Number of British kids treated for gender confusion jumped 1000% in last five years
The number of children being treated by the National Health
Service for gender dysphoria has increased by 1,000 percent over the past five
years, according to a story in the London Sun.
The paper reports that at the NHS Tavistock and Portman clinic
where all UK transgender patients under 18 are treated, “their families are
given counselling and, in some instances, [the patients are given] hormone
blocking treatments” as preparation for a possible “sex change” after 18.
“Last month it was revealed a five-year-old boy returned to
school in Nottinghamshire as a girl,” the Sun added.
“They should be getting psychotherapy,” Dr. Joseph Berger, a
leading Canadian psychiatrist, told LifeSiteNews. “These children are unhappy
for a variety of reasons. They should be treated for their unhappiness. Cutting
off penises and breasts is not the treatment for unhappiness.”
The Sun reported that the number of youth being treated for
gender dysphoria had climbed from 97 in 2010 to 1013 in 2015 at a cost of
£2,674,791 to taxpayers. But Bernard Reed of the Gender Identity Research and
Education Society said the National Health Service was “not really geared up
and trained to help meet this growing need for medical care,” while the NHS’s
Dr. Polly Carmichael admitted, “This year’s increase is extraordinary. It has
become very difficult now to predict whether referrals will carry on rising.”
The Sun could not supply numbers to verify a sudden increase,
but a London Telegraph story last year reported a 400 percent increase in youth
under 11 from 19 to 77 over the same five-year period. The Telegraph also
reported a survey of 32 youth the NHS treated with hormone blockers revealed
eight had gone on to have sexual reassignment surgery to remove or add breasts
or sex organs.
A group advocating Christian rights, London-based Christian
Concern, echoed Dr. Berger. Its chief executive, Andrea Williams, told Charisma
News, "When children express confusion like this, we need to be affirming
their God-given identity and helping them to understand their birth gender. …
Many children are simply following the lead of others, without truly
understanding the implications. If we allow this trend to grow unchecked, we could
see many children making decisions they could regret later on.”
Dr. Berger told LifeSiteNews that people who truly believe they
are the opposite sex to their biological sex are “totally nuts. They should be
treated with anti-psychotic drugs.” But most patients with gender dysphoria are
simply unhappy and think that changing their gender will make them happier. He
recounted treating a “very attractive” teenage girl recently who wanted to
change her gender because, it turned out, she thought “men have a higher social
standing.”
On the other hand, males may want to become females, Dr. Berger
said, “because they see women as living more passive lives, or because they get
to wear more colourful clothing, or get to be the center of attention more.”
Most teens with gender dysphoria, if not encouraged, simply lose
their discomfort with their given gender in a few years. Now, however, said Dr.
Berger, sexual reassignment “has become very faddish. It’s the ‘in’ thing. It
has almost taken over from homosexuality.” Politicians and some health
professionals have jumped on the bandwagon to “build a career.”
In January an all-party committee of the U.K. Parliament
released a report that was highly critical of the National Health Service and
especially general practitioners of under-serving transgender patients.
But scepticism is growing. Using the Internet to combine their
efforts, a loose alliance of feminists, lesbians and concerned parents are
resisting the pressure from trans lobbyists to aid and abet children seeking to
medicate with gender change. Such sites as 4thWaveNow, GenderCritical, and
Transcritical seek to protect children from a hyperactive surgical
establishment while feminists resist what they see as a distorted form of male
aggression. Declares the latest blog on Transcritical: “To be a woman,
you must be female, and to be female, you must have XX chromosomes and female
sex specific anatomy.” So-called “transwomen,” continues the blog, are just
males “who identify as the opposite sex.”
Meanwhile the anonymous founder of 4thWaveNow recently marked
her site’s first year anniversary, happily transitioning from a personal blog
to a clearing house for “parents skeptical of child/youth ‘transition,’ as well
as informed experts fighting “the trans-kid trend” and the “medical and media
establishments.”
The evidence supporting the sceptics is growing. Only in 2014,
Dr. Paul McHugh, retired chief of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University
medical center, explained to readers of the Wall
Street Journal that his
hospital got out of sex-change therapy in the 1970s because it didn’t work.
Long-term follow-ups of transgender patients showed “their subsequent
psycho-social adjustments” were no better than those who didn't have the
surgery.
McHugh cited the much more shocking results of a 2011 Swedish
study that followed up with 30 years of transgendered surgery patients to find
their suicide mortality rate almost 20 times higher than that of the
comparable, non-trans population.
While the Swedes offer no explanation, McHugh did: “‘Sex change’
is biologically impossible. People who undergo sex-reassignment surgery do not
change from men to women or vice versa. Rather, they become feminized men or
masculinized women. Claiming that this is civil-rights matter and encouraging
surgical intervention is in reality to collaborate with and promote a mental
disorder.”
Dr. Berger told LifeSiteNews the National Health Service should be
very slow to act on the desire of children or their parents for treatments,
including hormones or hormone blockers, that could do serious or permanent
injury.
