Name: The NHS has quietly changed its trans guidance to reflect reality | The Spectator
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The NHS has quietly changed its trans guidance to reflect reality | The Spectator

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Imagine you have a child who says they believe they were born in the wrong body, describing what amounts to a fundamental and painful mismatch between their biological sex and their gender identity. Imagine the child you see as your daughter declaring that they are in fact a boy. Where would you turn for information? No doubt a lot of people in such a position would consult the NHS. That ‘mismatch’, after all, could be a sign of gender dysphoria, a condition recognised – and treated – by the health service. What would you find if you looked up this issue on the excellent and comprehensive NHS website? First, you’d see reassuring words telling you that the NHS can help your child: Perhaps you might wonder about the treatments for young children in this context. Maybe you’ve seen headlines about children being given hormone therapy drugs that change their bodies, or heard things about the long-term effects of medical interventions that made you worry. In which case, you might well have been reassured by the NHS website’s soothing words about hormone therapy for children.Here’s what you would have read on that topic: (My bold.)Fully reversible, eh? That doesn’t sound so bad, does it? Maybe all those scary headlines were cooked up by nasty scaremongering types, the horrid transphobes you’ve heard about from the nice charities you looked up online. But hang on a moment. There’s an issue here. Because those words I’ve quoted about, the nice ones about ‘fully reversible’ treatment, are not, in fact what the NHS website says. Not any more, anyway.That’s what the NHS about hormone therapy for children. Then, last week, the guidance on the site was quietly to something very different. Here’s what the site now says instead: (My bold.)Which is all rather less reassuring, but also more accurate, at least if you believe experts such as Carl Heneghan, director of the Centre of Evidence-Based Medicine at Oxford and Editor in Chief of BMJ Evidence-Based Medicine. He has beenfor some time that we simply do not know enough about the long-term effects of GnRH analogues on children, not least since these drugs were not, in fact, formulated for this purpose. He’s not alone, either. Indeed, to anyone who has looked into this issue in a bit of detail, none of the alarming things in that new NHS website document will come as much of a surprise. To some, the first question that occurs here is: why has it taken the NHS so long to say these things?There are other questions too. Some are about some relatively minor points of process: why has the NHS so significantly changed its main publication on hormone treatment for children without any announcement or fanfare? There is nothing on that page to reveal the change beyond a footnote that the page was revised on May 28 and giving no details. (The only way to read the old text is via the excellent Wayback Machine.)But some of the questions arising from that change are rather bigger. Given that the NHS now says that hormone therapy for gender-variant children has unknown long-term effects on the physical and mental health of those children, why is the NHS still using such treatments on children?And what are the children and parents who were reassured by those earlier NHS words supposed to think now that the same service that issued those treatments is now admitting it doesn’t know what their long-term effects will be?There are other questions too, lots of them. We can only hope that, when time and coronavirus allow, the people we elect to ensure those questions are asked and answered finally do so.

Imagine you have a child who says they believe they were born in the wrong body, describing what amounts to a fundamental and painful mismatch between their biological sex and their gender identity. Imagine the child you see as your daughter declaring that they are in fact a boy. Where would you turn for information? No doubt a lot of people in such a position would consult the NHS. That ‘mismatch’, after all, could be a sign of gender dysphoria, a condition recognised – and treated – by the health service. What would you find if you looked up this issue on the excellent and comprehensive...

The NHS has quietly changed its trans guidance to reflect reality | The Spectator

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