This news from Britain is a stunning setback:

The court of appeal has overturned a controversial judgment that children under the age of 16 considering gender reassignment are unlikely to be mature enough to give informed consent to be prescribed puberty-blocking drugs.

Tavistock and Portman NHS foundation trust, which runs NHS England’s only gender identity development service (GIDS) for children, challenged a high court ruling last year in a case brought against the service by Keira Bell, a 24-year-old woman who began taking puberty blockers when she was 16 before detransitioning. The other applicant was the unnamed mother of a teenage autistic girl on the waiting list for treatment.

The three high court judges had also said the doctors of teenagers under 18 may need to consult the courts for authorisation for medical intervention. As a result of the decision, the Tavistock suspended new referrals for puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for the under-16s.

However, in a judgment handed down on Friday, the lord chief justice, Lord Burnett, Sir Geoffrey Vos and Lady Justice King said it had been “inappropriate” for the high court to issue the guidance.

Keira Bell comments:

Bell said she planned to seek leave to appeal to the supreme court, adding: “A global conversation has begun and has been shaped by this case. There is more to be done. It is a fantasy and deeply concerning that any doctor could believe a 10-year-old could consent to the loss of their fertility.”

Here’s a link to a personal essay in which Bell tells her own story. She was a moody and depressed 14-year-old from a troubled background (mother an alcoholic), and who was struggling to deal with same-sex attraction. More:

As I look back, I see how everything led me to conclude it would be best if I stopped becoming a woman. My thinking was that, if I took hormones, I’d grow taller and wouldn’t look much different from biological men.

I began seeing a psychologist through the National Health Service, or NHS. When I was 15—because I kept insisting that I wanted to be a boy—I was referred to the Gender Identity Development Service, at the Tavistock and Portman clinic in London. There, I was diagnosed with gender dysphoria, which is psychological distress because of a mismatch between your biological sex and your perceived gender identity.

By the time I got to the Tavistock, I was adamant that I needed to transition. It was the kind of brash assertion that’s typical of teenagers. What was really going on was that I was a girl insecure in my body who had experienced parental abandonment, felt alienated from my peers, suffered from anxiety and depression, and struggled with my sexual orientation.

After a series of superficial conversations with social workers, I was put on puberty blockers at age 16. A year later, I was receiving testosterone shots. When 20, I had a double mastectomy. By then, I appeared to have a more masculine build, as well as a man’s voice, a man’s beard, and a man’s name: Quincy, after Quincy Jones.

Five years later, she began to detransition after she realized that her dysphoria was not the cause of her problems, but a symptom of deeper problems. More:

The consequences of what happened to me have been profound: possible infertility, loss of my breasts and inability to breastfeed, atrophied genitals, a permanently changed voice, facial hair. When I was seen at the Tavistock clinic, I had so many issues that it was comforting to think I really had only one that needed solving: I was a male in a female body. But it was the job of the professionals to consider all my co-morbidities, not just to affirm my naïve hope that everything could be solved with hormones and surgery.

If you read the whole thing, you’ll see that this poor young woman was put on hormones and on the conveyor belt to transition without much deliberation at all — because that’s what she wanted.

Parents need to wake up, and wake up fast. There is an entire world of activists and allies devoted to convincing your child that he or she is something other than what they are, in terms of sex and gender. They are constantly trying to undermine your kid. You probably have no idea what it’s like. You might recall me telling you about meeting a Catholic father in Slovenia this summer, a man whose 12-year-old daughter is locked in a profound depression because some older teens from the US that she met online convinced her that she has to choose her gender identity quickly, before puberty really sets in. The girl is obsessed with this idea, doesn’t want to go to school, is struggling with eating, and so forth. This family is sitting in Slovenia, but the Internet made it possible for these ghouls in Oregon to colonize the child’s mind.

Please — please — read Abigail Shrier’s investigative piece about how here in the US, some states are amassing the power to seize custody of minor children who have indicated a desire to change their sex. Excerpt:

Taken individually, no single law in any state completely strips parents’ rights over the care and mental health treatment of their troubled minor teens. But pieced together, laws in California, Oregon, and Washington place troubled minor teens as young as 13 in the driver’s seat when it comes to their own mental health care—including “gender affirming” care—and renders parents powerless to stop them.

Here, for instance, are the powers granted to a 13-year-old child by the state of Washington. Minors age 13 and up are entitled to admit themselves for inpatient and outpatient mental health treatment without parental consent. Health insurers are forbidden from disclosing to the insured parents’ sensitive medical information of minor children—such as that regarding “gender dysphoria [and] gender affirming care.” Minors aged 13 to 18 can withhold mental health records from parents for “sensitive” conditions, which include both “gender dysphoria” and “gender-affirming care.” Insurers in Washington must cover a wide array of “gender-affirming treatments” from tracheal shaves to double mastectomies.

Put these together, and a seventh grader could be entitled to embark on “gender affirming care”—which may include anything from a provider using the child’s name and pronouns to the kid preparing to receive a course of hormones—without her parents’ permission, against her parents’ wishes, covered by her parents’ insurance, and with the parents kept in the dark by insurance companies and medical providers.

Lest you wonder whether there is some madcap elixir polluting the groundwater of Washington State alone, in 2015, Oregon passed a law permitting minors 15 and older to obtain puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries at taxpayers’ expense—all without parental consent. In 2018, California passed a similar bill for all children in foster care, age 12 and up. The California state senate is now considering an amendment to the Confidentiality of Medical Information Act that would bar health insurers from disclosing medical information to parents about their dependents, on pain of criminal liability.

The thing to get clear in your mind is that the ruling class in the US and in Europe — the state, the media, academia, the professions, big business — has accepted gender ideology as true and good. It will increasingly set out to separate children from their bigoted parents. Who is protecting you and your family? Are you aware of how vulnerable you all are?

Think about it: we have become a civilization whose ruling class believes that it is perfectly right and natural to put children on cross-sex hormones in an attempt to change their sex, based only on the say-so of the child and his guardians. As MacIntyre said:

This time, however, the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time.  And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament.

Well, they told us so.