The United Kingdom’s National Health Services announced this week it will no longer routinely prescribe gender-confused children puberty blockers, admitting the hormonal treatments are experimental in nature and can have lasting physical and mental consequences.
The decision is the result of an internal investigation into the massive spike in referrals to the Tavistock gender clinic, which is set to close at the end of the month. Dr. Hilary Cass, a pediatrician who oversaw the investigation, concluded last summer that there was not enough evidence to support Tavistock’s treatments and that much more research was required. This week, that decision became final.
On puberty blockers, specifically, Cass admitted there were significant “gaps in the evidence base” about the hormonal drugs. Doctors will now only be allowed to prescribe the drugs to children in research settings — and even then it must be done “on an exceptional, case-by-case basis” subject to approval from a national team of medical experts. Families who seek to obtain puberty blockers outside of the NHS will be “strongly discouraged” from doing so, the agency added.
This should be a wake-up call for the U.S. healthcare system, which hands out puberty blockers to children like they’re candy. This is not an exaggeration. Testimonies from young adults who underwent these treatments confirm that many medical professionals responsible for writing puberty blocker prescriptions barely vet their patients. At the Seattle Children’s Hospital, for example, two-thirds of children referred to the hospital’s gender clinic were prescribed puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones within a year, regardless of whether they had been diagnosed with gender dysphoria, according to a study published last year.
U.S. medical experts also minimize the risks of puberty blockers — if they even bother to mention the risks at all. Nearly every leading medical organization in the country trumpets the same talking points: puberty blockers are reversible, temporary, and simply give children time to figure themselves out. Except, there is no evidence at all to back this claim, and plenty of evidence that proves otherwise. There are several studies, for example, that show puberty blockers negatively affect bone density and brain development in developing bodies. These are irreversible, permanent consequences.
What makes this so much worse is the fact that the U.S. healthcare system is foisting these consequences onto children who will more than likely grow out of their gender confusion as they mature. In fact, this statistical reality is a large part of the reason the NHS is revising its own gender policies. In 2022, as the Tavistock gender clinic investigation was underway, the NHS argued that an appropriate medical response to gender confusion has to “reflect evidence that in most cases gender incongruence does not persist into adolescence.”
Yet, here in the U.S., our medical experts are gleefully determined to keep making permanent patients out of impressionable and confused children, many of whom are looking for answers to a problem the very same rotten healthcare system created for them in the first place by treating transgenderism as legitimate.
And when their gender experiment blows up in our faces, as it most surely will, the so-called experts will not be able to say they didn’t see it coming. The NHS is helping ring the warning bell for all to hear — will the U.S. listen?