Foreign Affairs

‘Transient Phase’: England Moves To Restrict Transgender Procedures For Kids As Biden Doubles Down

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England’s National Health Service (NHS) banned puberty blockers for minors outside strict clinical trials and advised against social transitions for kids, arguing that most children who think they’re transgender are going through a phase they will outgrow, according to The Telegraph.

The NHS is developing plans to restrict cross-sex medical treatments for children due to “scarce and inconclusive evidence to support clinical decision-making,” according to The Telegraph. As England moves to limit transgender medical interventions for children, the Biden administration has been championing child sex changes and publicly criticizing state level efforts to restrict those procedures as harmful to transgender people.

Following the @NHSEngland announcement on a new regional model for gender care, you can find further information and answers to common questions on our website: https://t.co/tylU46xTZ4

— Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust (@TaviAndPort) July 28, 2022

The NHS is moving away from the model of automatically affirming a child’s transgender identity, and its new guidelines will reflect that most children with gender identity issues grow out of them before adulthood. In order to undergo social transition, an adolescent will first need to be diagnosed with gender dysphoria, be able to understand the implications of transitioning and be at risk of serious distress, according to the proposed NHS guidelines, which argue that gender dysphoria is typically a “transient phase” and “in most cases gender incongruence does not persist into adolescence.”

In the U.S., however, only a handful of states have restricted gender-related procedures for children, and President Joe Biden promoted the procedures through HHS guidance calling cross-sex treatments “life-saving.”

The U.K.’s change in stance comes after the world’s largest pediatric gender clinic, Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) at Tavistock in the U.K., was shut down following an investigation into the safety of its patients, according to The Telegraph. (RELATED: 1,000 Families To Sue World’s Largest Pediatric Gender Clinic, Lawyer Says)

GIDS will be replaced with smaller clinics that offer a more holistic approach to children with gender identity issues, and plans for those clinics are being developed as Dr. Hilary Cass reviews the gender-related practices of the NHS, according to The Telegraph. Her report advises against even socially transitioning children to the opposite sex, arguing that changing a child’s name, pronouns and the way they dress can have a major psychological impact and isn’t the neutral, easily reversed intervention that transgender advocates claim.

The U.K. saw a meteoric rise in adolescents identifying as transgender in the past decade, from under 250 in 2011-12 to over 5,000 in 2021, according to The Telegraph, and the U.S. has seen a similar surge in transgender identity in recent years.

The NHS did not respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.