I would recommend reflecting on the impact of suddenly removing the sole legal means of treating a preventable source of intense lifelong distress without providing any alternative option in any other area of healthcare.
I would also recommend reflecting on how happy you would be to be sentenced to a mandatory course of cross-sex hormones for the next several years. It's only a few years, right? It's not like there would be any permanent changes that would impact your quality of life, so what's the problem? You might be able to have counselling to help you get used to the new voice you are now stuck with, if there are NHS resources available.
Whether you try and explain this away as hyperbolic catastrophising teenagers or brainwashed death cult members, the sad truth of the situation is that children are being sent a message by the government that the best - often only - ray of hope they currently have for the future is being actively and comprehensively banned for poorly defined, deeply controversial and highly inconsistent reasons.
This is despite their older peers being allowed to continue treatment due to having managed to get a foot in the door just before the ban. This is also despite younger children continuing to be prescribed this exact same treatment routinely, and other children who have more visible phenotype variations being allowed treatment for their conditions - which even sometimes include gender incongruence.
Bear in mind that this is the treatment that is prescribed as a concessionary measure in lieu of immediately issuing cross-sex hormones as requested by the vast majority of gender incongruent children - which would allow the retention of developmental parity with peers and nullify any bone density concerns arising from long-term suppression.
It doesn't add up. Are GnRH agonists so unsafe that they have to be immediately and completely banned as an emergency measure? If so, why are they still being issued to any children? Why are we allowing any drug that affects the LH release mechanism? Why only and specifically this one kind of child that just so happens to serve as the focal point for the culture war?
How do you explain to a child that although there is a 40 year-old treatment that addresses the permanent changes they are facing - that they did not ask for and will only be able to partially undo with years of expensive and painful surgery - they aren't allowed it now because JK Rowling got a little carried away with the new hobby she found half a decade ago, and money speaks so loudly that politicians are forced to listen? That despite the people who banned their future - no matter how elegantly you try to frame the blow - finally being gone from government, the next bunch are actually choosing to make it worse?
While I would vastly prefer that we were living in a social paradigm that made it possible, it is unfortunately the case that you cannot divorce suicide from the subject of healthcare for gender incongruent youth in the UK in 2024. We have been trying for decades, and came closer than we ever had previously circa-2017 just before the culture war kicked into gear.
The two sadly remain intrinsically and inescapably linked, and will continue to be for as long as this cultural context remains so deeply harmful. The people targeted at the focal point of the reactionary turn that has obliterated all the nuance and compassion we had painstakingly achieved in discourse simply don't have the luxury of getting to choose whether or not to engage with it, because it has now quite literally become a matter of life and death.
I'm not surprised that Jolyon is so frustrated. Every single person I know who has a transgender friend, family member or loved one is reeling from this callous move to perpetuate what was already an incredibly dangerous, rash decision forced into place without solid justification in a way that made it impossible to even seriously discuss or challenge.
I was speaking to an NHS clinician yesterday in a professional context who was having to bite her tongue at what is an astonishingly irresponsible decision made by a man who has no background in healthcare and no relevant experience, in defiance of established international protocol and the advice of subject matter experts with relevant experience, alongside an evident personal conflict of interest.
Wes Streeting will not have to see the impact of his decision on the daily lives of those it affects.
Their families and loved ones will.