Latest news with #pubertyBlockers
Telegraph
27-06-2025
- Health
- Telegraph
Activist doctor opposed to puberty blocker ban now head of BMA
An activist doctor who spearheaded the British Medical Association's opposition to a ban on puberty blockers for children has been elected as its leader. Dr Tom Dolphin tabled the 'emergency motion' in July last year that led to the union rejecting the findings of the Cass Review into children's gender services. The union was later pressured by its members to backtrack to a 'neutral' stance, and announced that it would conduct its own evaluation of the Cass Review by the end of last year, though it has yet to publish anything. Lady Cass spent more than four years on the study, which reviewed data from 113,000 children. She recommended a ban on prescribing sex hormones outside of clinical trials to children who question their gender. The BMA's council bypassed debate to reject the Cass Review after it ran out of time to discuss the motion at the annual meeting. The union has since shunned four attempts by members to have an open debate on the review this year. More than 1,500 doctors, the majority of them BMA members, have since signed a 'Not in Our Name' open letter to the union, criticising the 'very undemocratic' decision to reject Lady Cass's findings. The council, which consists of 69 members, this week ousted Prof Philip Banfield, the sitting chairman, and replaced him with Dr Dolphin. Dr Dolphin, an anaesthetic consultant who lives in London, has campaigned for Dawn Butler, the Labour MP for Brent Central and Brent South. He has been a member of BMA council since 2012 and is the chairman of his hospital trust's local negotiating committee, which represents and negotiates for doctors at employer-level. 'Trans rights are human rights' In July 2022, he posted photos of himself getting ready for a Trans Pride march, saying: 'About to set off to let London know that trans rights are human rights!' Fiona McAnena, the director of campaigns at human rights charity Sex Matters, said Dr Dolphin's election 'shows how gender ideology breaks previously respectable organisations'. She told The Telegraph: 'The Cass Review is a comprehensive, evidence-based report on so-called gender medicine for children by an independent paediatrician with impeccable credentials. 'Creating doubt around it without robust evidence is irresponsible, misleading, and not in the best interests of patients. 'We've said before that the trans activist doctors at the BMA are an embarrassment to their profession. Their false assertions about biology can be disproven with primary school science. 'Giving them this level of credibility could have serious consequences for the health and well-being of vulnerable children and young adults.' Dr Louise Irvine, a former BMA council member who co-chairs the Clinical Advisory Group on Sex and Gender, has criticised a 'culture of secrecy' around the review and said 'ideologues' had infiltrated senior positions in the union. She said doctors were 'very angry that they were not consulted' and 'appalled by the ridiculous knee-jerk and uninformed reaction of the BMA council'. 'There has been terrible secrecy all the way along. It reflects a deeper malaise within the BMA. It is no longer a democratic organisation,' she said, adding: 'Motions relating to Cass have never been picked for debate. They are trying to avoid this, because of the ideology of a small group within the BMA that has got into quite a powerful position.' A BMA spokesperson said: 'The BMA is a trade union and professional association with a proud history of advocating for doctors, health services and the health of the population. We are not a single-issue organisation. 'Dr Dolphin is a longstanding BMA elected member, who is widely respected by our members, underlined by his recent election as chair of council. He has been actively involved in the BMA for more than 20 years, during which time he has held multiple leadership positions and worked on a multitude of medico-political issues. 'He has sat on BMA council since 2012, and council members have now elected Dr Dolphin to lead the BMA on a huge range of issues across its wide remit as both a trade union and professional association.'
