A flashpoint in the recent election surrounds children who want to live life as the opposite sex, a mental disorder classified as gender dysphoria. Controversy over treatments drove votes toward Donald Trump and changes are certain to come under his new administration. In Europe, the practice of using puberty blockers and hormones in children also boiled over and led to a recent ban in Great Britain.

The following is a transcript of a report from “Full Measure with Sharyl Attkisson.”
Watch the video by clicking the link at the end of the page.

By one estimate, there are 300,000 people in the U.S. who identify as the opposite sex. That includes a growing number of children. There’s heated controversy as some doctors and clinics have promoted expensive and radical treatments — including puberty blockers that aren’t FDA approved for gender dysphoria — but are being prescribed in so-called off-label use.

According to pharma-supported MedPage, 25 states have restricted treatments including puberty blocking medicine and hormones in kids. That’s led to a pushback from transgender activists who say it’s crucial to the mental health of the children.

In Great Britain, the verdict is in— for the moment.

Sharyl: Can you tell us what’s going on with the puberty blocker debate?

David Cowling: We’ve had an explosion post covid of the number of young people who have assigned themselves as you know, transgender.

David Cowling is a British political analyst.

Cowling: And there was one in clinic, the Tavistock in central London that became the big center in Britain for such patients. Then whistleblowers came forward and started to condemn them for the way they were operating and the advice they were given. They were closed down in March of this year. And the government got Dr. Hilary Cass, a pediatrician, to review the literature. She did a review and found very shaky evidence for puberty blockers, very shaky evidence for medical procedures. And she said that, you know, in her judgment, looking at all the evidence, that it was far better for kids under 18, young people under 18 to be left alone in the sense of not being given puberty blockers not be given transformative medical surgeries.

As a result of the review, the UK government concluded, “There is not enough evidence to support the safety of clinical effectiveness of puberty suppressing hormones to make the treatment routine at this time.”

More broadly, the European Academy of Pediatrics agrees.

The group says, “The fundamental question of whether biomedical treatments [including hormone therapy] for gender dysphoria are effective remains contested” and “there is no robust empirical evidence that puberty blockers reduce suicidality or suicide rates.”

When it comes to surgery, the Academy writes: “In Europe, unlike the US, both radical and more cosmetic transgender surgery seems confined mainly to adults with capacity.our view as pediatricians is that it is correct to defer irreversible surgery until adulthood.”

Cowling: The people who were in favor of these operations challenged the government in the court, in the high court, and the high court has said that the government is quite entitled to ban puberty blockers. And the new Labour government appears to be going ahead with that ban.

Neil Coyle is a Member of Parliament from the left-leaning Labour Party. Labour recently won control of Parliament from Conservatives, who originally proposed the ban on puberty blockers.

Neil Coyle : Yeah, the, the new health secretary has said we will uphold the ban for now.

Sharyl: Do you sense that some medical authorities in the U.S. and the UK, maybe elsewhere, lurched ahead too fast or too quickly on some of this and it’s being kind of dialed back?

Coyle: Yeah, I think there are certain operations and elective surgery we call it in UK, that we wouldn’t allow children to undergo. And yet there have been these quite extreme interventions and without a fuller, longer term understanding and given that it’s children involved, I think it’s right and proper that a deeper depth understanding of the impact is undertaken and one that looks at all of the support that’s necessary for the children involved and the wider family. But the children involved need to have access to all the healthcare to make appropriate decisions.

Sharyl (on-camera): The UK is undergoing a wider review on the long-term effects of puberty blockers and other treatments for transgender children and that’s due next year.

Watch video here.