Children as young as 12 can consent to trans-affirming medical interventions, Scotland’s social care watchdog has told bodies responsible for looking after the country’s most vulnerable young people.
Experts said that the Care Inspectorate’s guidance, issued to services responsible for children in care this week, flew in the face of emerging expert evidence about the dangers of adopting an exclusively “affirming” approach to children who declare themselves transgender.
The new rule told staff to adopt the chosen names and pronouns of young people and suggested they can refer them to the Sandyford clinic, a controversial gender facility which has compared its own methods to those used at the disgraced Tavistock Clinic in London.
The guidance stated that facilities such as toilets are only sex-segregated owing to “social convention” and that young trans people should be able to share bedrooms with other young people who “share their gender identity”, pending risk assessments.
It also cited a case study in which a young person in care has been “supported” by a child care home to have a mastectomy.
The guidance pointed to Scottish legislation which “recognises that a young person aged 12 and over is presumed to have sufficient capacity to make decisions about medical treatment, although we recognise this will not always be the case”.
Read the full article on yahoo at Children as young as 12 can have puberty blockers, Scots watchdog says (yahoo.com) but originally from the Telegraph.