Mick Hartley

The grown-ups have arrived at last. Hayley Dixon in the Telegraph:

Most children who believe that they are transgender are just going through a “phase”, the NHS has said, as it warns that doctors should not encourage them to change their names and pronouns.

NHS England has announced plans for tightening controls on the treatment of under 18s questioning their gender, including a ban on prescribing puberty blockers outside of strict clinical trials.

The services, which will replace the controversial Tavistock clinic, will be led by medical doctors rather than therapists and will consider the impact of other conditions such as autism and mental health issues.

A very welcome return to proper medicine instead of the cult-driven nostrums of Stonewall and Mermaids.

The proposals say that the new clinical approach will for younger children “reflect evidence that in most cases gender incongruence does not persist into adolescence” and doctors should be mindful this might be a “transient phase”.

Instead of encouraging transition, medics should take “a watchful approach” to see how a young person’s conditions develop, the plans state.

When a prepubescent child has already socially transitioned, “the clinical approach has to be mindful of the risks of an inappropriate gender transition and the difficulties that the child may experience in returning to the original gender role upon entering puberty if the gender incongruence does not persist”.

It'll be interesting to see how Labour react to this. It's so obviously the right approach, and yet Starmer et al. have backed themselves into a corner here. This, after all, is the "conversion therapy" that trans activists have been making such a noise about – anything which isn't instant affirmation of the child's proclaimed new gender identity – and Labour have committed themselves to banning "all forms of conversion therapy".