What is the Commitment Bias?
Commitment bias, also known as the escalation of commitment, describes our tendency to remain committed to our past behaviors, particularly those exhibited publicly, even if they do not have desirable outcomes.
It's not only the wave of kids themselves who will require therapy and support for what was done to them, but also - and possibly even more so - the parents who got caught up in this hysteria and psychologically, and possibly medically, damaged their kids.
It's a classic parental tenet that "I would die for my child." But the cognitive walls necessary to actually deny and avoid admitting that you are the one who permanently damaged your own child must be the highest, thickest ones of all. And what happens when those finally come down?
Psychotherapy, not hormones and surgery, is increasingly the first line of treatment abroad.
Published: Jul 13, 2023
As experienced professionals involved in direct care for the rapidly growing numbers of gender-diverse youth, the evaluation of medical evidence or both, we were surprised by the Endocrine Society’s claims about the state of evidence for gender-affirming care for youth (Letters, July 5). Stephen Hammes, president of the Endocrine Society, writes, “More than 2,000 studies published since 1975 form a clear picture: Gender-affirming care improves the well-being of transgender and gender-diverse people and reduces the risk of suicide.” This claim is not supported by the best available evidence.
Every systematic review of evidence to date, including one published in the Journal of the Endocrine Society, has found the evidence for mental-health benefits of hormonal interventions for minors to be of low or very low certainty. By contrast, the risks are significant and include sterility, lifelong dependence on medication and the anguish of regret. For this reason, more and more European countries and international professional organizations now recommend psychotherapy rather than hormones and surgeries as the first line of treatment for gender-dysphoric youth.
Dr. Hammes’s claim that gender transition reduces suicides is contradicted by every systematic review, including the review published by the Endocrine Society, which states, “We could not draw any conclusions about death by suicide.” There is no reliable evidence to suggest that hormonal transition is an effective suicide-prevention measure.
The politicization of transgender healthcare in the U.S. is unfortunate. The way to combat it is for medical societies to align their recommendations with the best available evidence—rather than exaggerating the benefits and minimizing the risks.
This letter is signed by 21 clinicians and researchers from nine countries.
FINLAND
Prof. Riittakerttu Kaltiala, M.D., Ph.D.
Tampere University
Laura Takala, M.D., Ph.D.
Chief Psychiatrist, Alkupsykiatria Clinic
UNITED KINGDOM
Prof. Richard Byng, M.B.B.Ch., Ph.D.
University of Plymouth
Anna Hutchinson, D.Clin.Psych.
Clinical psychologist, The Integrated Psychology Clinic
Anastassis Spiliadis, Ph.D.(c)
Director, ICF Consultations
SWEDEN
Angela Sämfjord, M.D.
Senior consultant, Sahlgrenska University Hospital
Sven Román, M.D.
Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist
NORWAY
Anne Wæhre, M.D., Ph.D.
Senior consultant, Oslo University Hospital
BELGIUM
Em. Prof. Patrik Vankrunkelsven, M.D. Ph.D.
Katholieke Universiteit Leuven
Honorary senator
Sophie Dechêne, M.R.C.Psych.
Child and adolescent psychiatrist
Beryl Koener, M.D., Ph.D.
Child and adolescent psychiatrist
FRANCE
Prof. Celine Masson, Ph.D.
Picardy Jules Verne University
Psychologist, Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants
Co-director, Observatory La Petite Sirène
Caroline Eliacheff, M.D.
Child and adolescent psychiatrist
Co-director, Observatory La Petite Sirène
Em. Prof. Maurice Berger, M.D. Ph.D.
Child psychiatrist
SWITZERLAND
Daniel Halpérin, M.D.
Pediatrician
SOUTH AFRICA
Prof. Reitze Rodseth, Ph.D.
University of Kwazulu-Natal
Janet Giddy, M.B.Ch.B., M.P.H.
Family physician and public-health expert
Allan Donkin, M.B.Ch.B.
Family physician
UNITED STATES
Clin. Prof. Stephen B. Levine, M.D.
Case Western Reserve University
Clin. Prof. William Malone, M.D.
Idaho College of Osteopathic Medicine
Director, Society for Evidence Based Gender Medicine
Prof. Patrick K. Hunter, M.D.
