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Is the horror of child transitioning finally coming to an end?

Trump’s executive order on gender clinics deals a stunning blow to this activist-driven pseudoscience.

Andrew Doyle

Andrew Doyle

Topics Identity Politics Politics USA

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Whether you love or loathe Donald Trump, there are occasions when you have to admire his candour. The US president’s latest executive order, titled ‘Protecting Children From Chemical and Surgical Mutilation’, will prevent federal agencies from supporting the ‘gender affirming’ model of healthcare for minors. ‘Across the country today’, it reads, ‘medical professionals are maiming and sterilising a growing number of impressionable children under the radical and false claim that adults can change a child’s sex through a series of irreversible medical interventions. This dangerous trend will be a stain on our nation’s history, and it must end.’ Talk about getting straight to the point.

One of the core tenets of faith in the woke movement is that of ‘gender identity’, the notion that we each have an innate ‘essence of male or female’, as one trans campaigner explained to me, which may be misaligned with our anatomy. This patently religious belief has formed the basis for medical policies throughout the Western world when it comes to children who are expressing confusion about their sex. Since the publication of the Cass Review by NHS England last April, the idea that there is any evidential basis for the prescription of puberty blockers has been discredited. Yet children around the world are still being medicalised for what is clearly a problem that requires a psychotherapeutic approach. Trump’s executive order has specifically blamed the influence of WPATH (the World Professional Association for Transgender Health) for the ‘junk science’ that currently prevails and has done so much harm to children and adults alike.

It’s not just about puberty blockers, which, given that 80 per cent of young people desist from feelings of gender dysphoria through puberty, are effectively blocking the cure. Almost all young people prescribed these experimental drugs advance to cross-sex hormones. In some cases, surgery follows. The Manhattan Institute found evidence that, in the US between 2017 and 2023, around 6,000 girls under 18 underwent ‘gender-affirming’ double mastectomies, although the true figure could be much higher. Shockingly, at least 50 of these children were 12 years old or under.

The idea of medical practitioners removing the healthy breasts of adolescents because of a belief in a gendered soul is the kind of pseudoscientific atrocity that will bewilder and appal future historians. None of the cheerleaders for these measures can come close to justifying them in any terms other than appeals to emotion or accusations that their opponents are ‘transphobic’. When Labour peer Jacqui Smith, the UK government’s spokesperson for equalities in the House of Lords, was asked last year if her government had a working definition of ‘gender identity’, she deflected: ‘I have to say that this would be a better debate if we spent more time worrying about how we provide services and account for people’s needs, and less about how we catch our political opponents out.’

It is hardly a ‘gotcha’ to expect a government to understand the basis of its own policies. But then, not even WPATH has provided a satisfactory definition. As the world’s leading authority on ‘gender medicine’, we might expect its members to at least attempt to explain why children should have their puberties blocked rather than simply expecting us to take it on faith. WPATH defines ‘gender identity’ as ‘a person’s intrinsic sense of being male, female or an alternative gender’. This is the circular definition upon which this organisation’s supposed ‘expertise’ is founded.

In March of last year, journalists Michael Shellenberger and Mia Hughes published ‘The WPATH Files: Pseudoscientific Surgical and Hormonal Experiments on Children, Adolescents and Vulnerable Adults’. These leaked internal memos and videos revealed that leading members of WPATH were fully aware that many of their patients cannot give informed consent to the treatments they were undergoing. Examples include an endocrinologist who admits that ‘we’re often explaining these sorts of things to people who haven’t even had biology in high school yet’. Another openly states that, for many young patients, it is ‘out of their developmental range to understand the extent to which some of these medical interventions are impacting them’. You don’t need a medical degree to know that children cannot possibly comprehend the implications of a life without fertility or sexual function.

I presented a show on the WPATH Files for GB News in March 2024. This was a necessity given that no other UK news broadcaster was prepared to even acknowledge the existence of the biggest medical scandal of the century. When news broke that staff in the office of Rachel Levine, then the assistant secretary for health at the Department of Health under the Biden administration, allegedly put pressure on WPATH and pushed for the removal of age restrictions on trans surgery, the BBC again failed to cover the story. Even now, 10 months later, the BBC has yet to mention the WPATH Files at all, even in the context of Trump’s latest executive order. In the 24 hours after the scandal broke last March, the BBC did manage to report on news items such as ‘University of Essex campus cat honoured with statue’, ‘Recycling bins shake-up for Highland households’ and ‘More beavers released in Cairngorms National Park’. So at least they were covering the important stuff.

This is just one of many examples of how the ideological capture of the BBC has prevented it from fulfilling its role as the state broadcaster. The very fact that the BBC has an ‘Identity Unit’ and a full-time ‘gender and identity correspondent’ tells us all we need to know about the extent of the rot. But the same is true of the medical establishment both in the UK and in the US. Figures of authority are now beholden to a quasi-religious belief system that demands conformity and has scant regard for the truth.

And so it is reassuring that the White House has ordered US federal agencies to ‘rescind or amend all policies that rely on WPATH guidance, including WPATH’s “Standards of Care Version 8”’. This would seem sensible, given that these very same ‘Standards of Care’ contain a chapter on ‘eunuchs’, which recommends that medical practitioners should, in some circumstances, consider ‘medical intervention, surgical intervention or both’ for ‘eunuch individuals’. I freely admit my lack of expertise, but might I suggest that removing someone’s testes because they ‘feel’ like a eunuch could constitute a violation of the Hippocratic Oath?

This type of galloping lunacy has led the NHS to officially distance itself from the guidelines set out by WPATH. And yet as late as October 2024, Nottinghamshire NHS Healthcare Trust was advertising for a clinical psychologist who would work with children as young as 11, helping them along the ‘gender-affirming medical pathway… in line with WPATH SOC 8’. As journalist Joan Smith has put it, ‘it’s as if the Cass Review never happened’.

The ramifications of Trump’s executive order are far-reaching. US clinics that receive federal funding will be closed if they persist with the unevidenced ‘gender affirming’ model of healthcare. There will also be ‘a review of the existing literature on best practices for promoting the health of children who assert gender dysphoria, rapid-onset gender dysphoria or other identity-based confusion’, within a deadline of 90 days. For all the concerted efforts to dismiss the findings of the Cass Review, these will no longer be ignored.

However, private clinics who make a fortune from these procedures will be able to proceed unabated under Trump’s ruling. (It is for this reason that UK health secretary Wes Streeting was compelled to extend the ban on puberty blockers to private providers in December. And yet these maniacal activists are still attempting to find ways to circumvent the law, with the former CEO of Mermaids, Susie Green, vowing to defy the ban at her new youth gender clinic.)

Trump’s executive order has not eliminated the problem, but it is a major blow against these medieval practices masquerading as healthcare. We no more have a gendered soul than we are possessed by demons. Of course, the fact that it is Donald Trump who is taking these much-needed steps will mean that many will dismiss them as culture-war irrelevancies. But when it comes to the mutilation of children, tribalist political loyalties are surely not the priority.

Andrew Doyle is a writer, broadcaster and comedian. Find him on Substack here.

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