Trans Children Can’t Consent To Puberty Blockers, Lawyers Argue, In Landmark UK Case Against Tavistock Clinic
"Trans identifying children can’t understand the repercussions of taking hormone blockers at an early age, this being unable to consent to the treatment", the lawyer for two women suing the UK’s NHS-run youth gender clinic, has claimed.
Transitioning youth who take hormone blockers have a “very high likelihood” of moving on to cross-sex hormones, which can cause “irreversible changes” such as “loss of fertility and sexual function, and decreased bone density,” Jeremy Hyam QC told the High Court, arguing that young people who begin the treatment are incapable of fully understanding the permanent damage they are doing to their bodies and thus cannot truly give “informed consent.”
According to ‘London Daily’, Hyam represents two women who are suing the Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS), the UK’s only NHS gender clinic specifically for children, to ban the prescription of hormone blockers to youth without a court order affirming the treatment is in their “best interests.” The treatment “does not have any adequate base to support it,” and the effect of the blockers “on the intensity, duration, and outcome of adolescent development is largely unknown,” he said during the hearing.
The claimants are Keira Bell, a 23-year-old woman who began taking hormones at 16 to transition to male and started de-transitioning last year, and ‘Mrs A’, the mother of an autistic 16-year-old whose daughter is currently on the GIDS waiting list. Bell now regrets her “brash” [sic] decision to start on puberty blockers, describing it as a misguided attempt to “find confidence and happiness” that may have permanently cost her a chance at motherhood.
“I should have been challenged on the proposals or the claims that I was making for myself,” she told an interview back in March, when a judge first allowed the case to move forward, explaining that she felt incapable of turning back once the clinic visits began, as “one step led to another.”
A lawyer for the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust, which runs GIDS, dismissed the idea that hormone treatment was damaging to gender-dysphoric children, calling Hyam’s suggestion of a moratorium on hormone blockers without a court order “a radical proposition.” In testimony submitted in writing, Fenella Morris QC suggested the claimants were trying to “impose a blanket exclusion” on under-18s consenting to medical treatment at all.
Although Morris defended the injections as “a safe and reversible treatment with a well-established history,” she also attempted to shift responsibility to the University College London Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust and Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust, which she argued were actually “responsible” for prescribing the hormone blockers.
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