The United Kingdom’s National Health Service is shutting down its children’s gender clinic amid a series of health and ethics problems. As country after country begins to reconsider pushing children into gender transitions, the United States lags behind.
People will look back on this “transgender children” craze with shame.
The NHS’s Tavistock Gender Clinic is being closed after an independent review led by Dr. Hilary Cass “highlighted inconclusive evidence to back some of the clinical decision making,” according to the BBC. The clinic had not been keeping “routine and consistent” data on patients, and health staff felt pressured into pushing an “unquestioning affirmative approach.” That pressure was so great, in fact, that other mental health issues would be overlooked when patients were determined to have “gender-related distress.”
Referrals to the clinic jumped from 250 a decade ago to 5,000 in 2021. Yet only now has the NHS decided to begin clinical trials following children who were put on puberty blockers. Finland, France, and Sweden are among the countries that have begun to reevaluate whether it’s such a great idea to push children into gender transitions. The United Kingdom has now joined them.
But the U.S. has not. President Joe Biden has declared that it is hateful and wrong to not allow doctors to put children on puberty blockers or hormone treatments. Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra said he supports HHS funds going to sex reassignment surgeries for children. Assistant Health Secretary Rachel Levine said there is “no argument” among pediatricians about “gender-affirming care.”
That, of course, is not true, and more and more governments are coming to this realization. But among left-wing politicians, activists, and media, there is no debate allowed. Those who think that children suffering from gender confusion should not be pushed into permanent chemical and physical alterations are being hounded into silence. Anyone who questions the excesses of transgender activists and their warped ideology is accused of denying that transgender people exist or of being responsible for suicides.
In the years to come, people will wonder how the absurdity of this movement and the claims of activists were ever allowed to go so far. The children they mutilate will rise up and sue the doctors who did it. But by then, it will be too late for those children to reclaim their bodies or their lives. The stain on the institutions and liberal figures who supported this will not be washed away — nor should it be.
