NHS Drops Puberty Blockers as Gender Affirming Treatment

AP Photo/Matt Dunham

Great Britain has been edging toward this moment for months, but the government has made it official: children will no longer be prescribed puberty blockers as a treatment for gender dysphoria. 

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Period. End of story. Not gonna happen. 

This is perhaps the most dramatic about-face in European medical treatments of so-called "transgender" children, as until a couple of years ago puberty blockers were distributed like candy to children in the good old UK, and the NHS was all-in on what was once called the "Dutch Protocol," only moreso. 

Of course the Dutch and the Swedes have been moving in this direction as well, given that recent research indicates that the medicalization of gender dysphoria has been a huge mistake, creating massive harms to children with no discernable medical or mental health benefits. 

A study was just released demonstrating that mental health crises and suicidality increase dramatically after "gender-affirming" surgeries--by a factor of two in male-to-female surgeries. 

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Puberty blockers have their own massive problems, as I have outlined countless times in articles. Children who receive them develop osteoporosis, often become sterilized, and recent research indicates that their mental development and IQ are negatively impacted. 

That puberty blockers, hormones, and surgery have been routinely used on children is an unfolding scandal for many reasons, not the least of which is that practically no research has been done to demonstrate costs and benefits. This simply isn't done with medical care--calling an untried, untested, and potentially lethal procedure on people without experimental evidence. 

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I should say it simply isn't done if the intention is to heal people rather than push an ideological agenda regardless of the consequences. 

As things stand, the United States is the last bastion of "gender-affirming" medicalization, and I have to say that there are two primary reasons for this: 1) the power of alphabet ideology in the Democrat Party, and 2) the great profitability of gender treatments for doctors, hospitals, and the pharmaceutical industry. 

Prior to COVID-19 I often said that one of the reasons why the United States is so exceptional is that we have a CDC that is mostly driven by science and evidence. But, as with my once-naive faith in FEMA, I have learned a very harsh lesson about just how corrupt these agencies have become. 

What were once great, if flawed, institutions that ensured the resilience of our society in the face of unavoidable ills such as disease and disasters are now mainly politically-driven money machines. 

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Perhaps this is the fate of all institutions, good or ill. Success breeds complacency, which breeds modest corruption, which breeds institutional collapse into cronyism and complete self-dealing.

We are at that last stage, I am afraid, although what we are seeing in Europe should give us some hope that things can be reversed. If the Dutch, the Swedes, the Norwegians, and the Brits can reverse course, perhaps it will be possible here as well. 

On the other hand, the alphabet ideology zealots are much more politically powerful here than in Europe. 

Time to pray. 

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David Strom 2:30 PM | November 17, 2024
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John Stossel 8:30 AM | November 17, 2024
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