On December 1, 2020, in a landmark decision, the High Court in London rules against treatments that block puberty.
The ruling follows a lawsuit filed by Keira Bell, a 23-year-old woman who began treatment with puberty blockers at age 16 to appear masculine.
Today, Keira Bell’s life is very complicated since she is regularly thought to be a man. She feels trapped in between two genders at the same time and cannot have children. Her lawyer said adolescents “do not fully understand the nature and effects of hormone inhibitors.”
The court’s decision will inevitably affect the Tavistock Clinic and Portman NHS Trust which run the UK’s only gender identity clinic. This “Gender Identity Development Service” allegedly prescribed treatments to minors, sometimes as young as 10.
The issue the High Court addressed included limiting a minor’s consent to experimental treatment with either unknown or little-known long-term consequences. No reliable information is available on the physical or psychological consequences of these puberty blockers, on the person’s future relationships, on the surgical procedures involved, on the risks of infertility, on any evidence of real effectiveness, nor on the explicit danger of stopping puberty.
Widely covered by the British media, the ruling for “the Bell case, which was heard by the High Court in London, will have global implications for Europe’s thriving healthcare sector, whose profits depend on continuing to attract an increasing number of children to the system”.
The European Institute of Bioethics states that “The importance of this warning can only be underlined in the context of a growing craze for transgender children and adolescents, especially in the UK.”
In June 2020, Abigail Shrier, an American journalist for the Wall Street Journal, published a book on the transgender craze that is particularly seducing young girls.
In an interview with Le Figaro on December 16, 2020, she declared: “Online ‘influencers’ are largely responsible for spreading feelings of inadequacy about one’s own body and encouraging the idea that any perceived failure of perfect femininity means that a girl is probably transgender.”
