Yesterday was a good day for children. Health Secretary Wes Streeting has announced that following expert advice, puberty-blocking drugs will no longer be prescribed to under-18s who are confused about their gender. A loophole allowing private providers based abroad to dash off prescriptions has also been closed. This marks the end of a medical experiment on some of the most vulnerable children in the UK, a scandal that ought to prompt a reckoning. Clinicians who turned a blind eye to the evidence, who broke their oath to “first do no harm”, must now be held accountable.

But while the children have finally been protected, transgender ideology remains deeply rooted throughout the NHS. Walk into any NHS hospital, and you will not only be confronted with rainbow lanyards, badges and vapid posters about identity, you will be subject to policies influenced by transgender activists. And away from the frontline, roles such as the National Advisor for LGBT Health ensure ideologues are reserved a seat at the top table. It has been left to ordinary people — patients, carers and NHS employees — to push back against the might of the equality, diversity and inclusion industry.

Staff have become campaigners for simply expecting to be treated with dignity at work. When a female group of nurses, known as the Darlington Five, complained about a trans-identified male colleague who insisted on changing alongside them, their employer, County Durham and Darlington NHS Foundation Trust, allegedly responded by telling the women they needed to broaden their minds. They are now suing the trust.

It is not only staff who are impacted by “trans inclusion” policies. Should a patient be lucky enough to secure an appointment, there is no guarantee that a wish to see a clinician of the same sex will be respected. When this was raised by Sex Matters executive director Maya Forstater, who highlighted the case of Kamilla Kamaruddin, a male trans-identified GP who she said “enjoys intimately examining female patients without their consent”, Forstater was investigated by the police.

But it is women-only NHS services, such as maternity, where the ridiculous overreach of trans ideology is most apparent. Over recent years, there has been a concerted push to strip back sex-specific language and to claim that “all genders” give birth. This is apparently so as not to offend a tiny minority of expectant mothers who identify as transmen or non-binary, women who are apparently triggered by words like “female” but not by pushing a baby out of their vagina. It seems clear such policies are not really about including a vulnerable group: rather, they are an offering thrown by anxious EDI managers to stuff the gobs of complaining trans activists.

Ultimately, the prioritisation of trans activists’ demands is not surprising, for today’s doctors are being indoctrinated before they even set foot in a ward. Nearly every medical school in the UK has signed a controversial charter written by GLADD, the Association of LGBTQ+ Doctors and Dentists. The document commits signatories to support the banning of “so-called LGBTQ+ ‘conversion therapy’ in the UK” and to ensure that curricula stress the “importance of working with LGBTQ+ patients” by affirming and respecting their gender identity. While this sounds anodyne, colluding in a patient’s identification as the opposite sex, or belief that they are neither sex, is based on ideology, not evidence.

The harm inflicted on thousands of children by NHS professionals is the nadir of corporate acceptance of transgenderism in the UK. It is right that Streeting has finally called an end to it. But this end should mark a beginning. It is now time to reclaim the public services taken over by ideologies which hurt us all.

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

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