Yahoo
24-06-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
MAGA Is Waging an All-Out War on Family Liberty
Last week was a bad week for the American family. The Supreme Court ruled in U.S. v. Skrmetti to allow a Tennessee law that bans puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and gender-affirming surgeries for transgender minors. Meanwhile in Georgia, doctors delivered Adriana Smith's son via an emergency C-section. The 30-year-old mother had been declared brain dead after suffering multiple brain bleeds, but doctors at Emory University Hospital had kept her alive on ventilators since early February, against the wishes of her family, because they feared that removing her from life support would violate Georgia's highly restrictive abortion law. While Georgia's Republican attorney general, Chris Carr, claimed in May that the state's law did not require pregnant women to be kept on life support, hospital officials insisted that the legal ambiguity left them with no choice. And other elected Republicans seem far less certain than Carr about what the law intends. State Senator Ed Setzler, who sponsored the bill Emory cited in its decision, said in a statement to a local television station, 'I'm thankful that the hospital recognizes the full value of the small human life living inside of this regrettably dying young mother.… I would be thankful if the Living Infants Fairness and Equality Act played a small part in … allowing at least one of the two lives now hanging in the balance to be saved.' Because of the rhetoric of the culture wars, we have grown accustomed to seeing both the opposition to legal abortion and to gender-affirming care for minors as a conservative position, the views of those who advocate for the 'traditional' family. As a result, we might be unfazed by these recent events. But that would be a mistake. These two incidents reveal how removed the MAGA camp is from the 'family values' Republicans of the 1980s and 1990s. The authoritarian right is taking aim at the family and advocating for a level of state control over our private lives that would make the most committed Marxist blush. Progressives are right to see the Skrmetti ruling and the Georgia hospital's decision as attacks on autonomy, but that is only part of the story. The minor plaintiffs in Skrmetti do not possess full legal autonomy, and neither did Adriana Smith. So the question in both cases was about who should be allowed to make decisions for them. Historically, it has been the assumption of Anglo-American law that in such cases, a member of the person's family should stand as that person's representative in all matters from property to medical decisions. Hence the idea of next of kin. Practically speaking, this is one of the most important functions of the family, and it grows from a basic understanding of what family is. From Ancient Greece to the modern age, conservatives have assumed the family to be the first, natural, and primary organizing block of society, with a claim on us as individuals that supersedes that of the state. This is the moral of Sophocles's Antigone, in which the titular heroine defies the edict of the tyrant Creon (symbolic of state power) in order to bury her brother Polynices, in obedience to the primordial laws of kinship. It is why Cicero, the Roman statesman and philosopher (most famous for his opposition to Caesar's rise) who was hardly a radical, wrote, 'The first bond of society is in marriage itself; the next in children; then a single household with all things in common. And that is the beginning of the city and, as it were, the seedbed of the republic.' And it is why Edmund Burke, the father of modern conservatism, opposed the French Revolution, declaring, 'The power of perpetuating our property in our families is one of the most valuable and interesting circumstances belonging to it.' But this is not the view of men like Ed Setzler. In his statement about Adriana Smith, the state senator said, 'Mindful and respectful of the deep pain of this young mother's family, the wisdom of modern medical science to be able to save the life of her unborn child is something that I am hopeful in future years will lead to great joy.' Of course, he's not really just talking about the 'wisdom' of modern medicine but the opinion of Emory's doctors and lawyers, not to mention the law he helped create. And he is saying that these opinions—this wisdom, if you would prefer—should be substituted for the family's authority and wisdom. He is saying that the state decides what kind of medical care your child receives. The state decides whether your brain-dead wife remains hooked to machines. He's not alone. Again and again, MAGA authoritarians have been willing to invoke the power of the family when it can be leveraged to their own ends, but are quick to override that power when it cannot. So on the one hand, Republicans claim in their party platform to 'promote a Culture that values the Sanctity of Marriage, the blessings of childhood, the foundational role of families, and supports working parents.' But their actions betray their rhetoric: There is a GOP campaign in statehouses around the country to pass laws requiring schools and teachers to out gay and trans students to their parents, an effort most assuredly aimed at terrorizing queer children with unsupportive families. This is not about a parent's right to know but an effort to deputize parents in the state's campaign against their children. Because when the family stands as a barrier to Republicans' imposing their draconian will, they have proved more than willing to ignore parental authority. For example, what could be more transparent (and frankly silly) an interference with a parent's right to direct her child's education than banning drag story hours? The MAGA movement, it turns out, is essentially anti-family—and not just in the anti-LGBTQ way that the 'Free Mom Hugs' crowd worries about. It is important to remember that in many ways the new American authoritarianism has risen out of the collapse of the family within certain parts of society. Across huge tracts of Middle America, poor and working-class Americans have seen the family disintegrate as a stable institution. Poor and working-class people are less likely to marry and more likely to divorce than their middle- and upper-class counterparts. Not only do they have more children outside of marriage, but single mothers among the working class are better off staying that way. (Maybe that's why single moms will be the hardest hit by the GOP's planned budget cuts.) The vice president himself is a product of this culture of familial failure. Let's not forget, one of the most shocking facts of Hillbilly Elegy, the memoir that elevated JD Vance to the national zeitgeist, is the casual domestic violence among Memaw and Papaw, the would-be heroes of the story and the stable adults in his life. Is it a surprise, then, that this movement doesn't exactly trust families to protect the vulnerable when their families are often so fraught with violence, instability, and addiction? It is a position that, though understandable, is not defensible. While it is true that individual freedom underlies the modern tradition of liberty, the state's deference to the family has much older roots and in the modern context has served as a safeguard to personal liberty. It is the sole assurance that even when we are unable to act for ourselves, it will not be the state that acts in our place but those who know and love us. What we are witnessing is not the preservation of tradition but its perversion. The American right has long claimed to defend the family as a sacred institution. Now it is dismantling the very legal and moral principles that made that claim coherent. No amount of 'family values' rhetoric can hide the fact that what MAGA authoritarians seek is a society not founded upon the bounds of kinship, but constructed by the power of the state. If we are to preserve both liberty and the family, we must learn to tell the difference.
