How Britain just blew up the transgender medicine debate

Today, some 300,000 Americans between ages 13 and 17 identify as transgender, according to a report by the UCLA College of Law's Williams Institute.

A veritable nuclear bomb has gone off in the world of transgender medicine.

The British National Health Service on Thursday announced it is shutting down and radically remaking its gender identity clinic for young people because it has been “rushing children into life-altering treatment,” The Times of London reports.

The decision to decentralize and wholly remake the clinic is sure to create shock waves in the United States, where significant numbers of this generation’s young people have been transitioning to other genders, entering a pathway of lifelong treatment on puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and surgery.

Gender dysphoria – the distress felt when a person’s gender expression doesn’t match their indentity, and often a medical diagnosis required to undergo gender confirmation procedures – was just a few decades ago a rare diagnosis in the United States, mostly seen in very young boys .

Today, some 300,000 young Americans between ages 13 and 17 identify as transgender, according to a report by the UCLA School of Law’s Williams Institute.

The majority of those young patients are adolescent girls.

A nation steps back on ‘affirmative care’

The decision of the British NHS to decentralize its London clinic to treat gender dysphoria in young people and replace it with regional centers at existing children’s hospitals appears to be a push-back on “affirmative care,” which had become the standard in both England and the United States.

Affirmative care is a clinical approach to gender dysphoria in which the clinician validates a patient’s expressed gender identity no matter the age and often quickly moves them into drug treatment to halt puberty and later to begin cross-sex hormones. Eventually treatment can include surgery, such as double mastectomies.

In Arizona:Ban on surgeries for trans minors hurts, advocates say

Critics of affirmative care in the United States and Britain, including some of the leading voices in gender medicine who are, themselves, transgender, have begun to argue that affirmative care has been misdiagnosing some young people as gender dysphoric, when, in fact, they suffer from serious mental-health problems that then go untreated.

In England, the National Health Service will now move forward with regional clinics that offer more “holistic care with strong links to mental health services,” The Times reports.

Dr. Hilary Cass, a pediatrician, who is leading the review of Britain’s Tavistock Gender Identity Development Service or GIDS clinic, has determined the clinic failed children under 18. She has called for “a radical overhaul of how the NHS treats young people who are questioning their gender identity,” the Times reports.

The (UK) Guardian reports that decentralizing the London clinic will also address the problem of overwhelmed staff and long patient waiting lists that are backlogged as much as two years.

The number of referrals to the service went from 138 in 2010-11 to 2,383 in 2020-21, The Guardian reports.

US should keep an eye on Britain

Americans would be wise to watch what is happening in Western Europe because it is likely foreshadowing what will happen in our country.

One of the problems in discussing the issue in the United States has been fierce pushback from transgender activists, the medical community, academe and mainstream media. They have all promoted and even celebrated gender transitioning in young people without asking necessary hard questions.

Some have worked to crush dissent.

In 2018, Lisa Littman, a physician, researcher and then-assistant professor at Brown University’s School of Public Health, saw the surprising rise in young females identifying as transgender. She published a paper describing the phenomenon as “social and peer contagion” that she called “rapid-onset gender dysphoria,” perhaps caused by “social influences, parent-child conflict, and maladaptive coping mechanisms.”

Pushback was fierce, as “transgender ideologues tried to silence her,” reported The Wall Street Journal. She was forced to revise her published paper, but noted within the revision that “the Results section is unchanged in the updated version of the article.”

In Britain, the silencing of dissenting views has been oppressive. Some 35 staff members have resigned from the Gender Identity Development Service because of the lack of “credible research,” reported feminist, author and investigative journalist Julie Bindel in the news commentary site Unherd.

One of those doctors told Bindel:

“As demand surged for under 18-year-olds, it became clear that these young girls, in particular, had some very serious psychological problems, but were almost instantly affirmed as being ‘gender dysphoric’. That diagnosis is all that is needed to be rubber-stamped for testosterone, and subsequent surgery. Many of us that resigned over this are very worried indeed where it is leading.”

When clinicians raised these issues, they were accused of being “transphobic,” The Times of London reports.

Leading doctor says it went ‘too far’

In April, Erica Anderson, a psychologist who until recently was head of the US professional organization on the leading edge of gender medicine, told the Los Angeles Times that childhood transition has “gone too far.”

Anderson, who is a transgender woman, said, “Now it’s got to the point where there are kids presenting at clinics whose parents say, ‘This just doesn’t make sense.’

“To flatly say there couldn’t be any social influence in formation of gender identity flies in the face of reality,” she added. “Teenagers influence each other.”

Now that NHS has dropped its bomb on its own transgender clinic, perhaps we can have a more honest discussion in America about why so many adolescent girls, against all historic trends, have suddenly chosen a pathway to puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and double mastectomies.

We can start with American media finally doing its job and asking tough questions of a rapidly growing segment of American medicine that has prospered on the skyrocketing rise of gender dysphoria in mostly teenage girls.