Good news from across the Atlantic: The UK has banned the prescription of puberty blockers for children with “gender dysphoria.” The High Court has ruled that the previous government’s ban, which was introduced under emergency powers during the final weeks of Conservative rule, is lawful given the evidence against the safety of puberty blockers. While the influence of gender ideology on children has escalated in Continental Europe and America, this is a momentous victory for the UK. It accompanies an independent inquiry into the vicious but common claim that banning puberty blockers will lead to trans children’s committing suicide. The inquiry found the claim to be bogus and malicious. The leader of the National Suicide Prevention Strategy for England, Professor Louis Appleby, concluded the report with a warning to those who wield the threat of child suicides against scrupulous medical policy:
The way this issue has been discussed on social media has been insensitive, distressing and dangerous, and goes against guidance on safe reporting of suicide.
The basis for the Tory government’s decision was the watershed Cass Review, which definitively showed that prescribing puberty blockers and hormone replacement therapy (HRT) to children threatens those children’s long-term health. Crucially, there is no sound medical evidence that “gender dysphoria” – which I put in quotes for good reason – in children should be treated with medication.
Rather, there is abundant evidence that the condition is typically just a manifestation of the psychological stress associated with the hormonal upheaval of puberty. Factors like autism and the presence of eating disorders and sexual trauma also increase the likelihood that children will be drawn into the concept of gender dysphoria and, in result, adopt transgender identities. I wrote about this evidence, as well as the Cass Review, here. Its findings should be disseminated around the Western world – every legislator in the USA should familiarize themselves with the findings of the investigation into the toxic industrialization of gender ideology.
Even if gender dysphoria were a reliable, coherent concept and a valid condition with which to diagnose a child, the evidence suggests that puberty blockers come with a host of health-endangering risks, from brittle bones to vaginal atrophy to permanent sterilization. I encourage you to read the story of Keira Bell, published here by Yascha Mounk in 2021. It has been routine for children and pubescent teenagers to be prescribed puberty blockers without receiving proper warning of the associated risks; it is also typical that puberty blockers are followed with even more ravaging treatment, from testosterone to double mastectomies. Detransitioners frequently report that they felt “past the point of no return” during their so-called “gender journeys,” a feeling which prevented them from backing out of escalating their transition.
Even cases of puberty blockers being assigned to children who do not wish to change their gender but who have been diagnosed with premature or precocious puberty have left young people riddled with complications: Read Sharissa’s story here. Having been prescribed Lupron, a puberty-halting drug, for precocious puberty, she suffered with a degenerative disc disease and chronic pain in adulthood. Activists have claimed that nobody cared about puberty blockers until they were prescribed for trans children, and that they are long-standing and safe forms of treatment; that claim is only partially true, in that few people knew about the existence of puberty blockers before the onset of the “gender wars,” so very few people objected to them.
The High Court ruling follows Elon Musk’s revelation on my friend Jordan Peterson’s podcast that one of his oldest sons was placed on puberty blockers after Musk was tricked by medical professionals into approving the treatment. Elon’s son now identifies as a woman; in that respect, he has lost his son. Musk’s pain was palpable, and his mission to “destroy the woke mind virus” was explained then and there. No further justification needed.
Musk echoed the sentiment of parents who have been blindsided by the medical and therapeutic industries which treat children – whose boundless creativity, naiveté, lack of predictive power, and hormonal turmoil are natural and native to childhood – like disordered adults. Children are nothing of the sort: If a child tells you he intends to be a pirate or a woman, there is no reason to believe that he will think the same thing in a month’s time, as you might expect of an adult. The self-perception of teenagers is also famously mutable, which everyone knew until about five minutes ago. Countless young women are coming out and saying that they are glad they were children in the 80s or 90s, when they could be tomboys and declare that they would never have children of their own without being told by therapists that those desires would remain fixed, and that maybe they were not really girls at all.
