The decision* by Glasgow’s Sandyford gender clinic to pause the prescription of puberty blockers to children is good news for the children of Scotland. In due course, a public inquiry is needed into how doctors ever got involved in what may possibly be one of the greatest medical scandals of all time. For now, however, it’s important that no more children are harmed by an experimental treatment that in many cases did not improve children’s mental health and sometimes made the situation worse.
Children who identify as transgender have been let down badly by an NHS that succumbed to an activist lobby.
That is the obvious conclusion to make after Dr Hilary Cass published her final report this morning* as part of the Independent Review of Gender Identity Services for Children and Young People.
Children in England will no longer be prescribed puberty blockers at NHS gender identity clinics. This is good news: it was never appropriate to halt the normal physical development of young people struggling with the concept of growing up into the men and women that nature intended.
The government has finally published its transgender guidance for schools.* Teachers have been waiting a long time. We were promised we would have this document ‘for the summer term’. Well, it has arrived just in time for Christmas. But was it worth waiting for?
Schools are back but teachers are still waiting for the government’s guidance on transgender pupils. Back in March, Rishi Sunak promised that it would be in our hands ‘for the summer term’. Well it’s now autumn and another round of teacher training days – and the summer holidays – have come and gone, and still we are no nearer to any answers.
The Department for Education has delayed yet further its long-awaited transgender guidance for schools. Rishi Sunak had pledged that the document would be in our hands ‘for the summer term’, but that looks increasingly like another broken promise.
For too long, some teachers and schools have been making it up as they go along when presented with the challenge of accommodating transgender-identified children. Either that or they have contracted out their thinking to Stonewall or other third-party providers. The promised guidance from the Department for Education (DfE) cannot come soon enough. The latest snippet that has emerged will reassure single-sex schools that they can indeed remain single-sex.
Daniel Radcliffe has told a group of young people that adults worried about children changing gender have a ‘slightly condescending but well-meaning attitude of like, well, people are young and like… that is a huge decision’.
Debbie Hayton