Britain's NHS Bans Puberty Blockers, Threatens Children With 2 Years Gaol

So this is rubbish!

This poor cat just learned what new fuckery the Tories are up to. Pic by Lizard 10979, courtesy of Creative Commons Attribution 2.0

There are some days when a person can’t even. And then there are the days that you might be able to even if only a snarling someone wasn’t determined to prevent you. Britain’s rightwing ruling Conservative Party — known as the Tories — have just handed trans kids 92 of those days, and if they get their way, they’ll give every trans kid another 6480 or so. Worse? Even if the Labour Party wins the election coming up in a few weeks, they might just give trans kids the same.

The 92 days of horror began yesterday, June 3, when an order from UK Health Secretary Victoria Atkins took effect, rendering possession of puberty blocking drugs illegal without a new prescription from a UK-based physician that specifies that the drugs are not being used for gender-affirming care and further specifies the exact qualifying, non-trans related condition for which it is being prescribed. Said Atkins in a stentorian statement to the House of Commons:

“Today, I want to set out my clear intention to introduce a banning order on puberty blockers, with limited exceptions, under Section 62 of the Medicines Act 1968. This is an extraordinary use of that power, but it is the right use of that power because we must protect our children and young people from this risk to their safety.”

A letter sent to kids on the waiting list for trans-related health care confirms the order, its date of effect, the restriction of the drug to non-trans children (but its continued availability to anyone not trans), and the fact that only UK-based medical professionals will now be trusted. That “UK-based” bit is important, because the Tory government has long had an invisible ban on trans health care maintained through the simple expedient of underfunding services so that the wait times grew to five years before intake at a clinic able to provide care. But while this allowed the government to prevent a good deal of otherwise necessary or recommended care, families with enough money were able to pay private clinicians out of pocket to gain access to hormones, puberty blockers, therapy, and other standard forms of help. That stopped June 3.

Instead the new regulations create an exception to the laws that generally allow people to see doctors elsewhere in Europe and still fill prescriptions written by those clinicians within the UK. Under a 1960s law designed originally for the government to be able to act quickly in the case of contaminated stocks of medicines, the Health Secretary has the power to ban a drug partially or fully for three months. It has been used exactly once before when an imported herbal supplement was literally killing people because of poisons included through contaminated ingredients.

UK doctors are, of course, regulated and licensed through London, and the government has the power to remove those licenses. By threatening to “strike” doctors from the rolls — effectively ending their careers — the Tory-led NHS has a strong deterrent for any doctor thinking about fudging a diagnosis on paperwork in order to preserve access for desperate patients. That wouldn’t work for doctors licensed through other governments, of course, and this is why the new order is written to require a prescription specifically from a UK-based provider.

It doesn’t stop just there, however. As Erin Reed reports, “the order was issued just before parliament dissolved for the general election, meaning it could not be overturned.”

Jo Maugham, King’s Counsel and director of the Good Law Project, had this to say on twitter:

It is, to me, breathtaking that thousands […] of loving families are going to be criminalized by a law made by a Minister, never approved by Parliament, […] and the media is not reporting it.

If the Tories remain in power, Health Secretary Atkins plans on consulting with Parliament and passing a law to make this ban permanent. For now, though, being caught in possession of these drugs is similar in effect to being caught with cocaine.

The letter sent to children on the NHS waiting list serves to make sure that they know the government has its eyes on them, and that they are subject to two years in prison if they violate the ban. The order is written in such a way that it may or may not require children or their parents to throw away the medicines already in a home. Without (expensive) legal advice, the only legally safe plan is for a parent to undermine their own child’s medical care. It’s Sophie’s choice without the choice.

There is an election coming up, and with Parliament recessed for campaigning there’s no immediate risk that they’ll ratify and extend Atkins’s order. That said, no one should get comfortable. The Labour Shadow Health Secretary actually came out in support of criminalizing trans people and families possessing medicines, duly prescribed, while cis folks continue to be able to access the same drugs.

Labour’s shadow health secretary Wes Streeting said he “welcomed” Ms Atkins’ approach to puberty blockers, which suppress the natural production of sex hormones to delay puberty.

Yr trans-ass Wonkette literally cannot imagine what QTs in Britain would get out of supporting Labour when Streeting is in line to become the Health Secretary should his party win this summer’s snap election.

Despite the interparty agreement that giving trans kids the same medicines as straight kids is a threat to Western civilization, god, and the village green, the actions are so extreme that Reed says,

The actions being taken by the United Kingdom government are extreme among liberal democracies. In the United States, no state has explicitly criminalized the possession of gender-affirming care medications. The closest any state has come is Texas, where in 2022, Governor Greg Abbott attempted to investigate the parents of transgender youth for child abuse.

With due respect to Reed’s reporting, yr Wonkette would argue that Louisiana came closer by criminalizing abortion medication because even though the Mif isn’t a drug specific to trans health care, the action taken (criminalizing possession) is precisely the same, and the justifications given (public safety) are nearly identical and equally false.

The Tories, Streeter, and too many others are claiming that they haven’t banned trans health care, since there’s still a path to access it, non-Euclidian though that path may be. But the gargantuan levels of anti-trans hostility in the UK are made plain. In that same statement to the House of Commons, Atkins also asserted:

The Cass Review laid bare the damaging effect that social media and degrading pornography has had on young people’s sense of self.

It shouldn’t need to be said, but the Cass Review laid bare no such thing. There is no research establishing the purported fact that social media use or pornography cause transness. And the idea that — even if they did — being rendered trans constitutes “damage” is a purely ideological assertion valuing cis bodies and lives over trans ones. Atkins isn’t engaged in child protection here. She’s embarked on a program of ostentatious moral scolding, consequences for trans kids and their families be damned. Her party has an election to win, after all.

I want to root against her, but with a splunge like Streeter as her primary competition, elections seem less like the answer than open revolt.