U.K. to Indefinitely Ban Puberty Blockers as Gender Transition Procedure
The British government indefinitely banned puberty blockers as a treatment for minors with gender dysphoria on Wednesday. After embracing gender transition procedures for minors before the U.S., European countries like the U.K. are now reversing course as evidence of the harm they could cause has mounted. “We need to act with caution and care when it comes to this vulnerable group of young people, and follow the expert advice,” declared Health Secretary Wes Streeting.
The U.K. temporarily paused puberty blockers for children in March 2023, following the release of the Cass report, a credible, detailed examination that found insufficient evidence that gender transition procedures were safe for children. The Commission on Human Medicines, an independent organization of the British government, also recently found “an unacceptable safety risk in the continued prescription of puberty blockers to children.”
The government, then controlled by the Conservative Party, further restricted access to puberty blockers with an emergency ban passed in June. The high court upheld that ban as lawful in July. In August, after an electoral victory, the left-leaning Labour Party extended the emergency ban in August. This move invested both of the U.K.’s major political parties in the newly cautious approach toward gender transition procedures for minors.
On Wednesday, the Labour government announced new legislation that would make the ban indefinite, to be reviewed in 2027. The ban would also take effect in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland.
Once the policy is in place, it would make puberty blockers entirely inaccessible to British minors with gender dysphoria. Streeting announced a plan to conduct clinical trials for puberty blockers next year. These clinical trials will provide high-quality evidence to show whether or not puberty blockers are safe for use in minors with gender dysphoria — high-quality evidence that is currently lacking, according to the Cass report.
Along with the U.K., Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, and France have all pumped the brakes on providing puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones to minors as a treatment for gender dysphoria. These are all progressive democracies with nationalized health care systems that retreated from gender transition procedures for minors not out of ideological opposition to transgenderism, but out of safety concerns, based on extensive evidence.
These European countries embraced gender transition procedures for minors earlier than health care systems in the United States, making their experience relevant to the American context by offering a glimpse of what the results will be, another decade in the future.
In fact, these European developments have already been noticed by American lawmakers and courts. Just last Wednesday, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito broached the subject of the Cass report during oral arguments over a Tennessee law to protect minors from gender transition procedures. He wondered why, in a written briefing, the Biden administration Department of Justice had “relegated the Cass report to a footnote” and invited U.S. Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar to “withdraw the statement that there is overwhelming evidence establishing that these treatments have benefits that greatly outweigh the risks and the dangers.”
As the U.S. Supreme Court weighs the arguments in the Tennessee case (U.S. v. Skrmetti), the justices will likely notice that a progressive British government has inked over their sketched-out blueprint to restrict puberty blockers for minors. In the U.K.’s case, this decision was made not from ideological animus but from concern for the minors’ safety; perhaps the state of Tennessee acted for the same reason.
Joshua Arnold is a senior writer at The Washington Stand.