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.
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