The United Kingdom’s National Health Service has recently announced that it will be limiting the prescription of puberty-suppressing drugs to only those children enrolled in clinical trials. This decision was made in response to an interim report that identified “gaps in evidence” in the use of these drugs at the Tavistock gender clinic. New guidelines will strongly discourage families from seeking out these drugs from other sources. Similarly, other European countries, such as Norway, Finland, and Sweden, have also revised their clinical recommendations on gender affirming care for minors, restricting the use of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and transition-related surgeries to clinical research only.
Contrary to these European countries, the U.S. federal government, led by progressives and the Biden administration, continues 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 have all championed this cause. In the more open but bureaucratized system of American health care, gender clinics and hospitals partner with government officials to fund their ideological and medical experiments by tapping into the seemingly endless funds provided by medical insurers.
However, twelve states, led by Republicans, have passed restrictions on the use of off-label drugs or experimental gender surgeries on children, and more red states may follow suit. It is in the public interest to limit the damage done to children by an ideological mania and superstitious moral panic that claims children are born into the wrong bodies.
The example set by European countries should serve as a wake-up call to progressives in America. They must 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 in thrall to superstition, or more aligned to traditional patriarchal values. Rather, they have seen the results of gender ideologues’ experiments and are running away, horrified.
Regardless of whether one attributes our being to Nature alone or Nature’s God, nothing in evolutionary theory or in the natural world suggests that mammals are misfit to their sex. Therefore, we should stop treating our children as if they were.
