Mick Hartley

Stella O’Malley at Spiked

At the start of this year, it did seem as if sanity had returned to the discussion of children’s mental health after years dominated by trans ideology. The Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) had been closed down. The NHS had banned puberty blockers. And the claim that trans-identifying people face a dramatically heightened suicide risk without ‘gender-affirming’ treatment had been exposed as a dangerous lie. It certainly looked as though Britain had finally shaken itself awake from the feverish promises of medical transition.

But in February this year, in an astonishing example of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, the NHS announced that it was to spend £10million on a puberty-blockers trial. It was as if a bridge had collapsed, and had then been cordoned off to prevent further harm, only for engineers to decide to reopen it and send children across it again – as though the precise nature of the disaster could only be clarified by reenacting it.

Last week, it was announced that this puberty-blocker trial – the Pathways Trial – had been granted ‘ethical’ approval. Involving over 220 young participants, aged between 10 and 16, recruited over the next three years. And so it seems that we are back in the same moral swamp that birthed the crisis, medicating vulnerable, troubled children, only this time we cannot pretend we do not know better.

Not only did we think the NHS had taken the Cass Review on board, we also believed that Health Secretary Wes Streeting was a man of principle after he stood up to the trans activists and banned puberty blockers. Turns out we were wrong on both counts.