Mick Hartley

An excellent editorial in the Times this morning – NHS puberty blockers trial would turn children into guinea pigs:

The mistreatment of children at the Tavistock’s gender identity clinic ranks as one of the gravest medical scandals in recent history. By the time the NHS-run service was permanently closed last March, it had become a matter of routine for its clinicians to prescribe trans-identified children with drugs that arrested the onset of puberty. Though misleadingly presented as a consequence-free intervention, in reality the majority of the thousands of children given puberty blockers advanced to cross-sex hormones, and some to brutalising and medically-unnecessary surgeries.

What makes the scandal at the Tavistock all the more shocking is that its excesses were no accident: they were the predictable result of implementing the mistaken ideology that some children are born into the wrong sex. Taking this pernicious but fashionable belief at face value led doctors to abandon an array of professional norms and standards of good practice with alarming zeal.

As Dr Hilary Cass’s landmark 2024 report into the NHS’s gender services concluded, the rationale for the use of puberty blockers on children remains “unclear”, with only “remarkably weak evidence” available as to their long-term effects. Yet perversely, Dr Cass’s accurate highlighting of the scant evidence base for the experimental treatments used at the Tavistock is now poised to set in train a process that is all but certain to see more children harmed. On Friday the NHS announced plans to launch a £10.7 million clinical trial looking into the drugs’ effects, with trans-identified children once again to be used as the human guinea pigs. This study cannot be allowed to proceed….

Originally developed to treat prostate cancer, and occasionally used in the chemical castration of male sex offenders, puberty blockers act on the pituitary gland to shut off the natural production of sex hormones. They have never been licensed for use by children suffering feelings of cross-sex identification, but little in the way of medical expertise is needed to imagine their potential harms.

Puberty is not an optional extra in a healthy human being’s biological life plan. It is a extended physiological process involving a range of fundamental cognitive and psychological changes. Suppressing it is a disaster for the individual concerned. The notion that an ethical trial should be undertaken to establish the possible downsides of chemically sterilising children is as macabre as it is irrational. That research could be conducted over a long enough time-scale to establish informative results, while remaining experimentally well-controlled, is just as dubious.

Recent data from GP records suggests the number of children diagnosed with gender dysphoria has increased 50-fold over ten years. That trend, however, bears all the hallmarks of a social contagion, one aided and abetted by social media. Confronting such developments, adults, not least doctors, have a responsibility to prevent, rather than collude in, the mistaken choices children are liable to make about their own best interest.