The United Kingdom’s National Health Service (NHS) recently announced it would restrict the use of puberty-suppressing drugs to only those children enrolled in clinical trials. The decision follows an interim report on the Tavistock gender clinic, which found gaps in evidence regarding the use of these drugs. New guidelines will strongly discourage families from seeking these drugs from other sources. Norway’s Healthcare Investigation Board also plans to revise clinical recommendations around gender-affirming care for minors, restricting the use of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and transition-related surgeries to clinical research. Finland and Sweden have also pulled back on medical experimentation on children in the name of gender ideology.
These European countries are not reversing course due to religious or conservative culture-war politics, but rather due to their publicly rationed healthcare systems, which prioritize showing good results. In contrast, the U.S. federal government, progressives, and the Biden administration continue to push for the off-label use of puberty-blocking drugs. Gender ideologues in the media, medical providers at gender clinics, and the White House champion this use. The more open but bureaucratized American healthcare system allows gender clinics and hospitals to team up with government officials to fund their ideological and medical experiments using the seemingly endless funds made available by medical insurers.
Twelve states, led by Republicans, have passed restrictions on the use of off-label drugs or experimental gender surgeries on children. More red states may follow suit. There is a clear public interest in limiting the harm done to children by ideological mania and superstitious moral panic that says our children are born into the wrong bodies.
The example set in Europe should bother the conscience of progressives in America. They should be made to answer why societies far more secular than the United States are giving up on surgeries for children and the use of hormone therapies and puberty blockers. These societies are not less tolerant, more aligned with traditional patriarchal values, or more in thrall to superstition. They have seen the results of gender ideologues’ path and are running away, horrified.
Regardless of whether one attributes our being to Nature alone or Nature’s God, nothing in evolutionary theory or the natural world suggests that mammals are misfit to their sex. We should stop treating our children as if they were.
