Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality

by Helen Joyce

In 2020 the National Institute for Care and Health Excellence (NICE), the official body tasked with assessing the effectiveness of treatment options within Britain’s National Health Service, produced reviews of the evidence for prescribing puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for childhood and adolescent gender dysphoria. It ranked the standard of evidence as ‘very low’ in every category it considered. Every single study that found any benefit for puberty blockers, it concluded, ‘could represent changes that are either of questionable clinical value, or the studies themselves are not reliable and changes could be due to confounding, bias or chance’. Solid evidence of benefits for cross-sex hormones prescribed to teenagers, it said, was similarly non-existent.