UK moves to ban children transitioning

Surgery, puberty blockers, and hormone replacement therapy will soon be banned for trans-identified youth under the age of 18 in the UK. The UK’s Trade Minister Liz Truss offered this statement to the Times: “Grown adults should be able to make decisions, to have agency to live life as they see fit. But before the age of 18, when people are still developing their decision-making capabilities, they should be protected from making decisions that are irreversible about their bodies that they could possibly regret in the future.”

This development may come as no surprise to those who have paid attention to the intense scrutiny on medical transition among minors by people who view it as causing “irreversible change” to kids who may someday regret their choice.

In the last few years, there has been a huge statistical rise in young people identifying as transgender. According to The Children’s Gender Service at the Tavistock in Britain, there were just 77 trans children at their clinic in 2010. By 2019, there were 2,950 patients with 3,000 more on the waiting list to be treated.

We can attribute the unprecedented spike in children seeking to medicalize their gender to both the increase in acceptance and knowledge of transgenderism as well as the constantly-expanding definition of what transgender is by activists. It has continuously become an umbrella that encompasses far more than just the individuals who experience gender dysphoria, which used to be the primary factor in decisions made by psychologists and surgeons to determine if an individual should undergo transition.

As a trans woman myself, I’ve always been concerned with the reality that tweens and teens were given the choice to permanently sterilize themselves through hormone replacement therapy, which is an effect male-to-female transsexuals experience. While there are many success stories from trans people who made the leap very young, such as famed pop singer Kim Petras, it seems to be that there are just as many stories of regret.

The voices of young people who have now “de-transitioned” are also becoming more and more available thanks to social media platforms like Youtube, where new stories are going viral on a consistent basis. It is unconscionable to disregard these stories as invalid while only signal-boosting the success stories.

One of the most fascinating interviews I’ve done on my YouTube channel is with a teen de-transitioner who described every regret and trauma that critics of underage transitioning fear for them. You can check it out below.