The ban on puberty blockers is long overdue

The medical and political establishments have failed vulnerable children for long enough. At last, the tide is turning.

The United Kingdom is regressing in many ways, but when it comes to the threat of gender identity ideology it is the indisputable world leader. After years of tireless work from women’s rights and gay rights campaigners, a rigorous four-year study into pediatric gender care by Dr Hilary Cass, and persistent pressure from a handful of politicians in the face of fierce opposition, the government has now announced an indefinite ban on the prescription of puberty blockers to minors.

This follows on from a previous ban under emergency powers by the Former health secretary Victoria Atkins at the end of May. Wes Streeting, the current Health Secretary, made the announcement in parliament yesterday.

“The Cass review made it clear that there is not enough evidence about the long-term effects of using puberty blockers to treat gender incongruence to know whether they are safe or beneficial. That evidence should have been established before they were ever prescribed for that purpose. It is a scandal that medicine was given to vulnerable young children, without proof that it was safe or effective, or that it had gone through the rigorous safeguards of a clinical trial.”

Unscrupulous private health clinics who were profiting from the prescription of these drugs had been trying to find legal loopholes to continue even after the NHS had banned the treatment back in March. Dr Aidan Kelly from private clinic Gender Plus appeared on Novara Media’s podcast to argue that the evidence demanded by Cass is neither deliverable nor desirable. Now Streeting’s announcement has made clear that all such loopholes will finally be closed. The likes of Dr Kelly will no longer be able to get away with their unethical practices.

Some ill-informed politicians were not happy with Streeting’s statement, having persuaded themselves that such a thing as “gender identity” exists even when no-one has been able to provide a satisfactory definition. Streeting has made clear that he is observing the evidence of medical experts in the implementation of this ban. Nevertheless, the denials in parliament came thick and fast, with his fellow Labour MP Kate Osborne saying that she was “hugely disappointed” by his statement and that “the restrictions on puberty blockers remove the clinical expertise from medical decision making”. Of course, the precise opposite is true.

The Green Party representative for Brighton Pavillion, Siân Berry, went even further, asking: “Does he understand that this is, at heart, discriminatory?” It’s as though she has never read the Cass Review. Streeting’s response summarised what should have been asserted many years ago, that such claims from ideologues like Berry demonstrate “why we should listen to clinicians, not politicians”.

We should not necessarily be surprised at this imperviousness to evidence from know-nothing politicians. Ever since the Cass Review was published in April, activists have been scrambling to dismiss the study’s findings as “evidence-free”, “transphobic” and even (in the case of one particularly ignorant comedian) “far right”. Part of the reason why this ban has taken so long is that major medical institutions and organisations have been infected with the toxin of ideology. The WPATH Files (internal memos leaked from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, the world’s leading and most influential body on “gender medicine”) revealed that the organisation is largely dominated by activists with scant or dubious medical qualifications. Doctors who have expressed concerns have been intimidated into silence, and so the donkeys have been leading the handlers.

Studies have shown for years that the overwhelming majority of children who experience feelings of gender dysphoria find these symptoms alleviated through the process of puberty. Yet the pseudo-religious belief that we each have a sexed soul, or “gender identity”, had been allowed to overwhelm the clear evidence that to block puberty is to block the cure. Activists have been allowed to declare plain falsehoods as though they were facts – such as the notion that human beings can change sex, or that children can be born in the wrong body – and culture warriors have succeeded in coercing governments around the world to reshape public health policy in accordance with their superstitions.

The tide is most definitely turning. Organisations that have pushed these medical experiments on young people – Stonewall, Mermaids, Pink News, et al. – are now being discredited one by one. Hearings in the supreme court in the US and here in the UK have subjected gender identity ideology to the kind of scrutiny it has always avoided through shrill pronouncements of “no debate”. Smearing people as “bigots” for raising concerns only works up to a point; when it comes to people’s children, it was never going to be a winning strategy in the long run.

The government’s long overdue ban on puberty blockers shows that when falsehood and truth are allowed to grapple on the battlefield of ideas – to borrow John Milton’s metaphor – the latter will invariably triumph. For all that Pink News has attempted to demonise anyone who challenges this dangerous orthodoxy, the current scandal facing its leadership suggests that it has been finally defanged. (You can read more details of this scandal in Julie Bindel’s excellent piece for UnHerd.)

In hindsight, it seems fantastical that our society could have permitted this medical scandal to persist for so long, given that the prescription of puberty blockers was always unevidenced and has left many children infertile and deprived of sexual function for life. There is evidence that puberty blockers have caused instances of testicular atrophy, increased risk of cancer, osteoporosis, and impaired brain development. Cases of autism, abuse, and other co-morbidities were disproportionately common among children who were given “gender-affirming care”. Why would we ever have tolerated inflicting this on healthy children when a psychotherapeutic approach was so clearly required?

It comes down to activists and their complete disregard for reality. In December 2021, Novara Media published an article suggesting ways in which medical professionals could be deceived into prescribing opposite sex hormones. “I’m not suggesting you tell any especially big fibs”, the article says, “but maybe finesse your story into one that’s likely to be received with the least amount of confusion (and bear that in mind with the psychiatrists too)… You’re not here to make friends, you’re here to get hormones. Don’t feel bad about it.” It goes without saying that such advice is grotesquely irresponsible.

A lot of people are going to have to start making excuses, and we can expect to see many of those who have applauded these needless medical experimentations on children back-pedalling or revising their own history. We know that between 80 and 90 percent of adolescents referred to the Tavistock paediatric gender clinic were same-sex attracted. That the NHS was effectively practicing gay conversion therapy for so long is a shameful indictment of a failed system. And that so many supported it is beyond credulity.

The BBC has been complicit too, failing to report on the WPATH Files at all and thereby providing cover for the institutionalised abuse of children. Then there are the politicians who filibustered for four hours about ferrets to avoid a discussion on the social transitioning of children in schools tabled by Liz Truss. You can read more about this scandal here. Those MPs who gleefully disregarded the welfare of children should never be allowed to pretend they were not complicit.

Of course, some activist politicians have come out swinging against Labour’s ban. Maggie Chapman of the Scottish Greens had this to say on X:

Chapman had previously criticised biology textbooks in schools for stating that sex is binary and has suggested that children as young as eight should be able to transition. It is incredible just how wrong you can be if you assume that you are on “the right side of history”.

There is little doubt that history won’t look kindly on the likes of Chapman, and that in decades to come we’ll look back at this period and wonder how any of this was ever permitted to occur. All those who blithely cheered on the medicalisation of healthy children, and who continue to do so in spite of the evidence, can eventually expect to be held to account.

There is still much more work to be done. The UK is in many ways an outlier, and countries such as Canada are still charging down a regressive path. In the US, Donald Trump has pledged to put a stop to the transitioning of minors when he assumes office, but there will be intense opposition from activists who have been allowed to inveigle their way into positions of power. In the meantime, we should be thankful for those standing up for the evidence: Sajid Javid for commissioning the Cass Review, Dr Hillary Cass for carrying it out, and Victoria Atkins and Wes Streeting for implementing its findings. Above all, we should be grateful to all those individuals and campaigning groups, too numerous to mention, who have risked so much to protect the most vulnerable.

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