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@goatsarah Well, yes. But.

One of my best friends has a trans daughter, who is just on the point of being prescribed blockers after a battle of about five years. We don't at this point know whether she's sufficiently far along that this will 'only' make it harder to find a sympathetic GP, or a final last-minute defeat after so long waiting.

So yes, even within an awful system, this will make things materially worse for some trans people.

@djm4 they’ve always given these drugs to adults. They gave them to me in my 30s.

The issue is that they have pretty much never, as far as I know, given them to trans children for the purposes of arresting puberty.

I think the media narrative of referring to GnRH agonists as “puberty blockers” here is probably not helping any attempt at comprehension. It makes people think that’s all they do. They’re gonadotropin inhibitors, and they are useful after puberty for transition to allow HRT to work unopposed by endogenous hormones.

Now trying to stop them being prescribed for that is their next target, and without invading the privacy of the person you mention, you say it’s been a five year battle.

There’s no point prescribing these drugs before the initial onset of puberty because … well, they don’t do anything.

So five years … puberty is mostly done by then, and you’re looking at a young adult transition type situation.

Which they’ve always done anyway.

@djm4 Ok. Credit to her parents for fighting that battle, and maybe the Tavistock might have considered possibly doing it on a trial basis at some point (“maybe” is doing a lot of work there), but they basically don’t do that, and never have. Their standard mode of operation is to just keep talking until people age out of their service and can join an adult GIC waiting list.

The headline is literally just a reaffirmation of the way the NHS has always behaved. It’s giving the impression that it’s ending a practice of medical intervention for trans kids.

But to end something, it has to have started in the first place.