The United Kingdom’s publicly funded healthcare 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) said 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 had highlighted “significant uncertainties surrounding the use of hormone treatments,” NHS stated.
“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,” it said.
In a June 9 NHS document (pdf), the agency said 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’ 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, said in a June 9 tweet. Thoughtful Therapists is a group of counselors, clinical psychologists, and psychotherapists from the UK and Ireland.
In the June 9 document, the NHS also admitted 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,” it said.
“The relationship between these presentations and gender incongruence may not be readily apparent and will often require careful exploration.”
Due to the link between mental health and gender incongruence among children, NHS’ 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’ service will be “psychosocial and psychological support and intervention,” the agency stated.
“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, said in a June 9 tweet.
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 prohibiting sex-change treatments for children, scheduled to go into effect on Sept. 1.
The decision now prevents Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston, the largest pediatric healthcare provider in the country, from offering gender change procedures to kids. With the signing of Senate Bill 14, 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 healthcare profession from “radical, diverse, and discriminatory ideology”—pointed out that the United States is the “most permissive country” for 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 said.
“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.”