Florida State University
Pediatrician and bioethicist
Transgenderism has been highly politicized—on both sides. There are those who will justify any hormonal-replacement intervention for any young person who may have been identified as possibly having gender dysphoria. This is dangerous, as probably only a minority of those so identified truly qualify for this diagnosis. On the other hand, there are those who wouldn’t accept any hormonal intervention, regardless of the specifics of the individual patients.
Endocrinologists aren’t psychiatrists. We aren’t the ones who can identify gender-dysphoric individuals. The point isn’t to open the floodgates and offer an often-irreversible treatment to all people who may have issues with their sexuality, but to determine who would truly benefit from it.
Children should not be sacrificed on the altar of ideology.
By: Andrew Doyle
Published: Dec 30, 2024
‘Protect Trans Kids’. It’s one of the many slogans you will see frequently displayed at protests by gender ideologues. At the recent demonstrations outside the US supreme court, where the state of Tennessee’s ban on ‘gender-affirming care’ was being challenged by the ACLU, there were even young children holding placards bearing the phrase. But if adults don’t understand what it means, how can the children who it ostensibly describes?
The concept of the ‘trans child’ has become an essential tool in gender activism. In order to justify reorganising society according to ‘gender identity’ rather than sex – and thereby admitting men who identify as women into female-only spaces – it must first be determined that the concept of a ‘gender identity’ is real. And if there is such a thing as a sexed soul that is misaligned with our body, it must surely be present from the moment of conception. As such, being ‘trans’ is not a decision one makes in adult life, but an innate quality that exists at all ages.
J. K. Rowling posted a statement on X regarding this topic earlier this week.
‘There are no trans kids. No child is “born in the wrong body”. There are only adults like you, prepared to sacrifice the health of minors to bolster your belief in an ideology that will end up wreaking more harm than lobotomies and false memory syndrome combined.’
The subsequent firestorm was inevitable. Even the most sensible of comments on this topic are liable to whip up a frenzy of rage and indignation. This in itself is proof of the absurdity of the proposition. If the concept of a sexed soul was legitimate, measured debate and discussion would be adequate to persuade the undecided. But given the weakness of the claim, threats, insults and tantrums are the more likely tactic.
The term ‘trans’ has been muddied in recent years by insisting that it is an abbreviation of ‘transgender’. Previously, it had denoted ‘transsexual’, a term that specifically relates to those who have undertaken surgery or other medical interventions to appear as the opposite sex. The lexical shift to ‘transgender’ implies that the existence of a ‘gender identity’ is incontestable, and that we each have ‘an essence of male or female’ (as one trans campaigner explained to me). No such essence exists, and so ‘transgender’, like ‘non-binary’, is grounded in belief rather than reality. It is a form of self-identification, a way to classify oneself with a concordant set of behaviours, tastes and dress codes, much like ‘goth’ or ‘punk’.
Given that no human being has ever changed from male to female or vice versa, the term ‘trans’ must therefore refer to a process undertaken to appear as the opposite sex. There are two methods by which this can be achieved. Firstly, there is the transvestic approach, by which attire, accessories and behaviour is adopted according to sex stereotypes. For example, a man might wear a frock, high-heeled shoes, lipstick and a long wig, tilt his head coquettishly, and generally behave in a caricatured manner of a woman. Cross-dressers rely on sex stereotypes for effect; whereas many women routinely wear jeans and a t-shirt and no make-up at all, a man who did this would be unremarkable and not identifiably ‘trans’.
The other approach is surgical intervention. For men who wish to appear as women this can include: orchiectomy (removal of the testicles), vaginoplasty (removal and reshaping of the male genitals to create a faux-vagina), breast augmentation, facial plastic surgery, tracheal shave (reduction of Adam’s apple), vocal surgery to raise pitch, hair removal and hair transplants. For women who wish to appear as men, this can include: mastectomy (removal of breasts), pectoral implants, hysterectomy, vaginectomy and phalloplasty (the removal of the vagina and creation of a faux-penis), and body contouring.
Whereas any adult surely must retain the right to dress as he or she chooses, there is a debate to be had regarding the ethics of such surgical procedures. To offer an analogy: if a man desperately desires to have his own arm removed, is the doctor who carries out such an operation not violating his professional responsibility to ‘first do no harm’? Would not psychotherapeutic treatment be more appropriate? On the other hand, many individuals who identify as trans argue that ‘gender-reassignment’ surgery is a psychological necessity. Irrespective of where one stands on that debate, it should be clear that no child can possibly give informed consent to any of these procedures. And so if ‘trans child’ approximates to ‘transsexual child’, then such a thing cannot rightfully exist.
