The U.K. Turns Its Back on Transgender Ideology

National Review Online

Monday, August 15, 2022

By the spring of 2023, Britain’s state-run transgender youth clinic will shut its doors for good. NHS England announced it was closing the Tavistock gender-identity clinic last month after an independent report concluded that it was “not a safe or viable long-term option” for gender-confused young people. The report, conducted by the former president of the Royal College of Pediatrics and Child Health, found that patients were “at considerable risk” from clinicians’ “unquestioning affirmative approach.” Soon after, a London-based legal firm announced a class-action lawsuit on behalf of 1,000 families whose “children and young adolescents were rushed into treatment” and, as a result, “suffered life-changing and, in some cases, irreversible effects.”

Skeptics of this wicked experiment rightly feel vindicated by the clinic’s demise. But this is hardly consolation to its victims. No lawsuit, however successful, will ever restore what has been taken from them: their peace of mind, fertility, sexual functioning, and even healthy body parts. But rather than heed this warning, the United States continues to move full speed ahead with so-called gender-affirming care.

“To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle,” George Orwell wrote. And England’s Tavistock gender clinic has been the focus of intense national scrutiny, in large part, thanks to journalists — and especially those at the liberal-leaning Times of London — doing their job. When journalists noticed that referrals to the clinic had increased 20-fold in the past decade, from about 250 per year to 5,000 in 2021, they asked the obvious question: Why?

Thanks to their dogged reporting, the truth was set loose. At the behest of activists, vulnerable patients were being fast-tracked into wildly experimental treatment, while clinicians (later whistle-blowers) who objected were being silenced. Ordinary citizens were appalled. They put pressure on the government to intervene. Popular figures such as J. K. Rowling, the Harry Potter author, weighed in.

The National Health Service’s decision to shut down the clinic was a remarkable concession, an acknowledgment of harm — and a recognition that a major course correction was needed. Learning from these mistakes, the British government is now much more cautious about transgender ideology. For instance, the British attorney general recently clarified that schools do not have to abide by students’ preferred pronouns and that restrooms must be kept single sex. The outgoing prime minister Boris Johnson also made clear his party’s commitment to acknowledging the biological reality of sex.

But the Biden administration is in a far different, much more disturbing place. The assistant secretary of health Rachel (formerly Richard) Levine vows to “support and empower” young people “to get gender-affirmation treatment.” The Department of Education’s new Title IX guidance actively encourages schools to expand the definition of sex to include gender identity and the definition of sexual harassment to include sex-specific pronouns. Across the country, gender clinics are becoming more numerous and brazen in their recklessness. The Boston Children’s Hospital has a promotional video advertising “gender-affirming” hysterectomies for adolescent females, and the Children’s Hospital of Pittsburg has a similar one for puberty blockers. Like the Tavistock, their motivation is ideological — but, unlike the Tavistock, they have an added monetary incentive.

Of course, Americans have been asking the same questions that were asked of the Tavistock. Only they have been ignored and maligned by the mainstream media and liberal politicians. When Lisa Littman, a medical doctor and researcher at Brown University, first identified the phenomenon of “rapid onset gender dysphoria” (peer and social contagion among trans-identifying youth), she was smeared. Meanwhile, clinical activists are doing everything in their power to obscure the truth by propagating biased and methodologically bankrupt research. They are desperate to dismiss or downplay the testimony of detransitioners (those who take transition treatments and then later change their minds).

In the United States, victims of gender clinicians are having a harder time with lawsuits than their British counterparts owing to the falsely asserted standards of care, as well as narrower statutes of limitations. The activist strategy has been to assert a medical consensus that doesn’t exist. Levine claimed that, when it comes to gender-affirming care, there was “no argument among medical professionals” — and that pushback would “drive people to suicide.”

This mendacity is unsustainable. As Britain turns its back on transgender ideology, the medical and moral consensus insisted on by the activists is revealed as a preposterous sham obscuring an even more shameful scandal.