What this academic gets wrong about trans rights in Britain

The Keira Bell judgment, which said that children are unlikely to be able to give informed consent for taking puberty-blocking drugs, ‘puts trans people everywhere’ at risk. That’s the verdict of Grace Lavery, a professor of English, critical theory, and women’s studies at the University of California, Berkeley. From the other side of the Atlantic, Lavery described the case in an article for Foreign Policy as ‘an unprecedented juridical attack on the LGBT community in the U.K.’ It is, of course, nothing of the sort. 

The High Court determined that children as young as 12 were highly unlikely to be competent to understand and weigh the long-term risks of receiving such radical treatment. As such, the judges decided that ‘we consider that it is appropriate that the court should determine whether it is in the child’s best interests to take PBs (puberty blockers).’ That was it. It was a wise judgment that put the interests of children first; it was not an attack on LGBT people.