One of the problems with the whole concept of the National Health Service is that having what is for most people an effective monopoly in healthcare means that it is all too easy for fads and fashions in medicine to take over. Of course private healthcare is not immune to fads and fashions, you only need to look at the fashion for lobotomies in the USA in the 1940’s and 1950’s to see that, but when you have state monopolies and quasi-monopolies like the NHS it’s very easy for medical fads like ‘affirmation only transgender care’ to become entrenched orthodoxies.

In the last ten to fifteen years the idea that there is no other route for those with gender identity issues or similar mental health conditions apart from affirmation of the gender delusion has taken hold of the NHS. The NHS has also failed to do its own research into this area and instead has been led by various activist groups, including the child gender transition group Mermaids, into a policy that is almost entirely based on affirmation.

But now there are signs that the adults are now about to enter the room and that affirmation only policies might be on their last legs. If this is correct then its something to celebrate.

According to an article by Tim Worstall, the NHS is now changing its tune and is now saying what many gender critical activists and women’s groups have been saying for years which is that often gender identity issues, especially in young people, are a transient phase. It appears that the days of affirmation only policies might be on their last legs in the NHS and about time too.

Mr Worstall, quoting heavily from a paywalled Daily Telegraph article about these NHS policy changes said

Most children who think they’re transgender are just going through a ‘phase’, says NHS

Be a bit of a blow to the modern world if this sort of thing catches on…..

Note that the word “most” is carrying a lot of weight there. There are indeed people for whom chopping off their gonads gender transition is beneficial. But this new advice is stating that this is rare – thus that weight upon the most.

The proposals say that the new clinical approach will for younger children “reflect evidence that in most cases gender incongruence does not persist into adolescence” and doctors should be mindful this might be a “transient phase”.

Instead of encouraging transition, medics should take “a watchful approach” to see how a young person’s conditions develop, the plans state.

This change of policy should be welcomed by those who care more for the individual patients presenting with gender identity issues than for ideology. I believe that two things may have prompted the NHS’s change of position. The first is that the NHS is starting to become aware just how completely the ideology of trans influenced its thinking up until now and secondly there are likely to be a lot of detransitioners likely to being legal cases against the NHS.

The NHS has at least belatedly recognised their mistakes with regard gender identity conditions. However it’s a damned shame that they didn’t realise this earlier and spared hundreds of children and young people from being mutilated and drugged into becoming a simulacrum of the opposite sex.