However, if we decide that ‘trans child’ means ‘transgender child’, then we are in the realm of a philosophical or pseudo-religious belief. It is certainly possible for children to believe that they have gendered souls which do not align with their bodies. But such an esoteric view has not developed from a mature process of reflection and analysis. This is the same reason why Richard Dawkins objects to the concept of a ‘Christian child’ or a ‘Muslim child’. In such cases, invariably we are using a shorthand for ‘the child of Christian parents’ or ‘the child of Muslim parents’. Children are simply ill-equipped to have grappled with complex theological belief-systems and weighed up whether they accept them as valid or not.
Moreover, the term ‘transgender child’ points to a highly specific principle within a broader ethos. Given that it refers to the notion of a soul in the wrong body, it is closer akin to the idea of a ‘possessed child’ rather than a ‘Christian child’. Again, it is unfeasible to suppose that an infant could possibly have interrogated these beliefs with any degree of intellectual rigour. The main difference is that trans activists are lauded by the media and political class, whereas exorcists are given a wide berth.
As such, whichever way one looks at it, the very concept of the ‘trans child’ is incoherent. It makes sense to speak of ‘trans people’ because it is an effective shorthand for ‘people who call themselves trans’ or ‘people who believe they were born in the wrong body’, or ‘people who, out of psychological desire or necessity, present in accordance with the stereotypes of the opposite sex’. For the same reason, we can describe someone as a ‘Catholic’ without sharing his or her faith in transubstantiation.
But we need to recognise that this is a belief-system that no child can possibly comprehend, and so the phrase ‘trans child’ makes no sense. To use the phrase at all is to participate in the indoctrination. So while anyone has the right to refer to ‘trans children’, we have the right to tell them why such a phenomenon does not exist.
--
"A child is not a Christian child, not a Muslim child, but a child of Christian parents or a child of Muslim parents."
-- Richard Dawkins, “The God Delusion”
"A transgender child is like a vegan cat. We all know who's making the lifestyle choices."
-- Blaire White
==
The idea of a disembodied gendered "essence" disconnected from the biology of your anatomy is as ridiculous magical thinking as auras, astral projection, Islam's djinn, the Xian soul and Scientology's thetans.
Anyone who goes on about a "gender identity" should be treated no differently than someone with a ouija board and tarot cards, handing out copies of The Watchtower, or inviting you to a free "audit" session.
The courageous Texas surgeon was facing a decade in federal prison for blowing the whistle about gender surgery for minors. Trump just dismi
By: Emily Yoffe
Published: Jan 25, 2025
The courageous Texas surgeon was facing a decade in federal prison for blowing the whistle about gender surgery for minors. Trump just dismissed the case.
Until this afternoon, Dr. Eithan Haim, 34, was facing a potential decade in federal prison for revealing publicly that Texas Children’s Hospital was continuing to perform gender transitions on children even after declaring a moratorium on the controversial practice. For this, Haim, a Texas surgeon, became the target of the Biden Department of Justice, which indicted him for allegedly violating patient privacy laws.
There was no violation of patient privacy. What Haim blew the whistle on were surgeries to insert hormonal devices that prevent children from going through puberty. The records he revealed about these interventions carefully redacted identifying information about the patients. What’s more: He had caught the hospital in a bald-faced lie about the very existence of the program. Most dangerous for Haim was that he had run afoul of the Biden administration’s unquestioning support of medical transition of young people distressed about their gender.
“Eithan Haim was the only person with the courage to stand up for what was right,” Haim’s wife, Andrea, wrote on X about her husband taking on the powerful children’s hospital, the country’s largest. “For him, it wasn’t even a decision. Kids were being harmed, and he had to stop it.”
It came with a high price. The couple lost close friendships, all their savings, and their peace of mind. But they never budged.
On Friday came vindication.
At around 2:30 p.m. on Friday, Haim received notice that the Trump DOJ issued a dismissal of all charges against him, with prejudice—meaning the charges cannot be refiled. In a conversation with The Free Press, while he and his wife were celebrating over champagne, he said, “We didn’t think it was going to happen. We took on the federal leviathan and we won.” He added, “This is epic. This is like Lord of the Rings.”
