In a significant ruling last week, the United Kingdom’s High Court upheld the previous Conservative government’s emergency ban on providing puberty blockers to children under 18 who claim to be transgender. The decision was another major blow for transgender activists and casts further doubt on the left’s claims about so-called “gender-affirming care.”
The High Court’s ruling marks another dramatic turn in a four-year long saga that began in 2020 when Dr. Hilary Cass, a former president of the Royal College of Pediatrics and Child Health and a practicing pediatrician, launched an investigation at the behest of the British National Health Service (NHS) into the safety and efficacy of drug regimens for transgender-identifying minors.
In April of this year, Cass released her final assessment, known as the Cass Review. That document, which relied on extensive research over a period of several years, recommended that “no one under 18 should receive hormone drugs,” and advised that even those over 18 should use them only with “great caution.”
Dr. Cass concluded that the foundation for providing puberty blockers to minors was “shaky at best” and found evidence that these drugs could harm minors by compromising their bone density and leaving them with a host of other lifelong health issues.
These findings run directly counter to claims from transgender activists that the drugs only temporarily “pause” puberty for confused kids. The Cass Review found specifically that “there is no evidence that puberty blockers buy time to think, and some concern that they may change the trajectory of psychosexual gender identity development.”
Following the release of these findings, former Secretary of State for Health and Social Care Sajid Javid directed the NHS to stop prescribing puberty blockers to transgender-identifying minors. Although Sajid was replaced following the Conservative government’s sweeping defeat earlier this summer, the new Labour government has indicated it may move to make the ban permanent.
The transgender activist group TransAction challenged Sajid’s original decision, dedicating significant resources to overturning the ban. But the court tossed out the challenge, citing “powerful scientific evidence in support of restrictions on the supply of puberty blockers on the grounds that they were potentially harmful.” New health secretary Wes Streeting welcomed the ruling, saying, “Children’s healthcare must be evidence-led.”
The decision in the U.K. was just the latest court case to offer a stinging rebuke of the transgender movement’s claims that providing puberty blockers and even surgeries to minors is “necessary” and “life-saving.” Earlier this summer, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) also came under intense scrutiny as part of a civil suit filed against the group in the United States.
As the lawsuit uncovered, in 2018, WPATH commissioned researchers at Johns Hopkins University (JHU) to review the benefits of puberty blockers and other drugs prescribed to transgender-identifying individuals. While WPATH claims to be “science first” and “evidence-based,” internal communications show that WPATH leaders actively pressured researchers to bury findings that ran counter to WPATH’s own treatment guidelines.
WPATH notably publishes and updates “standards of care” for transgender-identifying individuals that many hospitals and medical organizations, including the American Medical Association, American Psychological Association, and World Health Organization have adopted. In the most recent update, published in 2022, WPATH removed virtually all minimum age restrictions on drug regimens and surgeries for transgender-identifying minors.
JHU’s research found that many of WPATH’s standards of care were not only not backed up by any hard evidence, but explicitly refuted by it. But WPATH leadership succeeded in suppressing those findings, including by demanding that the researchers not use any of their data without explicit approval from WPATH.
In order to obtain that approval, JHU had to meet a special WPATH checklist, which included a requirement that any review of the data promoted “transgender interventions,” or prescribing puberty blockers to transgender-identifying minors. WPATH was, in other words, acting explicitly as an ideological activist group, dropping all pretense of being a legitimate medical organization.
Other internal WPATH documents unveiled this year separately from that civil case have also suggested that the organization ignored concerns about young teenage patients not being able to fully understand the ramifications of “gender-affirming care” that would leave them permanently infertile, along with the broad dismissal of concerns about long-term health consequences of prescribing puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to minors.
All of these revelations have seriously undermined WPATH’s credibility and helped contribute to a growing willingness among Western governments and medical organizations to re-evaluate their stance on prescribing puberty blockers and gender transition surgeries to minors. Along with the U.K., Belgium, Sweden, and Finland have all issued blanket bans on surgeries for anyone under 18 and banned cross-sex hormones for anyone under 16.
Nonetheless, other countries like Canada have doubled down on prescribing such treatments for minors, while some states in the U.S. like California can now deny parents custody of their children for refusing to sign off on their minor children taking puberty blockers.
At the very least, however, the WPATH revelations in the United States and the High Court’s ruling in the U.K. are beginning to expose the dishonesty and corruption of the transgender movement – a positive step toward re-affirming basic biology and common sense.
Andrew Shirley is a veteran speechwriter and AMAC Newsline columnist. His commentary can be found on X at @AA_Shirley.
