by MATT MARGOLIS
It’s hard to believe that I’d ever want the United States to emulate Europe, but it’s finally happened. While the U.S. has gone all-in on pushing so-called “gender-affirming care” for children with gender dysphoria, our friends in Europe have slowly started coming to their senses.
Everywhere, money is power, and the transgender business is becoming a multi-billion-dollar industry with huge profit margins. As such, few in the medical community are willing to speak out against this powerful, growing evil targeting our children. But it’s happening in Europe right now.
In July, London’s Tavistock Clinic, the only transgender clinic in England, closed due to concerns that doctors were performing surgeries without considering children’s mental health — a practice that is far too common here in the United States. A few months later, the National Health Service (NHS) banned puberty blockers in most cases and no longer recommends social transitioning for kids. In fact, the United Kingdom, Finland, and France have all dialed down their pushing transgender “treatments” for children. So has Sweden, which abandoned recommending gender transitioning for children in December, arguing that the first line of treatment should be psychosocial support — not giving kids dangerous drugs and mutilating their bodies. This week, the Norwegian Healthcare Investigation Board followed suit.
Europe is seeing the light on this dangerous assault on children, and they’re looking at the United States and wondering why we’re so nutty. It’s true; the editor-in-chief of The British Medical Journal, Kamran Abbasi, just pushed back against the gender-affirming care model that has become all the rage in America.
“The debate on gender dysphoria perfectly captures all that is unsavoury about the intersection of science, medicine, and social media,” Abbasi writes. “Entrenched, even aggressively argued views are nothing new in science and medicine. But when it comes to gender dysphoria, just as with covid-19, there is little room for constructive dialogue. Unfortunately, what suffers is people’s welfare.”
“The dilemma is more acute if the person seeking care is a child or adolescent,” Abbasi continues. “This is the complex and difficult challenge that specialists in gender dysphoria must master to provide the best possible care to young people.”
Tavistock shamefully advocated for puberty blockers and surgeries without proper psychological assessments or interventions, and the clinic instilled unwarranted fear in parents by implying that refusing to transition their children would lead to dire consequences, including death. But there is no evidence that this is the case.
Abbasi is speaking truth to power. He points out that a medical journal must be focused on “the quality of evidence behind a treatment recommendation.” The BMJ has a “longstanding and leading position in acknowledging the limits of evidence and advocating against overdiagnosis and overtreatment—even when the state of the science disagrees with individual preferences,” he asserts. Meanwhile, the United States has moved in the opposite direction.