Although Haim had raised more than $1.2 million in a GiveSendGo account, mounting a case to stay out of federal prison has cost $2 million. “We’ll be paying legal bills for 20 years,” he said.
Andrea knows about federal indictments. She herself is an assistant U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Texas—her husband was indicted in the Southern District. Andrea, who gave birth to their daughter four months ago, said of their ordeal, “I haven’t had a good night’s sleep in a year without worrying my husband would be in prison and I would be raising our daughter alone. We are now going back to normal life.”
As the Trump administration got underway, Haim had an upcoming jury trial on the Biden-era indictment. “I was facing a kangaroo court in a few weeks,” he said.
Marcella Burke, Haim’s attorney, said she and his other lawyers began to ask everyone they knew with any connection to the new administration to make the dismissal of Haim’s case a priority. But she said she had no warning that their efforts had been successful.
“We thank everyone who helped along the way to bring this massive injustice to light, and we are grateful to secure this victory on behalf of our client,” Burke said in a statement. “The fight against the evils he exposed continues, but this dismissal represents a repudiation of the weaponization of federal law enforcement and the first step in accountability for the misdeeds we have all witnessed in this case.”
Missouri senator Josh Hawley went on X Friday afternoon to tout the effectiveness of his lobbying to get the charges against Haim dismissed. He wrote, “Following my call this morning, I am delighted to report the Trump DOJ is now moving to DISMISS this illegitimate prosecution.”
Andrea Haim wrote on X that the couple had no regrets. “[I]f you ask either of us, we would do it again in a heartbeat. Because of Eithan, the world is a better place for children, including our daughter. There is no greater gift we can give her than the knowledge that her daddy is a hero.”
To support Eithan Haim and his family, please click here.
[ Via: https://archive.today/eS9WS ]
==
Somehow, blowing the whistle on gender lobotomies is a crime, but illegally performing gender lobotomies is not.
Physicians are supposed to promote patients’ health, not cater to their desires.
The Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision in U.S. v. Skrmetti, upholding Tennessee’s ban on medical gender interventions for children, reflects a split in the Justices’ views of medicine: Is it about restoring patients’ health or satisfying their wants?
The court held last week that the Tennessee law permissibly distinguished between different medical uses of puberty blockers and hormones for children. Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John Roberts explained that medical treatments are defined not only by the drug used but by the purpose for which it is prescribed. Administering testosterone to a boy with delayed puberty is categorically different from giving it to a girl.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in dissent that the law impermissibly discriminates based on sex: “Male (but not female) adolescents can receive medicines that help them look like boys, and female (but not male) adolescents can receive medicines that help them look like girls.” In her view, the goal of testosterone for boys and girls is the same: it helps them “look more masculine.”
Behind the justices’ rift is a fundamental question: What is medicine for? In the traditional view, the purpose of treatment is the patient’s health—the well-working of the body. We don’t decide what health is. We observe health, recognize its goodness, and protect it.
Yet the rise of the “patient autonomy” model in the 1960s and ’70s directed physicians to administer treatment at their patients’ behest. This model led to a consumerist approach to medicine, which sees physicians as “providers” instead of healers. Providers of services fulfill customers’ wishes, regardless of whether doing so restores or compromises patient health.
Conflicts over “gender-affirming care” reveal how irreconcilable these models are. Tennessee’s law permits hormones and blockers for treating objective abnormalities of sexual development, consistent with medicine’s focus on health. Justice Sotomayor’s dissent collapses all uses of these drugs into one category: treatments that “help adolescents look and feel more” how they want.
Described in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, gender dysphoria is a mental disorder. Those who suffer it perceive healthy secondary sex characteristics as disordered.
Traditionally, medicine treats a mental disorder by helping the patient align perception with reality—like the reality of a healthy body. Medicalized gender transition turns this norm on its head, “affirming” the child’s disordered perception and treating his healthy body as a diseased one. If a girl wants to take testosterone to change her body because of her perceived identity as a boy, in this view, the doctor should go along. Justice Sotomayor described a patient who was “terrified” of undergoing the “wrong puberty” and supposedly benefited from puberty blockers. She also cited statements by major medical associations claiming that treatments to suppress healthy sexual development are “medically necessary.”