Fox News
19-06-2025
- Politics
- Fox News
WH praises SCOTUS ruling upholding TN ban on transgender treatments: ‘Victory for America's children'
The White House on Thursday praised the Supreme Court's ruling that a Tennessee law banning puberty blockers and other treatments for transgender minors did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment. During the daily briefing, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt declared it "a huge victory for America's children." "And it's obviously something this administration believes strongly in that young, minor children should not be allowed to be subjected to chemical castration and mutilation." Leavitt said Trump has signed "very strong executive orders" on the subject and that the administration is "grateful" for Nashville's efforts to protect Tennessee youth. "And we are grateful the Supreme Court ruled on the side of the law [and] on the side of protecting America's innocent children." The case, U.S. v. Skrmetti, was brought by three transgender minors and their families. The Biden administration was able to join as namesake plaintiff due to a law allowing the president to be party to lawsuits regarding the Equal Protection Clause. Then-Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar argued for the administration -- while later, the ensuing Trump administration opposed the Biden position, but the case continued. On Wednesday, a 6-3 ruling upheld TN SB 1, which "prohibits all medical treatments intended to allow 'a minor to identify with, or live as, a purported identity inconsistent with the minor's sex' or to treat 'purported discomfort or distress from a discordance between the minor's sex and asserted identity." Chief Justice John Roberts said the law in question did not "classify on any bases that warrant heightened review." "This case carries with it the weight of fierce scientific and policy debates about the safety, efficacy, and propriety of medical treatments in an evolving field," he said. Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti – the defendant -- said in a statement that the law had been supported by a "bipartisan supermajority of Tennessee's elected representatives" who "carefully considered the evidence and voted to protect kids from irreversible decisions they cannot yet fully understand." "I commend the Tennessee legislature and Governor Lee for their courage in passing this legislation and supporting our litigation despite withering opposition from the Biden administration, LGBT special interest groups, social justice activists, the American Medical Association, the American Bar Association, and even Hollywood," he said.
Al Jazeera
18-06-2025
- Health
- Al Jazeera
Supreme Court upholds Tennessee law barring gender-affirming care for youth
The United States Supreme Court has ruled that a Tennessee law barring puberty blockers and hormone therapies for transgender minors does not violate the US Constitution and can therefore remain in effect. Wednesday's decision was split along ideological lines, with the high court's six conservative judges siding with Tennessee and its three left-leaning judges joining together for a dissent. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the opinion for the majority. In it, he explained that the plaintiffs — three transgender minors, their parents and a doctor — had not successfully shown a violation of the Constitution's 14th Amendment, which guarantees equal protection under the law. The plaintiffs had sought to lift the ban, arguing that Tennessee's law, known as SB1, discriminated against them based on their sex and gender. Roberts, however, disagreed. He pointed out that the ban applies to young men and women equally. 'SB1 does not mask sex-based classifications,' he wrote. 'The law does not prohibit conduct for one sex that it permits for the other. Under SB1, no minor may be administered puberty blockers or hormones to treat gender dysphoria, gender identity disorder, or gender incongruence.' Roberts also noted that puberty blockers continue to be available under the Tennessee law to treat congenital defects, early puberty, disease or injury among children. That application likewise was allowed regardless of sex, he wrote. 'SB1 does not exclude any individual from medical treatments on the basis of transgender status but rather removes one set of diagnoses — gender dysphoria, gender identity disorder, and gender incongruence — from the range of treatable conditions,' Roberts said. Transgender youth are sometimes prescribed hormone inhibitors to delay the onset of puberty, thereby stopping the development of secondary sexual characteristics like breasts, deepening voices and facial hair. LGBTQ advocates say such gender-affirming care is essential in some cases to alleviate the stress of such changes and reduce the potential need for surgeries later on. Puberty blockers are widely considered to be safe and their effects temporary. But Roberts noted that some medical providers are pushing for more research into the long-term effects of the drugs and pointing to 'open questions' in the medical field. 