Mick Hartley

Joan Smith at UnHerd – NHS pause on children’s cross-sex hormones doesn’t go far enough:

Terms such as “gender-affirming” are all over the NHS website, which hasn’t yet been updated to reflect the newly-announced pause in prescribing hormones to under-18s. It attaches outdated stereotypes to young people who “might feel their physical appearance does not match their gender identity”, a distinctly unclear term.

This is also because “gender-affirming” is a term which has no clear definition. The NHS claims that “treatment for gender dysphoria aims to help people live the way they want to, in their preferred gender identity or as non-binary”. What it actually meant, before the announcement, was life-altering treatments carried out at ages where children don’t really understand what they’re feeling. As a result, some boys were given oestrogen to develop breasts and girls testosterone to lower their voices. But, fundamentally, a 17-year-old boy with breasts is still a boy.

What’s happened to the NHS, under pressure from trans activists, is indefensible. The idea that “gender dysphoria” represents a genuine mismatch between biological sex and “gender” has gone unchallenged for far too long. It’s not unusual for anxious teenagers to hate their bodies, and some may need sympathetic counselling to establish why that is. What they don’t need is to be told that the NHS has a duty to affirm their feelings — in this case, prescribing drugs that will give their bodies some characteristics of the other sex.

Following the publication of the Cass review, the NHS has been forced into a series of announcements, including halting the prescription of puberty blockers to children. The pause on cross-sex hormones is welcome, but it doesn’t go anything like far enough. The practice of medicine should never have been warped by such unscientific ideas, especially not in a service funded by public money. Health Secretary Wes Streeting needs to acknowledge that the era of extreme medical treatments for children was wrong. He then needs to assure us that gender ideology will be expelled permanently from the NHS.

We’re heading that way – but it’s a long hard struggle.