UK government planning to ban minors from access to gender reassignment surgery

by Karen Faulkner, Worthy News Correspondent

(Worthy News) – A UK cabinet minister has said the government is planning legislation that would prohibit minors from receiving gender reassignment surgery, the Daily Telegraph reported. Equalities Minister Liz Truss was addressing a parliamentary committee last week when she stated it was important to protect minors from making such irreversible decisions.

Under the UK’s Gender Recognition Act, minors diagnosed with gender dysphoria can have genital reconstructive surgery with parental approval and after a two-year waiting period. Following a two-year public consultation on gender recognition reform, Ms. Truss said the government would publish a full response to revising the current legislation this summer.

Giving evidence to the Women and Equalities Select Committee, the minister explained: “I believe strongly that adults should have the freedom to lead their lives as they see fit.” However, she added: “I think it’s very important that while people are still developing their decision-making capabilities that we protect them from making those irreversible decisions.”

According to the Daily Telegraph, the government’s plans have been criticized by transgender rights charities as introducing “a new form of inequality into British medical practice.”

Ms. Truss also set out several “very important principles,” she said the government would implement with the proposed legislation, the Daily Telegraph reported. The principles included the “protection of single-sex spaces” and “maintaining the proper checks and balances” while ensuring transgender adults can live free from fear of persecution.

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