'Health authorities in a number of European countries have raised significant concerns regarding the potential harms associated with using puberty blockers and hormones to treat transgender minors,' Roberts wrote. 'Recent developments only underscore the need for legislative flexibility in this area,' he continued. The majority's opinion was met by a fierce dissent, written by Justice Sonia Sotomayor. She pointed out that puberty blockers can save lives, given that transgender youth face higher rates of suicide, self-harm and bullying. 'The majority contorts logic and precedent to say otherwise, inexplicably declaring it must uphold Tennessee's categorical ban on lifesaving medical treatment so long as 'any reasonably conceivable state of facts' might justify it,' Sotomayor wrote. 'By retreating from meaningful judicial review exactly where it matters most, the Court abandons transgender children and their families to political whims. In sadness, I dissent.' She emphasised that the consensus in the US medical community is that puberty blockers are 'appropriate and medically necessary' in cases of a comprehensive and clinical diagnosis of gender dysphoria. 'Transgender adolescents' access to hormones and puberty blockers (known as gender-affirming care) is not a matter of mere cosmetic preference,' Sotomayor said. 'To the contrary, access to care can be a question of life or death.' She questioned why Tennessee lawmakers should have the power to regulate a medical decision — and why puberty blockers could still be used to address issues like unwanted facial hair among teenage girls but not gender affirmation among transgender youth. 'Tennessee's ban applies no matter what the minor's parents and doctors think, with no regard for the severity of the minor's mental health conditions or the extent to which treatment is medically necessary for an individual child,' Sotomayor said. Wednesday's decision comes at a precarious time for the transgender community in the US. Since returning to office for a second term in January, US President Donald Trump has taken steps to limit the rights of transgender people. On his very first day back in the White House, the Republican leader issued an executive order announcing the federal government would only recognise two sexes, male and female. Days later, on January 27, he issued another executive order, effectively setting the stage for a ban on transgender troops in the military. Trump denounced transgender people as 'expressing a false 'gender identity'' and said their identity 'conflicts with a soldier's commitment to an honorable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle'. The Supreme Court upheld that ban as well. June 6 marked an initial deadline for transgender troops to self-identify and leave the military voluntarily. In addition, Trump has said his administration will withhold federal funds from schools that allow transgender girls and women to participate in women's sports. That decision has led to clashes with states like Maine, where Democratic Governor Janet Mills has pledged to stand up to Trump. The fight over Tennessee's ban on puberty blockers arrives amid a wave of similar legislation: According to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), some 25 states have bans on gender-affirming healthcare for transgender youth. The group estimates that those laws leave around 100,000 transgender minors without access to medical care they may need. The ban the Supreme Court weighed on Wednesday had initially faced an injunction from a lower court, but the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals lifted the injunction pending an appeal. The ACLU called the Supreme Court's decision a setback but pledged to continue filing legal challenges. In a statement, it noted that the Supreme Court had not overturned the wider precedent that discriminating against transgender people is illegal. 'Today's ruling is a devastating loss for transgender people, our families, and everyone who cares about the Constitution,' said Chase Strangio, a co-director for the ACLU's LGBTQ and HIV Project. 'We are as determined as ever to fight for the dignity and equality of every transgender person.'
BBC News
18-06-2025
- Health
- BBC News
US Supreme Court rules that states can ban transgender care for minors
The US Supreme Court has ruled that states may put limits on or even fully ban gender transition care for young justices voted 6 to 3 to decide that a Tennessee law that limited access to treatments such as puberty blockers for under-18s was not discrimination. Three Tennessee transgender teenagers, their parents, and a doctor who provides transition medications had argued the 2023 Tennessee ban violated a US constitutional guarantee of equal protection under the law by discriminating on the basis of case, known as United States v Skrmetti, marked the first time the court has taken up the issue of transgender healthcare. This breaking news story is being updated and more details will be published shortly. Please refresh the page for the fullest can receive Breaking News on a smartphone or tablet via the BBC News App. You can also follow @BBCBreaking on X to get the latest alerts.
