The High Court in London has upheld a ban on prescribing puberty blocking drugs to children. Enacted in March by the previous British government, the measure was challenged by transgender activists.
The Conservative government restricted the National Health Service from using puberty blockers outside of clinical trials and banned private suppliers from prescribing them. The NHS had stopped prescribing the drugs last year, saying there was not enough evidence about their benefits and harms.
Gender care is an area of “remarkably weak evidence” and young people have been caught up in a “stormy social discourse,” Justice Beverley Lang said in a ruling on Monday, citing a review commissioned by the NHS.
The emergency procedure used to enact the ban was “rational,” said Lang, to “avoid serious danger to the health” of children during the six-month period required for regular consultations.
TransActual, the group that challenged the ban on behalf of an unnamed minor, argued that the government had banned the drugs first and then found ways to justify it.
“We are seriously concerned about the safety and welfare of young trans people in the UK,” the group’s healthcare director, Chay Brown, said in a statement.
“Over the last few years, they have come to view the UK medical establishment as paying lip service to their needs and all too happy to weaponize their very existence in pursuit of a now-discredited culture war,” added Brown.
Wes Streeting, the health secretary in the current Labour government, said that the NHS review found “insufficient evidence that puberty blockers are safe and effective for children with gender dysphoria and gender incongruence.”
The government must “act cautiously and with care” when it comes to vulnerable youth, said Streeting, adding that he was working with the NHS to “improve children’s gender identity services” and set up clinical trials to establish evidence on puberty blockers.
“We seem, at last, to be moving back to treatment for vulnerable youth based on evidence-based medicine, as opposed to the unevidenced claims of ideological lobby groups,” said J.K. Rowling, author of the ‘Harry Potter’ series and noted feminist, who has been a vocal critic of transgenderism.