The National Health Service (NHS) of England will no longer be prescribing puberty blockers to children with gender dysphoria.
According to reports, children in England will only have access to hormone blockers if they are taking part in clinical research trials.
A policy document released on Tuesday by the NHS stated: “We have concluded that there is not enough evidence to support the safety or clinical effectiveness of [puberty blockers] to make the treatment routinely available at this time.”
Over the past decade, the UK has seen record numbers of children under the age of 16 identifying as transgender, prompting the NHS to warn doctors not to encourage children to change their names and pronouns, claiming most children who believe they are transgender are just going through a ‘phase.’
From 2021-2022, more than 5,000 young people in the UK were referred to the Gender Identity Development Service, compared to less than 250 a decade earlier.
In 2017, reports revealed that the number of children being referred to gender identity clinics had quadrupled in the five years prior to 2016, and an overall total of 2,016 referrals of children aged between 3 and 18.
The NHS’s plans to prohibit the prescription of puberty blockers to children under the age of 18 were reported back in 2022, with the NHS revealing at the time that most cases of gender incongruence do not persist into adolescence.
Dr Paul McHugh, former head of psychiatry at John Hopkins University, estimated that as many as 80% of all children with transgender feelings eventually grow out of those feelings.
Take the prominent case of Keira Bell, for example. Bell was administered puberty-blocking drugs at 16 years of age, however, she later came to “very seriously regret” the decision to “transition.”
The teen reportedly began taking the life-altering treatment after three one-hour-long appointments at a Gender Identity Clinic. At the time, she was unaware of the real consequences of taking the hormone blockers which halted the development of her female body, deepened her voice, and caused her to grow facial hair.
“I think talking therapies when you’re under 18 are always going to be more beneficial than immediately putting yourself on life-altering drugs that are going to affect the rest of your life and I wish that’s what I had,” Bell said.
“At the time, I thought it was the best decision I was making – it’s a time-will-tell situation because nothing else will indicate whether you will stay on that path for the rest of your life or not.”
Bell is certainly not alone. Former transgender woman, Walt Heyer, has said his website, Sex Change Regret, receives about 25,000 visits in any given month, and at least a thousand transgender people have personally sought him out to talk to him about their regrets.
