The United Kingdom will spend $13.9 million to study the impacts of puberty blockers on minors experiencing gender-related distress. The U.K.’s National Health Service earlier this month announced its plan to invest in much-anticipated research into the controversial treatments, for which there remains insufficient data, per an NHS-commissioned report called the Cass Review. The study still needs to pass muster with an NHS ethics board.  

The stakes of Britain’s study have only intensified following PresidentTrump’s return to power, which poses an existential threat to the American branch of pediatric gender medicine, a beleaguered field that provides medical treatments and surgeries to minors to change their sex characteristics. Advocates of the treatments refer to these interventions as gender-affirming care, while the White House, in a recent executive order, labeled them as “chemical and surgical mutilation.”