“Gender-affirming care” is one of the most devious euphemisms in the common lexicon today. It rightly should be called “gender-denying care” because that’s what is actually happening. “Gender-affirming care” is the pet name used by cultists who are seeking to normalize the sexualization of children and transgenderism and who are taking advantage of the mentally distressed. Europe, however, is starting to reverse course on this abusive treatment plan.

The United Kingdom’s (UK) National Health Service (NHS) announced last Friday that it was going to seriously restrict dispensing of puberty blockers as a treatment option for kids struggling with gender dysphoria. In its statement, the NHS wrote, “There is not enough evidence to support their safety or clinical effectiveness as a routinely available treatment.” In other words, puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones don’t fix gender dysphoria and in fact cause irreparable harm.

This is in total contrast to the United States’ stance on treating anyone, but particularly minors, struggling with gender confusion. President Joe Biden openly attacks any sort of restriction on “gender-affirming” treatment. Over the weekend, Biden told a crowd gathered for a pride event at the White House: “We need to push back against the hundreds of callous and cynical bills and laws introduced in states targeting transgender children, terrifying families, and criminalizing doctors and nurses. These bills and laws attack the most basic values and freedoms we have as Americans — that’s not hyperbole.”

The truth is that these laws prevent children from being sexualized and ideologically groomed. More importantly, they prevent children from destroying their health before the brain’s frontal lobe is fully developed.

The UK in particular is about a decade ahead on the treatment of children identifying as the opposite sex. The shift away from cognitive behavioral therapy and other effective forms of talk therapy toward just blindly affirming is a major contributing factor behind the Tavistock Centre being closed.

The UK isn’t the only country shifting tentatively toward reality. The Norwegian Healthcare Investigation Board also announced that it was revising its guidelines on “gender-affirming care.” It is not only restricting access to puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones but also severely restricting gender mutilation surgeries.

In the U.S., a person can get approved for a gender mutilation surgery in very short order. The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh did an undercover operation that exposed the two most major “transgender healthcare” providers actively expediting patients for surgeries and working the insurance companies to get these unnecessary surgeries approved as “healthcare.” His undercover producer was able to get approved for an orchiectomy — testicle removal — after 22 minutes.

Finland and Sweden have been on the front lines of researching the lasting impacts of transgenderism. And yet, in the U.S., transgender activists are able to bully formerly prestigious science journals into suppressing research that points to the vast majority of gender “transitions” being the result of a social contagion.

The Federalist’s Jordan Boyd puts it best when she writes, “We need to not just ban the demonic act of chopping off healthy body parts or rendering them useless with castrating drugs, but also punish the people promoting and executing the left’s shop of horrors behind parents’ backs.” People who pursue medical and social interventions to deny their biological sex are brainwashed victims and probably mentally ill (or at least seriously struggling). It is rank abuse of the vulnerable.

It is a hopeful sign that European countries are starting to review their guidelines. The U.S. should do the same as the larger public tide is turning against the transgender ideologues. And because it’s simply the right thing to do.