UK High Court Upholds Puberty Blockers Ban
Judge: “In my view, it was rational … to decide that it was essential to adopt the emergency procedure to avoid serious danger to the health of children and young people.”
An emergency ban on prescribing puberty blockers to children and young people under 18 with gender dysphoria in England, Scotland, and Wales has been upheld by a high court judge.
The emergency order went into effect on June 3rd of this year and expires on September 2nd. The ban doesn’t apply to patients who had already begun a course of treatment before the effective date.
The Guardian reports:
The Conservative government issued an emergency order on 29 May temporarily outlawing the supply of puberty blockers pursuant to an overseas prescription, in the wake of the review by Dr Hilary Cass into gender medicine.
The review criticised the lack of evidence surrounding the benefits and the risks associated with puberty blockers and the legislation was designed to ensure they could only be obtained as part of an authorised clinical trial.
The Cass Review is the independent study of transgender health care commissioned by the United Kingdom’s National Health Service and released this past April.
As we wrote at the time here:
The Cass report found “the evidence for the indicated uses of puberty blockers and masculinising/feminising hormones in adolescents are unproven and benefits/harms are unknown.” Because of the potential risks puberty blockers pose to to neurocognitive development, psychosexual development and longer-term bone health, they should only be offered under a research protocol.
In her ruling, the judge said the emergency measure was justified given the “serious danger” to children’s health:
In my view, it was rational … to decide that it was essential to adopt the emergency procedure to avoid serious danger to the health of children and young people who would otherwise be prescribed puberty blockers during that five- to six-month period.
…
In my judgment, the Cass review’s findings about the very substantial risks and very narrow benefits associated with the use of puberty blockers, and the recommendation that in future the NHS prescribing of puberty blockers to children and young people should only take place in a clinical trial, and not routinely, amounted to powerful scientific evidence in support of restrictions on the supply of puberty blockers on the grounds that they were potentially harmful.
The Guardian further reports that the government plans to address the lack of evidence to support the use of puberty blockers:
The health secretary, Wes Streeting, who is understood to be minded to make the ban permanent, said after the high court ruling: “Children’s healthcare must be evidence-led.
“I am working with NHS England to improve children’s gender identity services and to set up a clinical trial to establish the evidence on puberty blockers.”
Overall, the Cass Review called the evidence used to justify gender medicine “remarkably weak.”
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Comments
This is good, there are way too many unknowns. Now how about America.
Remember how hormones impacted menopausal women.
“ Remember how hormones impacted menopausal women.”
Yes it was a flawed, very flawed study.
It feels strange to be worse than the UK on something so important.
My shiny beanie suggests this is an isolated, random fluctuation towards rationality that will be swamped (and probably eventually reversed) by the UK’s juggernaut descent into social insanity.
Yes I think the harms are known. Brain damage, bone damage, mental damage, etc.. Yes it royally screws you up. How about no clinical trials?
If we could actually trust our scientist to craft legitimate studies and report their findings accurately rather than politically, I would say that studies would be a wonderful idea. Study children who are already on puberty blockers as a condition of continuing. Study children who aren’t getting them – with therapy and without. Have ALL of these children evaluated for other medical conditions.
I am willing to bet we will find that most “transgender” children are victims of their environment, or suffering from another illness entirely. I’m also certain that we will find that puberty blockers do more harm than good.
I don’t understand the exemption for ‘clinical trials’ which are to determine the safety and efficacy of drugs. An efficacious puberty blocker would do what it is supposed to do, which the British health authority decided was not a net positive.
I hope in a few years that the trans insanity is looked upon like frontal lobotomies. This news is encouraging. I also hope that the doctors who perpetrated this madness are sued into poverty. Prison would be better.
the left responded :
we know how to make children feel good
Every time I see “Lupron” I balance the fact it was part of my anti-cancer therapy that at this point seems to have worked perfectly, against what it did to libido, certain abilities, and muscle tone. Grr.
Lupron for children is evil madness.
Oh, dear me…! I know!
Lupron, methamphetamine, nitroglycerin… they all have therapeutic benefits in strictly limited medical circumstances. Or, you can use them to commit mental, moral, and/or physical suicide if you FAFO.
Yes. There are legitimate medical reasons to prescribe puberty blockers to a child. Gender dysphoria is not one of them.
(I know someone who was prescribed them, for legitimate medical reasons, and is now a fully functional adult. As far as I know this person’s physical sex and gender identity have always been in perfect synch.)
Indeed.
I have a coworker whose child is on puberty blockers, because they were starting puberty at the age of six.
And a relative who was given two doses of lupron to trigger a temporary menopause in order to confirm that her ovaries were the issue. After the med wore off and the problems did return, they removed an ovary, and she’s doing much better now.
Both of those uses are to treat disease, nor to muck with normal healthy working bodies.
I can add in that the Lupron was expensive, even with insurance.
As I understand it this is not an actual ban on the drug. It’s a ban on it being supplied by UK pharmacies based on foreign prescriptions. In general the UK does allow that, but in this case it’s banned. You can still get it if you have a UK prescription. NHS doctors are not allowed to prescribe it any more, but as far as I know private doctors can.
Private doctors will not prescribe something that is not available to NHS doctors.
“I am working with NHS England to improve children’s gender identity services and to set up a clinical trial to establish the evidence on puberty blockers.”
Unless that service solely revolves around mental health care and ensuring children have access ONLY to the psychological help they actually need then Wes is nothing more than a Democrat who wants to fuck children.
So LI is all in on the shadow banning of mean comments now? Can anyone see my post directly above this one?
I can see it in my pc (as if its been posted to the chat) BUT it doesnt show up on my mobile device and when I reply to my comment to add more context I get an error saying that I cant reply to banned posts.
I don’t remember seeing it earlier this morning, but it’s there now.