Victoria Atkins has just made a statement in the House of Commons on the Cass Review, a landmark review into the gender treatment of children (Please see here for the detail).
The Health Secretary said: “This review hammers home an area of public policy where trending cultural values are outpacing evidence, safety and biological reality. This must stop now. “No.”
She noted that demand for gender-related services has “expanded” over the past decade, with more than half of referrals being teenage girls.
“This sudden increase in demand is not a coincidence; it is caused by a number of factors, which we will discuss later, but essentially it was caused by a myth,” she said.
“This myth was that for children and young people grappling with adolescence, questioning their identity, sexuality, and life course, the answer to their questions was inevitably to change gender.”
Ms Atkins said this had been “imposed” on children without “full and thoughtful consideration of the wider needs of children”.
The health secretary also slammed clinicians who put children on the path to gender treatment without fully investigating the roots of their conflicts.
She praised those who have “sounded the alarm” in recent years, “even when they have been ridiculed as bigots and transphobes”.
The Health Secretary said changes had already been made since the interim report was published two years ago.
Prescribing sex hormones to under-16s is already prohibited on the NHS, and Mr Atkins warned private healthcare providers that prescribing gender-affirming drugs is “heavily regulated”, adding said it was not authorized to do so.
“Such clinics may be in very serious regulatory breaches, which could result in their licenses being revoked and their clinicians fired,” she warned.
The Health Secretary also warned registered online providers outside the UK not to prescribe gender-based treatments, saying he was considering all options to prevent this, adding: “Nothing is off the table. ” he said.
She concluded by saying that children’s safety “must take precedence over any other concerns, and anyone who threatens it must be held accountable.”
