Mick Hartley

It’s a grim irony that the health secretary who’s authorising the puberty blocker trial is gay, given that, as many have argued, the momentum behind “gender affirming care” is profoundly homophobic – “transing away the gay”. Kate Barker at Spiked:

Figures from the Tavistock Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) are stark and troubling. Eighty-nine per cent of the girls and 81 per cent of the boys who attended the clinic said they were same-sex attracted. They were persuaded that their emerging sense that they were lesbian, gay or bisexual meant they were trapped in the wrong body and should be ‘treated’ with powerful drugs. Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch was right to describe ‘gender-affirming care’ for children as ‘transing away the gay’. Adding to Streeting’s hesitance must be the fear that he, the first out gay man to run the Department of Health and Social Care, would be the enabler-in-chief of this scandal.

The medicalisation of homosexuality undoubtedly has a long and ugly history. As the UK’s only charity exclusively for lesbians, gays and bisexuals, LGB Alliance, where I am CEO, led the fight against puberty blockers. Streeting was an incredible ally, and did the bravest thing a politician can do: he admitted he was wrong.

We call on him to be brave again, and reconsider this mass medical experiment on children – the vast majority of whom will grow up to be lesbian, gay or bisexual.

It’s sobering to reflect that Alan Turing was given feminising drugs – in effect chemical castration – to “cure” him of his homosexuality back in 1952. It’s now universally recognised as a monstrous betrayal of a man who gave so much to this country as a computer pioneer and a hero of Bletchley Park, and casts a dark shadow over the medical ethics of the time. Yet here we are, over seventy years later….on children.