The global, interfaith Ruth Institute has lauded a recent UK court ruling that gender-confused minors are often incapable of informed consent when it comes to life-altering decisions.
As Breitbart News reported, a High Court in the United Kingdom ruled this week that children under the age of 16 can no longer get puberty-blocking transgender hormones unless they can demonstrate an understanding of the risks and long-term costs of the procedure.
Ruth Institute founder and president Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse, Ph.D., hailed the decision as a victory for common sense.
“Keira Bell, one of the plaintiffs in the case, was given the drugs at age 16 after only three one-hour appointments,” Morse noted in a statement. “At 20, she had a double mastectomy. Now at 23, she’s in the process of de-transitioning.”
At the time, Bell said she believed the treatment would help her “achieve happiness” but later she regretted the decision and last year began trying to reverse the process.
“It was heartbreaking to realize I’d gone down the wrong path,” Bell said, adding that the drugs had “irreparably damaged” her body and likely left her sterile.
Dr. Morse noted that many activists push minors suffering from gender dysphoria — a psychological condition in which people experience a marked incongruence between their experienced gender and their biological sex — into radical decisions in order to advance an agenda, rather than helping the children work through their issues that are psychological in nature, not physical.
“Often those who experience gender dysphoria as children have other psychological issues,” said Morse, who is the author of The Sexual State: How Elite Ideologies Are Destroying Lives. “These children are pushed into life-altering decisions by activists intent on promoting a cause.”
The UK-based Transgender Trend, a group critical of transgender ideology, said the court’s judgment represented a “watershed moment.”
“As a society we must ask ourselves how we allowed this to happen,” the group said on its website. “The threats, bullying and the silencing of alternative views must stop here.”
“The government needs to take action to remove all transgender guidance and resources from schools and social service departments to safeguard children and prevent any further teaching of the ideology to children as fact,” it noted.
Last February, the UK scrapped proposed changes to the Gender Recognition Act that would have made it easier for children to change their gender.
The proposed measure, launched by former prime minister Theresa May in 2018, was ditched over fears that it would negatively impact children who lack the “decision-making capabilities” to make such a transition for themselves.
For years, the prestigious, U.S.-based American College of Pediatricians (ACP) has insisted that encouraging children “into believing a lifetime of chemical and surgical impersonation of the opposite sex is normal and healthful is child abuse.”
The ACP declared that “a person’s belief that he or she is something they are not is, at best, a sign of confused thinking.” Gender dysphoria describes a problem that exists in the mind and not the body and “it should be treated as such.”
In 2018, the ACP reacted strongly to proposed guidelines by the ultra-progressive American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) that urged parents to accept the preferred gender identity of their children regardless of their biological sex, insisting that the guidelines are grounded upon “unscientific gender ideology,” rather than any hard evidence.
The ACP doctors argued that the assumption that gender dysphoria is innate contradicts all relevant data and is based on “ideology” rather than science.
Studies have shown, the ACP argued, that the “perspective of an ‘innate gender identity’ arising from prenatally ‘feminized’ or ‘masculinized’ brains trapped in the wrong body is in fact an ideological belief that has no basis in rigorous science.”
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