
In the United States, the issue is so politicized that it is hard to imagine the scientific establishment coming together to deal with these matters.
After all, in the U.S. there is a huge amount of ideological push, in public schools and in the social media culture, for unhappy young people to decide they are “trans.” Our K-12 public schools, and colleges and universities, are only too happy to help them along.
One reason for the distinction between the U.S. and Europe is that Europe has socialized medicine, so when the establishment makes a decision, it affects everyone. In the U.S., private doctors and clinics do a lot of the more radical transitional surgeries and provide care, so legislative rulings would be needed to stop these actions. But the politics are so contentious it is hard to imagine it happening in a good many states.
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