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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