England’s National Health Service, after finishing a systematic review of the evidence, has highlighted brand-new guidelines for the treatment of trans-identifying youth, dropped the previously held endorsement of their “gender-affirming” model of care for a far more conservative and cautious methodology to dealing with the treatment of gender dysphoria in minors.
The NHS now expressly recognizes that both adolescents and kids claiming to identify as transgender could just be going through a “transient phase” and warns that doctors should refrain from trying to encourage them to swap their pronouns or change their name, as “social transition” is not a “neutral act” and could lead to extremely “significant effects” regarding the child’s “psychological functioning.”
These new guidelines “reflect evidence that in most cases gender incongruence does not persist into adolescence” for young kids. The new guidance claims that instead of pushing them to go through with their transition, physicians should take “a watchful approach,” which is a stance going directly against the recent 2018 policy out of the American Academy of Pediatrics, that equates “watchful waiting” with a “harmful” type of “conversion therapy.”
These new NHS guidelines seem to mean that services will end up being led by medical doctors instead of the odd therapist, and will now take into account the impact of autism and many other common health issues which are normally co-occurring. This new guidance also puts a hard ban on puberty blockers for all patients under 18, with strict exceptions regarding certain cases about strict clinical trials.
The new guidelines are slated to go into effect over the more controversial protocols administered by the now-shuttered Tavistock gender clinic which “affirm” a kids self-diagnoses transgender identity and stop medical professionals from looking into the more probable background factors sparking the cast of dysphoria.
The “case for change” highlights their abrupt change from the previously held approach that is indicated by the “significant and sharp rise in [gender clinic] referrals” and “scarce and inconclusive evidence to support clinical decision-making.”
As reported in the most recent data put forth by the Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) at the U.K.’s Tavistock Centre, referrals for both children and teenagers have almost doubled when looking at previous years. GIDS now thinks that over 5,000+ kids and teens have been pushed to seek gender-related services in 2021-2022, a 112% increase from 2020-2021.
The Society of Evidence-Based Gender Medicine (SEGM), which is a group of 100+ researchers and clinicians, put forth a new report as of Monday which points out key parts of the new NHS guidelines.
“The new NHS guidelines represent a repudiation of the past decade’s approach to management of gender dysphoric minors,” explained SEGM. “The ‘gender-affirming’ approach, endorsed by WPATH and characterized by the conceptualization of gender-dysphoric minors as ‘transgender children’ has been replaced with a holistic view of identity development in children and adolescents.”
“With the new NHS guidance, England joins Finland and Sweden as the three European countries who have explicitly deviated from WPATH guidelines and devised treatment approaches that sharply curb gender transition of minors,” the group concluded. “Psychotherapy will be provided as the first and usually only line of treatment for gender dysphoric youth.”
