Mick Hartley

Andrew Doyle adds to the clamour against the puberty blocker trail:

We need to be honest about what is happening here. An unevidenced and pseudoscientific claim is being assumed to be true, and innocent children will almost certainly be injured as a result. This is wholly unethical. Medical trials are initiated on the principle that the potential benefits outweigh the potential risks. But, as Tavistock whistleblower Dr David Bell has pointed out, these trials will ‘introduce a known risk of systemic physical harm to a physically healthy child. To put it mildly, this is a divergence from normal clinical practice’.

Why stop at trials for puberty blockers? In some communities in the Democratic Republic of Congo, children believed to be possessed by kindoki – a type of evil spiritual influence – are treated by beating, starvation, burning or forced submersion in water. There is no evidence for the existence of kindoki, and those who believe in such witchcraft represent a minority of the population. So will the government commission a medical trial to ascertain whether beating, starving, burning and submerging a cohort of children is beneficial to their wellbeing?

The analogy seems extreme, but testing for the presence of demons is no less absurd than doing so for the existence of an innate gendered soul. If evidence for such a phenomenon were to be discovered, and reputable doctors were then to put forward a case that this soul/body incongruence is best treated with medical rather than therapeutic intervention, then a puberty blocker trial might be justified. We are so far from this scenario that it is astonishing it is even being entertained as a possibility.

Injecting children with a hormone-suppressing drug to investigate supernatural claims is simply not morally defensible. It will doubtless impact most severely on children who are autistic, who suffer from unrelated traumas, or who are likely to grow up gay. While the power of the genderist ideology continues to decline, we need to be alert to those in positions of power who still insist on conflating medicine with metaphysics. Children should never have to pay the price for the delusions of those entrusted with their care.