Mick Hartley

It's perhaps no surprise in the murky world of online pharmacies that children who want to transition, or more likely their parents, can actually buy the necessary stuff online. From the Times:

Parents of transgender children can bypass NHS safeguards by arranging home deliveries of life-changing medication from an online pharmacy in Britain, The Times has learnt.

Puberty blockers and sex hormones can be dispatched via a “quick, discreet delivery” once they pay for prescriptions from a private clinic abroad. This allows people to avoid some checks and safeguards that protect children who are referred for NHS treatment.

Clear Chemist in Liverpool can deliver the drugs thanks to a loophole allowing the dispensing of prescriptions from Switzerland or a European Economic Area country. The prescriptions are from GenderGP, a private company founded by Helen Webberley, who was fined in 2018 for running an unlicensed transgender clinic from her home in south Wales. She was suspended by the General Medical Council.

She moved her clinic to Spain and last year it was acquired by a Hong Kong-registered owner, Harland International. She still features on the website and is a non-medical adviser….

GenderGP requires “information gathering sessions” by video link, charged at £65, but its other counselling and support services are voluntary. Children using NHS services have a GP referral, a telephone assessment, three to six therapy sessions and two appointments with an endocrinology team before treatment is approved.

Mermaids, a transgender charity, removed a GenderGP link from its website in May last year. However, The Times has seen redacted screenshots taken this year from forums on the Mermaids site, in which parents discussed experiences with GenderGP.

One said there were “no invasive questions like we had at Tavi”, referring to the Tavistock and Portman NHS clinic in London. Another said: “My son spoke to the counsellor three days after we signed up and they are happy for him to start puberty blockers.”

Parents may have been bullied into thinking that their children are at high risk of suicide if they're not allowed their way with the gender change – thanks to propaganda from the likes of Mermaids and Stonewall – or they've swallowed the whole homophobic line about "sensitive" boys really being boys with a girl brain, or tomboys really being girls with a boy brain. Either way it's clearly a grotesque abuse of parental responsibility to allow such damaging and life-changing drugs near their children at such a young age.

And it's particularly distasteful to see Mermaids now trying to be the responsible ones…