The UK’s National Health Service (NHS) plans to restrict the treatment of young people under who call themselves transgender, according to reported the British newspaper The Telegraph. The initiative foresees, among other measures, a ban on prescribing puberty-blocking hormones to young people up to 18 years old, pointing out that this is “a transitory phase”. The objective now, according to the health service, is to avoid “regret” and “inadequate gender transition”.
According to Telegraph , these changes are necessary due to the large increase in referrals for gender transition. Between 2011 and 2022, 250 minors requested this type of treatment. Last year, there were more than 5,000.
The British health service recently closed the clinic specializing in gender transition for children, Tavistock, after questions were raised about treatments for Keira Bell, a teenager who regretted transitioning and detransitioned back to her birth gender.
“After a series of perfunctory conversations with social workers, I started taking drug blockers. puberty at 16 years. A year later, I was getting testosterone injections. At 20 years old, I had a double mastectomy (breast removal),” Bell wrote in a post on her personal blog.
“ But the more my transition progressed, the more I realized I wasn’t a man, and never would be. As I matured, I recognized that gender dysphoria was a symptom of my general unhappiness, not the cause of it. The consequences of what happened to me were profound: possible infertility, loss of my breasts and inability to breastfeed, atrophied genitals, a permanently altered voice and facial hair. When I was seen at the Tavistock clinic, I had so many problems that it was comforting to think that I really only had one that needed to be resolved,” said Bell, who filed a lawsuit against the clinic.
Jay Richards , director of The Heritage Foundation’s Center for Life, Religion and Family, compares the British scene to the American one, in an interview with The Daily Signal. “Gender-transition surgeries for minors in the US have increased nearly fivefold from just 2016 to 2019,” Richards noted.
“The UK and other northern European countries started down this path before us, and are now rethinking it. In fact, the UK has closed its main pediatric gender clinic. And the UK National Health Service is now admitting the obvious: that many children suddenly identifying as transgender are likely going through a phase and should not be going for chemical and surgical sterilization,” Richards argues.
