If a government’s first duty is to protect its citizens, then Wes Streeting must step up to defend some of society’s most vulnerable. Instead, the Health Secretary is reportedly refusing to intervene over NHS plans to test puberty blockers on children.
Nearly £11 million has been allocated to experiment with drugs that may prevent children’s bones from developing normally. Streeting knows these drugs are potentially dangerous when used to stop the natural development of healthy children. He banned the practice last December after the Commission on Human Medicines found that there was an ‘unacceptable safety risk in the continued prescription of puberty blockers to children’. So why is Streeting not cracking down now?
Puberty blockers are not a new treatment. These drugs were used by the Tavistock’s now-closed Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) clinic for well over a decade.
After all that time, last year’s Cass Review of gender identity services for children and young people pointed out that puberty blockers can compromise bone density. The dangers could not be clearer.
As for the purported benefits, the review added that ‘no changes in gender dysphoria or body satisfaction were demonstrated’. Since many young people started on puberty blockers proceeded to cross-sex hormones, which change physical appearance, there was no evidence that puberty blockers bought any ‘time to think’ and some concern that they may change the ‘trajectory of psychosexual and gender identity development’.
After such damning comments, it beggars belief that the NHS isn’t taking a harder line on these treatments.
According to reports, Streeting seems to believe that this trial must go ahead because it had been recommended by the Cass Review itself. But Streeting needs to be reminded that, while the advice of doctors might be a necessary condition for another trial, it is not sufficient. If further evidence is needed, then it would be better to work through the evidence gathered from the Tavistock and to follow up previous patients.
My personal experience of adult gender services – I transitioned in 2012 and had gender-reassignment surgery in 2016 – did not involve any follow-up. For all my former clinicians know, unless they read my Spectator pieces, I could be dead.
In 2020, my GP contacted the gender clinic for advice on my long-term hormone regime. The response was to just keep prescribing the same dose of the same drug. She was not impressed: ‘If you were a woman who had had her ovaries removed, I would not be prescribing that!’ Since then, I took the decision to significantly reduce the dose myself, in the hope of reducing my risk of breast cancer.
This is experimental treatment, but I am an adult who went into this at 43. I was old enough to understand the consequences of what I was doing. I was able to consent. But this proposed trial involves children too young to consent to treatment that could well destroy their capacity to eventually have children of their own.
It’s not even clear to me what disease these medics are treating. If you had asked me back in 2012, I would have claimed that I was suffering from transsexualism and would have suggested that I was a woman born in a man’s body. Thirteen years later, I think that was nonsense.
My problems were driven by autogynephilia – a sexual attraction to the thought of myself as a woman, rather than to other people as women. It is a totally different condition from that experienced by teenage girls struggling with the pressures of becoming women.
Adolescence has always been a difficult time for some children. The thought of leaving childhood behind can be hard for youngsters to face. But it seems to me that the diagnosis of gender dysphoria has become far more common since puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones have become available. Children want it because it is there.
Even more worryingly, some parents might also want it for their children. Over a decade, GIDS took 382 referrals of children aged 6 and under. That doesn’t happen without the cooperation or – encouragement – of parents and carers.
In a controlled trial, there must be a control group. What will be the effect on them? After being dispensed placebos, the boys’ voices will break, and the girls will start developing breasts. While they might escape the physical effects of the drugs, they are at risk of psychological trauma of a different kind.
I am horrified that some doctors are keen to spend millions carrying out further experiments on children. It is the job of the government to see the bigger picture. Streeting must step in and stop this, or he risks it becoming his legacy.
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