In recent years, we've witnessed Europe recognizing the risks associated with transitioning gender-confused children, which has prompted major policy shifts. For instance, London's Tavistock Clinic, the UK's main transgender clinic, shut its doors in July 2022 amid concerns about hastily performing surgeries without sufficient consideration for children's mental well-being.
Following this closure, the United Kingdom's National Health Service (NHS) implemented strict regulations, banning the use of puberty blockers in most cases and discontinuing the recommendation of social transitioning for children. Other European countries like Finland, France, Sweden, and Norway, have shifted away from advocating for gender transitioning in young people. Instead, these nations are prioritizing psychosocial support as the primary approach, aiming to minimize the risks associated with potentially harmful medications and invasive procedures.
It’s an entirely reasonable position since studies have shown that the overwhelming majority of children who experience gender confusion grow out of it after puberty.
Related: ‘Gender-affirming Care’ for Children Has No Medical Benefits
The United States, however, refuses to acknowledge the science. Only Republican-run states have passed laws to protect children from the transgender cult, and liberal judges have sometimes blocked those efforts. Now it appears that even transgenderism itself is facing more scrutiny, not just the transitioning of children — at least in the United Kingdom.
The National Health Service (NHS) has declared that sex is a biological fact. While this hardly seems like something that should be extraordinary, it is a notable departure from prevailing gender ideology.
"Changes to the health service’s written constitution proposed by ministers will for the first time ban trans women from women-only wards, and give women the right to request a female doctor for intimate care," reports The Telegraph. "The NHS constitution, a document that aims to set out the principles and values of the health service and legal rights for patients and staff, was last updated in 2015. It has to be updated at least every 10 years by the Secretary of State."
Campaigners for women’s rights welcomed the significant shift, which comes after years of wrangling and follows accusations that the health service had been captured by “gender ideology”.
In 2021, NHS guidance said trans patients could be placed in single-sex wards based on the gender with which they identified.
The new constitution will state: “We are defining sex as biological sex.”
The clarification means that the right to a single-sex ward means patients would “not have to share sleeping accommodation with patients of the opposite biological sex”.
The article posits that these changes are "a further indication of a change in attitudes after the Cass Review into the NHS’s gender identity services found evidence that allowing children to change gender was built on weak foundations." This is most certainly welcome news, but I can't help but wonder how long it will take for the United States to follow the same sane path.
Independent journalist Michael Shellenberger predicted last month that it’s "only a matter of time for liberal-minded Americans and Democrats to hear about the changes in Europe and start to impose reforms."
Hopefully, he is right. So far, leftist-controlled states and Democrat judges are getting in the way, and I fear it will be a long time before the left will ever admit that they have been wrong.
