Mick Hartley

Suzanne Moore in the Telegraph:

One of the shocking things that happened when the news broke that the controversial Pathways trial assessing the effect of puberty blockers on children was to be halted was that no one had bothered to tell Dr Hilary Cass….

The Pathways trial – ignominiously dubbed the “Streeting trial” by shadow health minister and consultant paediatrician Dr Caroline Johnson – was stopped by the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) over “fresh” concerns about how these powerful drugs may harm children in the long term. Cass was being interviewed on Radio New Zealand when the announcement was made. She seemed to have had no forearming from Streeting. She averred that it was “something to do with technical details being ironed out”, suggesting still that the trial was basically sound.

Actually, far from it: the MHRA recommendation that children could not consent to having their puberty blocked at eight, and instead had to be 14 to participate, effectively kiboshes the trial because most girls will have reached puberty by then.

Has Streeting used Cass as a political pawn since the report was published, to use her as a fall guy to mask his own failures of leadership? Many of us never understood why this trial had to happen in the first place, unless it was a sop to trans activists and an attempt to push this issue into the long grass.

We already know from countless studies what puberty blockers do: they affect bone density as well as cognitive development. They may cause vaginal bleeding in very young girls. But the main issue is that they are not taken in a vacuum. They nearly always lead on to cross-sex hormones. They are a fast-track to medicalising a child forever.

No new evidence caused the MHRA to pull the trial back. Rather, they got cold feet about the age of the children involved when it came to the trial protocol that meant asking them about “fertility preservation”. Are you really going to ask small girls who have never had a period about “egg retrieval” for freezing? Are you going to ask young boys about sperm donation before you set them on a path to future infertility? How can a child consent to this?…

Both Cass and Streeting speak of the demand from children and their families for these drugs, as though that in itself justifies the risks. We know that around 2,000 children went on blockers after being referred by the Tavistock gender identity clinic… before the NHS banned the drugs following Cass’s findings. The Tavistock failed to track the long-term medical outcomes of these children; furthermore, most NHS Trusts that ran adult gender identity clinics would not share their clinical data with Cass.

It is crazy that a new cohort of kids must be experimented on. As soon as the public began to understand this, they were appalled. None of this, by the way, is about the rights of adults to transition or present as they like. This is an issue about the safeguarding of children, a concept that gender ideology regards as utterly disposable.

Fundamentally, this is a moral judgement – and one that Wes Streeting has failed to get right. He has admitted that he felt “discomfort” about the trial but that’s not good enough.

As Health Secretary, he should have stepped in to prevent it. Cass is not a political animal, so it would come as no surprise if she felt compelled to appease the trans mob (she was subject to horrible threats by them, remember) with the concession of a puberty blockers trial. But if she could not stand up to the activists, then Streeting should have done.

But he was intimidated. He thought the trial might get the trans activists – not least the trans activists in the Labour Party – off his back. Not a good look for a prospective leader.