U.K. to Perform Mental Health Evaluations on Children with Gender Dysphoria
The U.K.’s National Health Services reportedly will start advising clinics to assess children who identify as transgender for mental health problems and other conditions.
The new guidelines come in the wake of the U.K.’s decision to shutter its transgender clinic in 2022 and stop giving puberty blockers to children last year.
A government investigation revealed healthcare professionals at the NHS’s Tavistock gender clinic pressured families into subjecting their children to puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones despite an obvious lack of scientific evidence and inadequate mental health screenings for children with gender dysphoria.
Since then, medical professionals have written extensively about the harm that these gender-reassignment procedures caused.
Under the new NHS guidelines, children in the U.K. with gender dysphoria would be assessed for ADHD, autism, learning disabilities, or mental health problems. These assessments could help identify underlying causes of a child’s gender dysphoria.
All of this underscores why it is so important that lawmakers in Arkansas overwhelmingly passed the Save Adolescents From Experimentation (SAFE) Act in 2021.
The SAFE Act is a good law that prevents doctors in Arkansas from performing sex-change surgeries on children or giving them puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones.
Since then, reports from Europe and elsewhere have shown time and again that Arkansas was right to pass the SAFE Act.
Unfortunately, the SAFE Act has been tied up in court since 2021. However, we believe our courts ultimately will recognize that the SAFE Act is a good law and uphold it as constitutional.
Articles appearing on this website are written with the aid of Family Council’s researchers and writers.