In contrast, medicine traditionally takes the well-working human body as its standard. Justice Clarence Thomas pointed out in his concurrence that giving testosterone to a girl induces a disease state, hyperandrogenism, which increases her risk of heart disease and characteristically renders her infertile.
Justice Thomas’s concurrence aligns with longstanding principles of pediatric ethics that both doctors and parents have a fiduciary duty to promote children’s health-related interests. For pediatric patients, the ethical standard centers on their medical best interests, not their wish to suppress unwanted functions.
Medicalized gender transition has another glaring problem. Children can’t comprehend consequences such as sterilization or loss of sexual response. As Justice Thomas noted in his concurrence, members of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health have admitted that discussing fertility preservation with a 14-year-old is like “talking to a blank wall.” This problem is compounded by the high prevalence of anxiety, depression and other mental disorders in these children. Gender clinicians also admit that treatment ends when the child no longer wants it—unlike how medicine handles genuinely necessary interventions.
Front and center in the debate are the vulnerable children suffering from gender dysphoria. Their healthy bodies and future ability to experience sexual intimacy and have children are at stake, illustrated by stories of irreversible damage done to detransitioners—those who seek treatment and later regret it.
The integrity of the medical profession is also at risk. This isn’t the first time vulnerable patients have been harmed by physicians to alleviate mental distress. In the 19th century, thousands of young women had their ovaries removed to treat “menstrual madness” and “lunacy.” Lobotomies were performed in the 20th century on people like Rosemary Kennedy, whose family was told she’d be calmer afterward.
Today’s gender interventions for children are disturbingly similar. In trying to relieve mental suffering, they cause permanent harm. The Supreme Court was right to recognize this. It is past time for the medical profession to do the same.
Dr. Curlin is a physician and professor at Duke University and co-author of “The Way of Medicine.”
Parents who have consented to these drugs for their children love their kids dearly, but they’ve consented under entirely false pretenses.
By: Leor Sapir
Published: Apr 4, 2024
Across the United States, thousands of parents have consented to having their children’s puberty stopped with a class of drugs called gonadotropin-releasing hormone agonists. Known colloquially as “puberty blockers,” these drugs overstimulate the pituitary gland to the point of preventing it from sending signals to the ovaries or testes to start producing the hormones responsible for puberty.
Parents who have consented to these drugs for their children love their kids dearly, but they’ve consented under entirely false pretenses. The doctors who’ve advised them say that puberty blockers are known to improve mental health — that they are even life-saving — and that they are fully reversible and just give kids “time to think.” None of this is true.
Major American medical associations say that “gender-affirming care” for kids is “medically necessary” and “life-saving.” Health authorities Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark and the U.K. disagree. Last month, the National Health Service of England decommissioned puberty blockers as a treatment of adolescent gender dysphoria. “We have concluded that there is not enough evidence to support the safety or clinical effectiveness of [puberty blockers] to make the treatment routinely available at this time,” the NHSE explained.
Imagine if American doctors told parents the following truths. The mental health benefits of puberty blockers are highly uncertain, according to multiple systematic reviews of the evidence, the bedrock of evidence-based medicine. The World Health Organization says the evidence is “limited and variable.” There is no research into long-term harms, but some evidence suggests decreased IQ and brittle bones. Permanent sterility is guaranteed for minors who go through full hormonal “transition.” Sexual dysfunction appears to be extremely common as well. Over 93 percent of kids who take these drugs go on to cross-sex hormones, which lead to permanent physical changes including excruciating genital growth, vaginal atrophy and tearing and much higher risk for cancer and cardiovascular disease.
There is no credible evidence that puberty blockers function as suicide-prevention measures. Finland’s top gender clinician has called the suicide narrative “purposeful disinformation” and “dangerous.” For all these reasons, health authorities in a growing number of countries, including some of the most LGBT-friendly, are now prioritizing talk therapy.
How many parents would consent to puberty blockers under these circumstances? Very few, if any.
It is common for drugs to enter pediatric use after evidence of their success in adult medicine. The opposite happened in gender medicine. It was the failure of “sex reassignment” in adult men to achieve satisfactory cosmetic outcomes and improve life functioning that led a group of clinicians in the Netherlands to propose starting the “reassignment” process in childhood.
Their hypothesis was as technologically appealing as it was ethically dubious: since males could not reverse the effects of testosterone-fueled puberty to pass as women, it would be beneficial to these men to have their puberty bypassed altogether.