As the US election approaches, gender ideology’s threat to children’s health looms large as a key voting issue. It now ranks among issues as crucial as inflation, foreign policy, and abortion – and so it must. Parents should be advised that Kamala Harris has expressed no concern about the inherent errors and risks in “transgender treatment” for children, saying in 2023 (in her typically inelegant parlance):
The intersection on the issue of reproductive care and trans care, and the ability of families to be able to have care for their children and their families, is really, again, an intersection around attacks that are on an identity.
To unpack Harris’ claim: Anyone who questions the safety of so-called “trans care” for children is simply “attacking” an identity which Harris, in deferential line with the minoritarian woke agenda, considers sacred. For good measure, she bewilderingly associates the need for reproductive care (and, by extension, its political opposition) with medically transitioning. The prayer-like invocation of “intersectionality” needs no further explanation.
Harris’ condemnation of gender critical views presumably extends to the rigorous investigations into NHS practices carried out in the UK. A prospective Democrat administration under Harris is predicted to not only continue but to expand Biden’s agenda for child gender transition. Never mind the abundant evidence that puberty blockers fail to honor the Hippocratic oath – to do no harm – by bringing with them several long-term health problems. Never mind the revolutionary subversion of basic wisdom required to believe that children and teenagers are well-positioned to make permanent, potentially destructive changes to their healthy bodies.
ADDENDUM:
Men With Disorders Are Not Women
I wanted to add the following to this morning’s article.
There is currently a lot of confusion about the case of Imane Khelif, an Algerian competitive boxer who punched Italy’s Angela Carini so hard that she retired in under a minute at the Paris Olympics. Khelif previously failed a sex test by the Internal Boxing Committee. Given the failed sex test – which can indicate a person’s chromosomal sex by measuring hormonal levels – it is plausible that Khelif has a Disorder of Sex Development (DSD), otherwise known as an ‘intersex’ condition.
This recalls the famous case of the middle-distance runner Caster Semenya, who has a DSD known as 5α-Reductase 2 deficiency (5αR2D), a disorder which only men (with XY chromosomes) can have. Despite the appearance of feminine anatomy in childhood, Semenya has testes, male chromosomes, male testosterone levels, and has fathered children. The case for his being a woman is entirely superficial: the appearance of external genitalia.
Many males with DSDs are “assigned female at birth.” This is because their external genitalia often resemble the female vulva, or do not resemble typical male genitalia, due to disrupted development in the womb. As infants and children, their external anatomy may appear female; this doesn’t change the fact that, in cases such as that of Semenya, their internal sexual organs are male: testes. For many males with DSD, it does not become clear until puberty that they are male and not female.
Having gone through male puberty, these men will likely possess testosterone levels, corresponding to features such as muscle development and bone density, which are typical of their male sex. Accordingly, they should not compete in women’s sports. It may be confusing and difficult to have a DSD, but a post-pubescent man with a DSD is not a woman. He may have life experiences which are highly atypical of men; he may feel more at home among women. But it does not therefore oblige women to compete with him in a sport. The biological gulf that precludes certain competitive sports from being unisex – especially contact sports! – remains.
Trans activists want to turn the discourse around on sex realists by saying that “a woman with atypical hormonal levels can still be a woman!” That would be fine and true if males with DSDs, like Semenya and very plausibly Khelif, were women with female chromosomes who went through female puberty. Everyone knows that hormones can vary across a woman’s life. But men with DSDs have nothing to do with that. The interest of trans activists to “defeat” sex and normalize unisex sports for the sake of trans athletes is driving their response to the Khelif debacle. Do not let them confuse or manipulate you.
To be clear: What we witnessed at the Paris Olympics was a male fighter punching a woman. It would not be the first time a man punched a woman. But such acts of violence, which most healthy cultures abhor, have no place in competitive sports. Men fighting women in the ring must not become the new normal in the service of “gender inclusivity.”
Thank you for this factual, well reasoned plea for a return to sanity from the destructive trans movement
Always appreciate your observations and your well written arguments, Ayaan. It is sad to hear that even someone as well off and powerful as Elon Musk was not able to protect his children from the demented and, yes, sadistic, "doctors" and sadistic politicians/bureaucrats that have been promoting this evil on children.