Children make healthcare decisions every day
Dr Helen Webberley on TalkTV: the conversion therapy ban, with Julia Hartley-Brewer, TalkTV
Decisions about puberty blockers are different in kind from other medical decisions children and families make. When it comes to gender care, young people are assumed to be too young, too confused, or too easily led to have any real say in what happens to their own bodies.
What I was pointing to there is something that gets lost the moment gender enters the room: children and parents make healthcare decisions together all the time, for broken bones, for heart surgery, for the small everyday things and the very big ones. Nobody questions whether a child can understand a grommets procedure or consent to having their adenoids out. The moment we are talking about puberty blockers, suddenly the same child is treated as incapable of understanding anything. That inconsistency is not caution. It is a double standard applied to one group of children and no other, and the children paying the price for it are trans children.
More from this conversation
