Why did it take so long to ban puberty blockers? (Patrick West, 22nd March 2024, spiked)

For too long, these drugs were handed out to mentally troubled youths, to confused young gay people caught up in vortices of social contagion and to children pressured into potentially life-ruining decisions by ideologically driven adults.

For this ban, we must thank Lucy Bannerman and Janice Turner of The Times, author Helen Joyce and the many other gender-critical feminists who campaigned tenaciously against the use of puberty blockers. But a troubling question remains: how on Earth was the practice allowed to continue for so long?

An intriguing answer comes from Helen Joyce herself. As she explains in a recent article for the Critic, the trick the radical trans movement played was to persuade people that according blanket rights to trans people was simply the next step in a narrative of liberation. The thinking among many has been that, ever since the Enlightenment, we have been on an emancipatory trajectory in the West. It began with religious toleration, then came the campaign for racial equality, moving on to women’s liberation and then, by the 1960s, gay liberation. With these goals achieved, the next step was surely liberation for the trans community. As Joyce explains: ‘During the past decade, the trans lobby has been stunningly successful in selling false analogies… [such as] that separate toilets for men and women are like racial segregation and that insisting people can change sex is “gay rights 2.0”.’ […]

The recent craze for mutilating children will most likely one day be put in that same category of warped, weird thinking. As will Butler’s belief, that both gender and biological sex are socially constructed.

The ‘Detransition’ Time Bomb (WILFRED REILLY, March 14, 2024, National Review)

More striking than the total numbers involved, to me, was their mappable rate of increase. The summed year-over-year increase rate, during only my five-year window of analysis, was 119.6 percent for the use of puberty blockers and 122.1 percent for hormone use. Conservatively applying the rate for the last year that I have on record to the next two, we would expect prescriptions for puberty-blocking drugs to keep rising to above 2,000 in 2023, and for hormone prescriptions to over 7,000 in 2023, with hundreds more mastectomies for teen girls across the same two years. Our 2017–23 totals would then indicate tens of thousands of minors were given some combination of puberty blockers, human sex hormones, and top surgeries.