The Dutch recognized the dilemma but thought they found a way around it. Relying on their experience using puberty blockers to treat a condition known as central precocious puberty (CPP), they argued that blockers were fully reversible and thus part of the diagnostic process. If it turned out that the kid wasn’t “truly trans,” the drugs would be discontinued and puberty allowed to resume.
Their argument was dubious from the get-go. First, CPP has an objective diagnosis, based on a blood sample, whereas gender transition is based on the adolescent’s feelings and experiences, which are subject to change. In a political climate such as ours, in which mere exploration of the reasons for rejecting one’s body can be labeled “conversion therapy,” differential diagnosis becomes impossible.
As Dr. Jason Rafferty, author of the American Academy of Pediatrics’ current policy statement on “gender-affirming care,” has put it, “the child’s sense of reality and feeling of who they are is the navigational beacon to sort of orient treatment around.” The AAP statement has been witheringly critiqued, and Rafferty and the AAP are now defendants in lawsuits by former patients.
Second, in CPP puberty suppression is by definition temporary; the goal is to delay puberty to its appropriate developmental window. In gender dysphoria, a “successful” prescription is where puberty is bypassed altogether. The assumption about reversibility, never tested and highly questionable form the start, proved to be the ethical foundation for the entire Dutch experiment, and it quickly crumbled. Over 93 percent of adolescents who are put on puberty blockers for gender issues continue down the medical pathway to cross-sex hormones. Some go on to surgeries.
Gender clinicians do not see this suspiciously high figure as a reason to rethink their approach. They see no possibility of iatrogenesis — a medical intervention that unintentionally induces harm, in this case by causing gender distress or confusion to persist artificially. On the contrary, they regard the high persistence rate as proof of their own remarkable diagnostic abilities.
More modest and scientifically-minded clinicians and researchers see things very differently. “Blocking puberty,” writes Sallie Baxendale, a professor of neuropsychology and author of an important new study on puberty blockers, “prevents the critical rewiring in the brain that underpins the ability make complex decisions. Puberty blockers may give children time to think but they simultaneously rob them of their developing capacity to do so.”
What is likely happening is that an ongoing youth mental health crisis whose origins predate and have little to do with gender is being misdiagnosed and mistreated with harmful and experimental drugs. Puberty blockers are the definition of a “quick fix” solution.
Researchers incorrectly refer to what the Dutch did as an experiment. In an experiment, falsifiable hypotheses are proposed, alternative interventions are tested, outcomes are monitored and competing explanations for observed results are thoughtfully ruled out.
The Dutch did nothing of the sort, according to a comprehensive scholarly examination of their study. Further, the only attempt to replicate that study, which was done in the U.K., failed. The researchers had to be forced to disclose their disappointing findings. Any scientific-minded person willing to put in the effort and read the literature will come to the same conclusion: Pediatric gender medicine is an industry built on fraud.
During the 2000s and 2010s, the Dutch pseudo-experiment with puberty blockers “escaped the lab” and became entangled in a fast-growing international social movement for transgender recognition. In the U.S., the drugs are being prescribed at numbers far exceeding anything the Dutch could possibly have imagined. Most adolescents referred to pediatric gender clinics are teen girls who have no history of dysphoria in childhood but who do have other mental health challenges that predate their distress with their bodies.
American medicine is no stranger to scandal — lobotomy, “recovered memory” and OxyContin are just a few examples. What makes pediatric gender transition unique is that it has been framed as a nonnegotiable civil right and defended by powerful civil rights groups, the Democratic Party and their ideological allies in the mainstream media.
A key reason for the divergence between U.S. and European medical authorities, as I’ve explained in a previous essay, is the latter’s greater willingness to follow principles of evidence-based medicine, including reliance on systematic reviews. Jack Turban, a prominent American gender clinician, revealed in a deposition that he seems not to know what a systematic review of evidence is.
Another reason is that in the U.S., doctors who practice child “transition” demand and often receive deference as the experts on the evidence for their practices; abroad, such clinicians are seen as having conflicts of interest. When the National Health Service of England appointed the highly respected Dr. Hilary Cass to lead its review of its youth gender service, it did so precisely because she was “a senior clinician with no prior involvement or fixed views in this area.” Sweden and Finland delegated the evaluation of evidence to experts with no personal involvement or stake in pediatric gender medicine.
