(LifeSiteNews) — Back in January, I detailed the views of extremist transgender activists tapped by the World Health Organization to work on “guidelines” for so-called “gender care,” noting that “Florence” Ashley, an assistant professor at the University of Alberta College of Law who goes by the pronouns “They/Them/That B–ch” and “served as the first openly transfeminine law clerk at the Supreme Court of Canada,” actually argued in a 2019 paper for Clinical Child Psychology and Psychiatry that “puberty blockers ought to be treated as the default option” for children instead of “letting puberty run its course.” (Both Frank Wright and Claire Marie Merkowsky also wrote reports, which you can read here and here.)
In short, as medical bodies around the world move away from puberty blockers, Ashley, who, I must remind you, shapes impressionable young minds at a major Canadian university, has called for them to be considered standard for gender-confused minors and even advocates prescribing them without mental health checks.
But perhaps all the collective reporting on Ashley’s radical views has done some good. According to the Daily Mail, the World Health Organization “has quietly axed” Ashley, who has no medical background; the “committee members were announced on January 3, but a revision to the list published Monday no longer listed Ashley as a panelist.” The official line from the WHO is that Ashley was excluded because of a “conflict in schedules,” despite the fact that Ashley was listed on the panel just a few weeks ago. The other radical panelists, unfortunately, appear to be secure in their positions.
Currently, Ashley is campaigning against Alberta Premier Danielle Smith’s proposed policies to ban puberty blockers for minors, despite the fact that the policies align with the U.K.’s National Health Service, which recently announced that it would no longer be prescribing puberty blockers to children. As the left-wing Guardian put it, the NHS stated that this decision was due to the fact that there “is not enough evidence about either how safe they are to take or whether they are clinically effective to justify prescribing them to children and young people.”
READ: UK’s National Health Service to stop prescribing puberty blockers to gender-confused children
Premier Smith has been swift to point this out. “The U.K. and many of the Nordic countries are taking a different approach,” she told reporters after the NHS decision. “Let’s be frank about it. If you stop the process of puberty and then you do cross-sex hormones and don’t develop, become sexually mature, you can’t have children. So we have to decide at what age a child should make that decision.”
“From the feedback that we’ve gotten from those who are in the field, from looking at the international evidence, we just don’t feel comfortable that would be the age 15 and under,” she continued. Indeed, the slowly emerging international consensus is that puberty blockers and “sex changes” for minors have been a catastrophic experiment on children. In fact, the NHS has limited prescription of puberty blockers – which Canada’s entire progressive establishment defends – to medical trials.
Smith is right. Ashley is wrong. As a March 15 headline in The Telegraph put it, “The evil trans ideology is in retreat, at last.”
