Amid Britain’s prevailing gloom, there’s one thing we Brits can cheer. While much of Europe still bows to the cult of transgender ideology, we have rejected it. Health Secretary Wes Streeting has accepted the Cass Review, ensuring that puberty blockers are no longer routinely prescribed to children by the NHS — and that private prescriptions for “gender dysphoria” are banned as well.

The Cass Review set out, in clinical terms, that so-called “gender medicine” for children has been built on shaky foundations with remarkably weak evidence of benefit. The Commission on Human Medicines concluded there is currently an unacceptable safety risk in prescribing puberty blockers to minors. Reported side effects include damage to fertility, reduced bone density, and lowered IQ. That is why the UK moved away from the affirmative model.

Yet activists are already working around the ban. As the Telegraph reported, families are being funneled to doctors in Ireland and Spain, with puberty blocking drugs and cross-sex hormones dispensed through a network of “known pharmacies”. The outfit at the center of this, Anne Health, promises to guide customers “through the details of how to order, purchase, collect, and arrange the medication’s administration with a qualified medical professional in an EU country.”

The Department of Health has condemned the company — co-founded by Susie Green, former head of child transition charity Mermaids — warning that “advising parents on how to circumvent health regulations put in place to protect children is irresponsible and dangerous”. Anne Health says it is “actively helping families”, and Green is unrepentant.

Arguably Brexit allowed the UK breathing space, and within Europe, the UK has become a sanctuary of sanity from trans ideology. From feminists and gay rights campaigners to Christians and conservatives, activists have pushed back against the lobby groups that have infiltrated EU institutions. Whereas trans lobby group Stonewall has become a shell of its former self, its European sibling, ILGA, still sets the direction of travel within the European parliament.

Consequently, while Britain is putting on the brakes, Germany has become an unlikely and unintentional source of comedy in Europe. After passing a self-ID law last year, a mustached male neo-Nazi is demanding to be housed in a women’s prison. Meanwhile, in Denmark, a psychotherapist is being sued for “misgendering” a trans activist after warning about the hardcore fetish pornography he produces. And when it comes to children, EU countries are only now beginning to question puberty blockers and breast-binding. For once, then, the UK is leading.

At the same time, horrors more common outside of Europe, such as breast ironing and female genital mutilation, are treated very differently. In parts of Africa, where these rituals are more common, the UK recognizes them not as medical treatments but as harmful cultural practices.

Those are crimes the British state rightly condemns: we issue protection orders, track prevalence and insist on zero tolerance. Yet when a harmful practice arrives in the guise of a fashionable Western ideology, there is collective blindness. One we prosecute as abuse while the other remains accessible via EU pathways and activist networks.

Britain should be proud of having pulled the emergency brake on affirmative “gender medicine”. But if we’re serious about safeguarding, we must close the loopholes that invite medical tourism for banned drugs and make clear that activists who facilitate harm to children should be criminalized.

The UK’s stance on FGM taught us something simple: when a culture demands injury to secure acceptance, a civilized society says “no”. Apply the same clarity here. Call the pseudoscience of gender medicine what it is: a harmful cultural practice.

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Josephine Bartosch is assistant editor at The Critic and co-author of the forthcoming book Pornocracy.

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