The United Kingdom’s National Health Service recently announced that it would limit the use of puberty-suppressing drugs, allowing only those enrolled in clinical trials to be prescribed the drugs. This decision was made in response to an interim report about the Tavistock gender clinic, which found “gaps in evidence” regarding the use of these drugs. New guidelines will strongly discourage families from seeking out these drugs from other sources. Norway’s Healthcare Investigation Board also plans to revise clinical recommendations for 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 conservative culture-war politics or a religious revival. Rather, their publicly rationed form of healthcare provision, constrained by public budgets, puts a premium on showing good results and limits the reach of ideological fantasy disguised in medical language.
In contrast, the U.S. federal government, led by progressives and the Biden administration, continues to push forward with the off-label use of puberty-blocking drugs. Gender ideologues in the media, medical providers at “gender clinics,” and the White House itself have championed this use. In America’s more open but bureaucratized healthcare system, gender clinics and hospitals team up with government officials to fund their ideological and medical experiments by tapping into 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. Limiting the damage done to children by an ideological mania and superstitious moral panic that says our children are born into the wrong bodies is in the public interest.
The example set in Europe should bother the conscience of progressives in America. They should answer the question of 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, nor more in thrall to superstition. They have seen the results of gender ideologues’ path and are running away, horrified.
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.
