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LONDON, April 19, 2011 (LifeSiteNews.com) – The UK’s National Research Ethics Service (NRES) has approved the use of puberty blocking drugs to be administered to children as young as 12 who are thought to have “Gender Identity Disorder,” (GID). The Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust in London wants to offer the drugs to children to delay the onset of puberty on the theory that this will allow the child time to come to a “decision” regarding his “gender”.

The director of the Tavistock and Portman mental health clinic, Dr. Polly Carmichael, told media, “This delay gives us a window to explore together that they are definitely making the right decision. But as professionals we need to be looking at the long term and making sure this treatment is safe.”

A research project funded by the National Health Service proposes to give the drugs to a dozen children and teenagers, a project jointly run by the Tavistock and Portman clinic and University College London Hospital.

GID is a diagnosis present in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4thEdition. The American Psychiatric Association says that GID is present if there is “long-standing and strong identification with another gender,” “long-standing disquiet about the sex assigned or a sense of incongruity in the gender-assigned role of that sex.”

Frequently the “treatment” recommended for the diagnosed individual is “gender reassignment therapy” or a “sex-change” that can include hormone therapy and/or surgery. Puberty-blocking drugs retard the growth and development of sexual characteristics and, proponents say, decrease the need for surgery should the child ultimately decide for a change.

Until this month’s decision by the NRES, UK physicians were legally prevented from administering the drugs to anyone under 16.

Anthony Ozimic, a bioethics expert for the UK-based pro-life group the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children (SPUC), commented, saying, “This procedure would seem to be contrary to a basic principle of medical ethics, namely that the purpose of medicine is the treatment of illness.”

Ozimic told LSN, “In addition, the intentional blocking of puberty by chemical means is analogous to sterilisation, which is an unethical mutilation of the human body. This procedure, and any attendant facilitation of sex change operations, would seem to be contrary to the individual’s innate possession of either the male or the female sex.”

“Gender theorists” and homosexualist activists have worked for decades to insert and expand diagnoses such as GID and “gender dysphoria” into the international medical literature because they bolster the concept that “gender” and biological sex are not synonymous. Gender theory, sometimes called “Queer theory” in academic circles, asserts that gender is a malleable psycho-social “construct,” which can be chosen at later stages in life. At the same time, it asserts that homosexuality is a naturally fixed condition that cannot be altered with therapy. Traditional concepts of masculinity and femininity are dismissed in this theory as culturally imposed “sex role stereotypes”.

Dr. Jeffrey Satinover, a psychiatrist and physicist who has worked to debunk these gender theories, wrote a paper describing the deliberate infiltration of the psychiatric community by homosexualist activists in the 1950s and ‘60s.

In his comprehensive analysis, “The Trojan Couch: How the Mental Health Guilds Allow Medical Diagnostics, Scientific Research And Jurisprudence To Be Subverted In Lockstep With The Political Aims Of Their Gay Sub-Components,” Satinover says that far from being a “fixed” condition, homosexuality is one that young people will naturally grow out of unless they are subjected to “extraneous factors” and a “social milieu” in which it is encouraged.

“Ironically”, Satinover notes, “this ‘social milieu’ is the family setting and culture being created by, inter alia, the decisions enforced by the Justices of the Supreme Court of the United States acting in coordination with the misrepresentation of scientific evidence provided to it by the American Psychiatric Association, the American Psychological Association, and the National Association of Social Workers.”