{"id":474420,"date":"2026-03-14T01:44:27","date_gmt":"2026-03-14T01:44:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/474420\/"},"modified":"2026-03-14T01:44:27","modified_gmt":"2026-03-14T01:44:27","slug":"nhs-pause-on-childrens-cross-sex-hormones-doesnt-go-far-enough","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/474420\/","title":{"rendered":"NHS pause on children\u2019s cross-sex hormones doesn\u2019t go far enough"},"content":{"rendered":"

The NHS\u2019s decision<\/a> to pause new prescriptions of cross-sex hormones to 16- and 17-year-olds comes with an important admission. According to NHS England, an extensive review of the impact of testosterone and estrogen on young people \u201cdoes not support the continued use\u201d of such drugs.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe cannot say if they are harmful or effective,\u201d acknowledges Professor James Palmer, National Medical Director for Specialized Services at NHS England. In other words, under-18s with \u201cgender dysphoria or gender incongruence\u201d have been given powerful, life-altering substances by doctors who simply didn\u2019t know what the outcome would be. A 90-day public consultation will start next Monday to look into the draft legislation before being formalized into law, and activists are already up in arms. One advocacy group, TransLucent, has called<\/a> it \u201cyet another blatant act of discrimination against transgender youths\u2019 healthcare\u201d.<\/p>\n

This hyperbolic reaction is an indication of how the NHS came to take foolish, unevidenced decisions in the first place. A fear of upsetting activists has led to a widespread acceptance of the language of an unscientific ideology, while overlooking potential harm to patients.<\/p>\n

Terms such as \u201cgender-affirming\u201d are all over the NHS website, which hasn\u2019t yet been updated to reflect the newly-announced pause in prescribing hormones to under-18s. It attaches outdated stereotypes to young people who \u201cmight feel their physical appearance does not match their gender identity\u201d, a distinctly unclear term.<\/p>\n

This is also because \u201cgender-affirming\u201d is a term which has no clear definition. The NHS claims<\/a> that \u201ctreatment for gender dysphoria aims to help people live the way they want to, in their preferred gender identity or as non-binary\u201d. What it actually meant, before the announcement, was life-altering treatments carried out at ages where children don\u2019t really understand what they\u2019re feeling. As a result, some boys were given estrogen to develop breasts and girls testosterone to lower their voices. But, fundamentally, a 17-year-old boy with breasts is still a boy.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s happened to the NHS, under pressure from trans activists, is indefensible. The idea that \u201cgender dysphoria\u201d represents a genuine mismatch between biological sex and \u201cgender\u201d has gone unchallenged for far too long. It\u2019s not unusual for anxious teenagers to hate their bodies, and some may need sympathetic counseling to establish why that is. What they don\u2019t need is to be told that the NHS has a duty to affirm their feelings \u2014 in this case, prescribing drugs that will give their bodies some characteristics of the other sex.<\/p>\n

Following the publication of the Cass review, the NHS has been forced into a series of announcements, including halting<\/a> the prescription of puberty blockers to children. The pause on cross-sex hormones is welcome, but it doesn\u2019t go anything like far enough. The practice of medicine should never have been warped by such unscientific ideas, especially not in a service funded by public money. Health Secretary Wes Streeting needs to acknowledge that the era of extreme medical treatments for children was wrong. He then needs to assure us that gender ideology will be expelled permanently from the NHS.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The NHS\u2019s decision to pause new prescriptions of cross-sex hormones to 16- and 17-year-olds comes with an important…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":474421,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[43],"tags":[102,2960,66455,104,6605,112319,169226,56,1955,54,55],"class_list":["post-474420","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-healthcare","tag-health","tag-healthcare","tag-hormones","tag-nhs","tag-nhs-england","tag-puberty-blockers","tag-trans-children","tag-uk","tag-uncategorized","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/474420","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=474420"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/474420\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/474421"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=474420"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=474420"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=474420"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}