The thing about Liz Truss' comments re the Gender Recognition Act (which is a piece of devolved legislation here, so I'm mainly talking in regards to Westminster here) is the last (somewhat vague) point she made. She wants to 'protect under 18s from making decisions which...

are irreversible in the future', which as far as one liners go, probably looks fairly inoffensive to most people, but when it's clear what she actually means is a restriction on healthcare offered to trans children, it becomes somewhat more distressing.

When looking at services which are offered to children who are said to experience gender dysphoria, the majority of what the NHS offer is simply different types of counselling, both for the child and for their families. NHS England offer 'family therapy, individual child therapy

parental support and counselling, group work for young people and their parents, regular reviews to monitor gender identity development and hormone therapy' - I'll get to hormone therapy in a sec, but it's clear that the other options are there to help prevent and walk through...

what could be a fairly distressing time/mental health issues. This is an essential service, and is vital to prevent what could become a mental health pandemic if removed. When it comes to hormone therapy, this is only provided to people under the age of 18 in the most...

severe cases, i.e the person is showing clear and consistent distress (may be at risk of self-harm or worse). When we talk about hormone treatment in this regard, It is broken down into two categories, puberty blockers (GnRH) if the person is yet to reach puberty, and hormones..

which are provided on a permanent basis. Lets start with puberty blockers, in cases where the person is showing consistent distress/a desire to live as the opposite sex, these can be given to halt puberty until they are such an age where they can choose...

to take other measures, such as permanent hormone treatment, and/or surgery if desired. The thing about puberty blockers THEY ARE ENTIRELY REVERSIBLE and can be stopped at any time. So these should not be in the firing line for Truss' office. Then there is permanent...

hormone treatment. This is not something which is generally offered to trans children and would usually involve treatment in an adult gender clinic, which is only available to people over the age of 17. Again, at this stage the majority of treatment is psychological until...

a person is ready to go down the route of taking hormones which would help them live as their true gender. If this is not clear via this thread, to get to this point it takes a lot of counselling and treatment, and if they start the hormones and on the rare occasion decide