Parents should never have been put in the position of having to decide whether to “allow” their kids to go through puberty. Those who would put the onus on parents are letting charlatans in the medical profession off the hook. Puberty is difficult for all teens, and it is not a disease. Puberty blockers offer teens in distress — especially girls with history of sexual abuse, autistic kids and gay kids — false hope by casting puberty as optional.
Puberty is a rite of passage from childhood into adulthood, responsible for the development of the body’s major organs and systems and not just its external sexual features. Puberty blockers rob children of their right to an open future.
Puberty blockers are to be banned indefinitely in the UK after an expert review warned that the drugs posed an “unacceptable safety risk” to children.
The Government said that an independent report by the Commission on Human Medicines found that there is “currently an unacceptable safety risk in the continued prescription of puberty blockers to children”.
The drugs, which stop the onset of puberty and had been routinely given to children questioning their gender, will now only be available through a clinical trial run by the NHS.
The Cass Review, led by the paediatrician, Dr Hilary Cass concluded that there was “remarkably weak” evidence to support their use in children with gender dysphoria, and put them on an affirmative pathway that “may change the trajectory of psychosexual and gender identity development”.
An emergency ban was introduced in May by Victoria Atkins, the Conservative health secretary at the time.
Wes Streeting, the Health Secretary, outlined his intention to make the ban permanent in July, as first revealed by The Telegraph, and extended the ban.
On Wednesday, he told the House of Commons that he had “asked the Commission on Human Medicines to look at the current environment for prescribing puberty blockers, and we launched a targeted consultation”.
He said: “The commission is an independent body made up of leading clinicians and epidemiologists which advises on medicine safety.
“They took evidence directly from clinical experts, consultant paediatric endocrinologists and patient representatives, including representatives of trans people, young people and their families.
“After thoroughly examining all the available evidence, they have concluded that prescribing puberty blockers to children for the purposes of gender dysphoria in the current prescribing environment represents, and I quote, ‘an unacceptable safety risk’.”
He said that “of particular concern to the Commission was whether these children and their families were provided with enough time and information to give their full and informed consent”.
It means there is now an indefinite ban restricting the sale or supply of puberty blockers for under-18s through a prescription issued either by a UK doctor or someone registered outside the UK.
While health is a devolved matter, the ban applies to England, Wales and Scotland, as well as Northern Ireland, which on Tuesday agreed to stay in line with the rest of the UK to prevent it becoming a “back door” to the mainland.
NHS England said that it “closes a loophole that posed a risk to the safety of children and young people”.
Dr Hilary Cass, who published her report in April, described puberty blockers as “powerful drugs with unproven benefits and significant risks”.
She said: “That is why I recommended that they should only be prescribed following a multi-disciplinary assessment and within a research protocol.
“I support the Government’s decision to continue restrictions on the dispensing of puberty blockers for gender dysphoria outside the NHS where these essential safeguards are not being provided.”
Helen Joyce, the director of advocacy at the charity Sex Matters, said: “This will be an emotional day for families whose children experienced the physical harms caused by puberty blockers and the campaigners subjected to abuse, discrimination and scorn for raising the alarm in the years before the Cass Review.
“Wes Streeting has shown integrity and bravery in replacing a temporary ban with an indefinite order.
“It marks another step towards puberty blockers being relegated to a shameful chapter of history, in which parents and health professionals were emotionally blackmailed into harming children in the name of ‘progress’.”
She said that Mr Streeting “needs to ensure that private gender clinics are kept under close scrutiny” and listen to concerns about the NHS trial.
Mr Streeting said that the decision was based on “evidence” and not “political pressure”.
He said NHS England was “working with potential partner organisations to explore establishing a much needed follow through service for 17 to 25-year-olds”, which was recommended by Dr Cass.
He told MPs: “We do not yet know the risks of stopping pubertal hormones at this critical life stage. That is the basis upon which I am making decisions. I am treading cautiously in this area because the safety of children must come first.
“There are some who have called on the Government not to go ahead with the clinical trial recommended by Dr Cass. Others on the opposite side of this debate want the Government to ignore the recommendations of the independent expert Commission on Human Medicines.
“We are taking a different approach. The decisions we take will always be based on the evidence and advice of clinicians, not politics or political pressure.”
