The UK publicly funded health care system will no longer allow the use of puberty blockers for children except for clinical trials.
“The NHS will only commission puberty-suppressing hormones as part of clinical research,” the National Health Service (NHS) stated in a June 9 update about implementing advice from the Cass Review, an independent review of gender identity services for children and young people.
The review highlighted “significant uncertainties surrounding the use of hormone treatments,” according to the NHS.
“We are now going out to targeted stakeholder testing on an interim clinical commissioning policy proposing that, outside of a research setting, puberty suppressing hormones should not be routinely commissioned for children and adolescents who have gender incongruence/dysphoria,” the agency stated.
In a June 9 NHS document (pdf), the agency stated that the most appropriate clinical pathway to deal with children said to be experiencing gender incongruence was through an “integrated multidisciplinary team (MDT) approach, fully involving the child or young person and their family.”
It stressed the need to explore “all developmentally and psychosocially appropriate options” when treating such children. The clinical approach should be “mindful that this may be a transient phase, particularly for pre-pubertal children.”
Experts welcomed the NHS’s new policy.
“This day will go down in history as the day that safeguarding of children came back into existence,” James Esses, co-founder of Thoughtful Therapists, wrote on Twitter on June 9.
Thoughtful Therapists is a group of counselors, clinical psychologists, and psychotherapists from the UK and Ireland.
Mental Health Issues
In the June 9 document, the NHS also stated that there could be a link between mental health issues and feelings of gender incongruence: “A significant proportion of children and young people who are concerned about, or distressed by, issues of gender incongruence experience coexisting mental health, neuro-developmental and/or personal, family or social complexities in their lives.
“The relationship between these presentations and gender incongruence may not be readily apparent and will often require careful exploration.”
Because of the link between mental health and gender incongruence among children, NHS’s MDT will include “expertise for the direct assessment of autism, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and other forms of neurodiversity.”
The primary intervention for children experiencing gender incongruence and assessed as suitable for NHS’s service will be “psychosocial and psychological support and intervention,” according to the agency.
“Brilliant news! The NHS are finally listening to valid concerns that children are being harmed under the guise of the ‘be kind’ movement! What’s actually kind is exploring WHY a child is so devastated by their world that they want to transition,” Dr. Pam Spurr, a chartered psychologist with the British Psychological Society, wrote in a June 9 tweet.
US Laws Against Transitioning Children
Multiple U.S. states have taken action to prevent gender transitioning among minors. On June 2, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott signed into law Senate Bill 14, which will prohibit sex-change treatments for children and is scheduled to go into effect on Sept. 1.
The decision now prevents Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston, the largest pediatric health care provider in the country, from offering gender change procedures to children. Texas joined 17 other states that currently restrict gender transitioning for children.
A Jan. 6 report by Do No Harm—a group that seeks to insulate the health care profession from “radical, diverse, and discriminatory ideology”—pointed out that the United States is the “most permissive country” for the legal and medical gender transition of children. The observation came after comparing the United States with 11 Northern and Western European nations.
“In a sharp departure from the gender affirmation model employed in the United States, these countries now discourage automatic deference to a child’s self-declarations on the grounds that the risks outweigh the benefits, while also calling for months-long psychotherapy sessions to address co-occurring mental health problems,” the report reads.
“Notably, in the United Kingdom, the Cass Review attributed the lack of safeguards for children at the largest pediatric gender center to the ‘affirmative model,’ which originated in the USA.”