Mick Hartley

Maya Forstater at The Critic on the puberty blocker trial:

The government has licensed the “pathways” puberty blockers experiment to go ahead. Drugs used for chemical castration will be given to children with the hope of improving their mental wellbeing moderately for a few years. The Health Secretary, Wes Streeting, is the man responsible. Clinicians and parliamentarians have written to him, asking him to think again. He has said he feels “uncomfortable”. So he should. It is obscene to ask an overwrought child to make the unconscionable decision to take this drug for this purpose, and unethical for the state to offer it to them.

Children who are too young to vote, get a tattoo or even decide what subjects to study at school cannot understand what they are being asked to put at risk in order to pursue their desire to “transition”. This includes the chance to go through normal physical and mental development, to understand their sexual orientation, to have a fulfilling adult sex life, to have children and to enjoy decades of life in a healthy body rather than as a lifelong medical patient.

They are also too young to understand, or perhaps too strongly committed to accept, that the promise on the other side is a mis-sold dream. There is no combination of pills, surgeries and laws that can enable a boy to grow up to be a woman or a girl to become a man. The Supreme Court made this clear last year. This should have led to a re-evaluation of this proposed experiment on children. Instead, NHS bureaucrats and the medical researchers carried on regardless, and the Health Secretary allowed them.

Streeting claims that his approach “has been led by the evidence, not ideology”, but the justification for the trial is drenched in gender ideology.

Children will be asked questions such as whether they “prefer to behave like my affirmed gender” and whether they agree that “every time someone treats me like my assigned sex I feel hurt”.

The committee did not ask even basic questions, such as what is meant by “gender” and “sex” or what it would mean to “live and be accepted as a person of the affirmed gender” (desire to do this is amongst the diagnostic criteria).

Without qualms or concerns it signed off survey tools that ask children whether they are “definitely a boy”, “mainly a boy”, “definitely a girl”, “mainly a girl” or “neither a boy or girl”; and whether they describe themselves as “cisgender”, “transgender”, “non-binary”, “agender”, “genderfluid”, “genderqueer”, “two spirit” or “other”.

These terms and questions are based on the promise that a person can leave behind their sex (“assigned sex”, in the terminology of the trial protocol) and become a person of the opposite sex (“affirmed gender”). It uses “boy” and “girl” for both concepts. The committee did not ask if the children could understand this bait-and-switch in language. They didn’t even ask themselves if they understood it.

And they’ve dodged the most fundamental questions.

Every decision-maker involved in this story has somehow overlooked two crucial facts that have been available in plain sight all along, and which were the basis for the Supreme Court judgment last year. Human beings cannot change sex. And other people have rights. It shouldn’t take courage — or indeed any particular insight — to say either of these things.

Stunting a child’s mental, physical, sexual and reproductive development based on an impossible dream isn’t kindness, it’s child abuse. Passing the responsibility to children to make the decision is deeply unethical.