Mick Hartley

Suzanne Moore in the Telegraph adds her voice to the puberty blocker debate:

All the “Be kind” folk , the “Live and let live” people – you need to wake up. You need to understand this is where gender ideology has led: not to merry rainbow parades, but to stunting the bones and brains of small children, in an effort to prove what? That cruel and horrible mantra that they were “born in the wrong body”. How can Labour support this?

Leave it to the loony-tunes Greens and Lib Dems to spout that insanity. There is already mass revulsion and legal challenges will be mounted. The MP Rosie Duffield is organising an emergency parliamentary meeting about the trial on Nov 25.

Leave our kids alone. Harming children in the name of trans ideology is deeply wrong. The experiment must not go ahead. Distressed kids and their parents may have all drunk the KoolAid but grown-ups like Streeting have to say: “We will support you emotionally, but we will not let others destroy your body, brain and life chances”.

If Wes Streeting does not stop this trial, this will be his appalling legacy.

It’s not looking good. In reply to Kemi Badenoch’s letter strongly opposing the trial – ““activist ideology masquerading as research” – Streeting’s somewhat patronising reply:

I’ll reply formally and fully, but I’m surprised by this letter.

The Conservatives commissioned the Cass Review and accepted its recommendations in full.

I did, too, and am implementing it.

I’m keen to maintain a cross-party approach on such a sensitive issue.

There was the good part of the Cass Review, getting puberty blockers banned, and there was the bad part, suggesting a future trial. It seems obvious that the second part was an add-on, attempting to appease trans activists. It was a mistake – but Streeting makes out he can’t see it.

Bev Jackson (of LGB Alliance):

Wes, there is nothing surprising about this letter. Many of us were so relieved with the main findings of the Cass Review that we decided it was not the time to focus on its ill-advised recommendation of a clinical trial.

Furthermore, the world has changed since then. First, the Supreme Court ruling has clarified the law in ways that make a future on medication without acceptance as “the opposite sex” less attractive.

Second, the interdisciplinary HHS Review, more wide-ranging and informative, makes it absolutely clear that placing distressed children with healthy bodies on puberty blockers is medical malpractice.

Amid a wealth of dubious U-turns, Wes, cancelling this trial would be a wholly justifiable U-turn. Please listen: you don’t want to harm children and you don’t want this abomination to be your legacy.