Child of 12 can have puberty blockers, says care watchdog
CHILDREN as young as 12 can consent to trans-affirming medical interventions, Scotland’s social care watchdog has told those who look after the country’s most vulnerable young people.
Experts said the Care Inspectorate guidance, issued this week to services responsible for children in care, flew in the face of emerging expert evidence about the dangers of adopting an exclusively “affirming” approach to children who declare themselves transgender.
Staff have been told to adopt the chosen names and pronouns of young people, and can refer them to the Sandyford, a controversial gender clinic that has compared its methods with those used at the disgraced Tavistock Centre.
The guidance states that facilities such as toilets are segregated by sex because of “social convention” and that trans young people should be able to share bedrooms with other young people who “share their gender identity”, pending risk assessments.
It also cites a case study in which a young person in care was “supported” by a care home to undergo a mastectomy.
The guidance cites legislation that recognises “a young person aged 12 and over is presumed to have sufficient capacity to make decisions about medical treatment, although we recognise this will not always be the case”.
The document makes no reference to the findings of the interim Cass review of gender identity services in England, which issued warnings of possible risks in encouraging “social transition” of young people and a lack of evidence to support the use of puberty blockers.
Instead, the 22-page guidelines refer to controversial documents published by the SNP government and pro-trans charities, such as Stonewall and LGBT Youth Scotland, the body that helped write the guidance.
David Bell, a consultant psychiatrist who became a Tavistock whistleblower, said the document represented a “significant failure of safeguarding” by the watchdog. He added: “There is considerable evidence that just affirming children is harmful and this guidance seems to ignore all of the emerging medical evidence.”