Gender ideology – the exploitation of children exposed

It’s official.  The prescription of puberty blockers and hormone therapy for children has at long last been recognised as unsafe.  After years of abusive experimentation, in new rules introduced by the NHS, gender identity clinics will no longer be allowed, apart from in clinical research trials, to give drugs that halt production of sex hormones causing physical changes at puberty.  
 
The Interim 2022 Cass review into gender identity services for children and young people reported that puberty blockers might permanently disrupt brain development, while at the same time locking children into ‘an irreversible, life-altering path of cross-sex hormone treatment’.  As side effects, the report listed headaches, hot flushes, weight gain, tiredness, low mood and anxiety.  It also referenced the fact that even temporary prescription of  puberty blockers may negatively impact mineral bone density, but stopped short of acknowledging the longer term risk of osteoporosis, along with increased risk of depression, mood disorders, seizures, heart attack, strokes, and blood clots, for all of which there appears to be increasing evidence.
 
Puberty blockers or inhibitors were first developed in the 1980s, to help children with what was termed ‘precocious puberty’, i.e. the occurrence of puberty at an unusually early age.  Around the turn of the century, however, their use was extended to gender non-conforming adolescents as a way of reducing the psychological stress caused by unwanted physical development.  Shockingly, no proper investigation into risk or the long-term effects of such treatment on otherwise healthy bodies was ever carried out.  Instead, patients and public alike were assured they were fine, because they could be stopped at any time and were fully reversible.  
 
This was untrue.  It is now well established that many of the outcomes are irreversible, and the reality is that vulnerable young people were used as guinea pigs by a medical establishment that collapsed in face of ideological pressure, hell bent on promoting gender-choice and reconfiguring biology. 
 
Puberty blockers were first trialled at The Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust – at the time, the UK’s only dedicated gender identity clinic for children and young people
– in 2011.  Promoted as a way of circumventing psychological stress caused by the unwelcome development of sexual characteristics, demand was immediate, and so high that a decision was taken to make them broadly available.  So much so that, from that point on, it became almost routine to prescribe puberty blockers to children who were questioning their gender, often without proper or adequate assessment and ignoring mental health problems and/or related conditions, such as autism.  
 
The result has been an unknown number of lives irrevocably scarred – as witnessed by young people such as Keira Bell and Charlie Evans, bravely fighting to recover their biological identity, and the hundreds now signed up to the Detransition Advocacy Network, established to provide help and support for those similarly struggling to detransition.  
 
The perhaps unpalatable truth is that activists have callously and cruelly exploited vulnerable children in order to promote a harmful and dangerous ideology – that gender is choice, unrelated to biology.  At its most basic, this is ruthless abuse, because how can young people, pushing the boundaries as they fight to discover who and what they really are, be expected to comprehend the enormity of what it is they are being asked to decide?  
 
In order to safeguard children and protect them from the harm of decisions they can’t possibly understand, not just puberty blockers, but all transitioning treatment under the age of 18 must be banned.   And, instead of telling children that they’re ‘born in the wrong body’, let’s tell them instead that they’re beautiful and wonderfully made, and infinitely precious as they are … whatever that might be.