I applaud this recent decision by the British High Court, reported by The Guardian:
Children under the age of 16 considering gender reassignment are unlikely to be mature enough to give informed consent to be prescribed puberty-blocking drugs, the high court has ruled.
Even in cases involving teenagers under 18 doctors may need to consult the courts for authorisation for medical intervention, three senior judges have ruled in an action brought against the Tavistock and Portman NHS trust, which runs the UK’s main gender identity development service for children.
An NHS spokesperson welcomed the “clarity” the decision had brought, adding: “The Tavistock have immediately suspended new referrals for puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for the under 16s, which in future will only be permitted where a court specifically authorises it. Dr Hilary Cass is conducting a wider review on the future of gender identity services.”
Now it’s time to stop this mass child abuse on this side of the pond too, given that most girls move from “puberty blockers” to taking 10 to 40 times the natural female amount of testosterone, usually leading to infertility. How did it get to the point where the once-vocal anti-clitoridectomy crowd got so quiet when something comparable comes to our own communities? 12, 13, 14 and 15 year old girls have been allowed to make permanent “decisions” of this sort, without the need for any official medical diagnosis of gender dysphoria.
Instead of getting real diagnoses, they are cheer-led into drugs, hormones and surgery through social media, peer pressure and even Planned Parenthood (which supplies testosterone to many of these girls. All of this under the guise of “civil rights.” The “decisions” of these girls to use “puberty blockers” are being made without the benefit of long-term studies as to dangers, physical and psychological. It’s about time we got real adults into this conversation. There is a LOT of buyer’s remorse out there, but it’s being suppressed by left-leaning news media (you can find hundreds of cases on Reddit/detransition), It makes me wonder when the lawsuits will start flying over here.
How will we look back at 2020. Did we protect our teenaged girls? Jonathan Kay is spot on with this Tweet:
Puberty Blockers declared to be experimental and not a good first choice (along with sex reassignment) “as the foremost therapeutic tools for treating this condition.”
From Matt Taibbi’s Substack interview of Abigail Shrier:
Psychiatrist whistle-blower at Tavistock, David Bell, retires and tells his story of censorship. Many at Tavistock don’t want to know or discuss critically important facts regarding puberty blockers and transgender treatment:
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/may/02/tavistock-trust-whistleblower-david-bell-transgender-children-gids
The most common observation in medicine is “When you hear hoofbeats think horses, not zebras.” The meaning is clear. When acquiring a new piece of information, first check whether it fits into current medical thought and practice, instead of insisting on going to a novel or thinly-supported hypothesis. Those of us who pause to think first of horses are called anti-trans or transphobic because we won’t jump immediately to Zebras.
This is a conservative view, but it’s medically conservative, not politically conservative. Which gets us to another point. When one’s views on a topic are conservative, that may not be inconsistent with being a political liberal. Most libertarians are social liberals and fiscal conservatives. All that is heard out of that is “conservative,” and the authoritarian left sets out immediately to destroy the speaker. The idea that a woman has control over her body isn’t inconsistent with a parent’s intercession in their eleven-year-old daughter’s pregnancy.
This Reddit transgender detransition website now has almost 20,000 members. https://www.reddit.com/r/detrans/new/