(Article by Michael Austin republished from WesternJournal.com)

Kids are developmentally unable to make decisions about things that they don’t understand, including sexual activity.

Given this fact, it is reprehensible that some parents believe their children have the capacity to make life-altering changes to their sexual development through gender reassignment procedures.

Keira Bell, a woman who was treated with hormone blockers as a teenager to reassign her gender, is taking on the United Kingdom National Health Service, arguing that she “should have been told to wait.”

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At the age of 15, Bell began undergoing hormone therapy to help her transition to a boy, according to Sky News.

Eight years later, she changed her mind and transitioned back to female.

“I am angry about the whole situation because of how things have turned out for me based on the medical pathway that I was put on, but I’m now just trying to focus on changing the system for the better and making it better for minors and children,” Bell said, according to Sky News.

“I should have been told to wait and not affirmed in my gender identity I was claiming to have and given intensive therapy basically to make sure that I was on the right track for things and investigate the feelings I was having to figure out how I got to that stage,” she said.

https://twitter.com/SkyNews/status/1284588709619347458

Bell is now suing the NHS for allowing children to give informed consent to life-altering hormone treatment, Sky News reported.

Studies have shown that those afflicted with gender dysphoria are not helped by gender reassignment surgery or hormone therapy.

A study in the multidisciplinary academic journal PLOS One concluded that sex-reassigned individuals had “considerably higher risks for mortality, suicidal behavior, and psychiatric morbidity than the general population” and that using sex reassignment to treat gender dysphoria fails to treat underlying psychiatric conditions related to the condition.

Debra W. Soh, a sex researcher and political commentator, explained in an article for the Pacific Standard why transgender children should wait to transition.

“Popular opinion suggests that early intervention is the necessary approach in order to remedy a child’s gender dysphoria. This consists of early social transitioning followed by hormone blockers to prevent the otherwise irreversible changes of puberty, contra-sex hormones, and, if desired, eventual sex re-assignment surgery. Denying a child these interventions is viewed as antiquated and cruel,” Soh wrote.

“But research has shown that most gender dysphoric children outgrow their dysphoria, and do so by adolescence.”

Soh then went on to explain the emotional difficulty that individuals like Bell are forced to go through when they decide to transition back.

“For a young child whose gender dysphoria would have desisted without intervention, these procedures amount to a needlessly challenging process to undergo—and that’s without considering the implications of choosing to transition back. Even a social transition back to one’s original gender role can be an emotionally difficult experience for children,” she said.

“Waiting until a child has reached cognitive maturity before making these sorts of decisions would make the most sense. But this is an unpopular stance, and scientists and clinicians who support it are vilified, not because science — which should be our guiding beacon — disproves it, but because it has been deemed insensitive and at odds with the current ideology.”

Read more at: WesternJournal.com and GenderConfused.com.