Puberty blockers for under-18s with gender dysphoria will be banned indefinitely across the UK except for use in clinical trials, the government has announced.
Wes Streeting, the health secretary, said that after receiving advice from medical experts, he would make existing emergency measures banning the sale and supply of puberty blockers indefinite.
The Department of Health and Social Care said the Commission on Human Medicines (CHM) had published independent expert advice that there was “currently an unacceptable safety risk in the continued prescription of puberty blockers to children”.
Full-fledged hormone blocking + replacement certainly is about as much reversible as puberty, that is, not really. E.g. once boobs grow having tons of testosterone in your system won’t make them go away, only surgery will (did you know that the most common cosmetic surgery for cis men is breast reduction, btw?). Some stuff self-medicating enbies are doing should be reversible, like not blocking testosterone and taking oestrogen for smoother skin.
Anyhow the earliest anyone is going to get hormone treatment is 16, and that’s in Germany for clear cases with a judge having a second look at everything. Generally it’s 18. Puberty blockers don’t even need to be reversed you just stop taking them and the puberty comes, side-effects from late puberty are benign and/or manageable. Like, in a risk weighting we’re talking about being 2cm smaller than you could have been vs. suicide, it’s not even a competition.