Mick Hartley

Lara Brown in the Spectator – Why is Baroness Cass backing another puberty blocker trial?

Baroness Cass has long been hailed as a figure who restored sense to the battle over child transition. Her report on NHS gender identity services, The Cass Review, led to the puberty blocker ban and the closure of the Tavistock gender clinic.

But her work has also contributed to one of the most dangerous, unnecessary medical trials proposed in recent history. On 1 August, researchers at King’s College London will begin recruiting children as young as 11 to a clinical trial ‘that will explore how puberty-suppressing hormones impact the physical, social and emotional wellbeing of young people with gender incongruence’.

Participants judged to possess a ‘good understanding of the intervention and its possible benefits and risks’ will be prescribed gonadotropin-releasing hormone analogues – drugs initially developed to treat advanced prostate cancer but now used off label to chemically castrate sex offenders and stop puberty in gender-questioning children.

One has to assume that the researchers who devised this study have never actually met an 11-year-old. Otherwise, it is hard to imagine how they have concluded that someone so young is able to provide informed consent for a lifetime of fertility problems, the inability to achieve sexual function or osteoporosis, all possible side effects.

We are putting these children at risk of irreversible physical and cognitive problems in part because a trial was recommended in The Cass Review. On Tuesday, Baroness Cass argued that ‘some of the hype about risks have been exaggerated in that we genuinely don’t know if there are harms’ and that the trial is ‘essential’ to answer the question of ‘whether these drugs are helpful or not’.

It’s more than “putting these children at risk of irreversible physical and cognitive problems”: It’s next to certain that they’ll be irreparably damaged. These are powerful drugs. And the condition they’re proposing to treat, the belief that they were “born in the wrong body”, is a delusion: a social contagion. Most will be gay and/or autistic It’s an exercise in child cruelty. But hey, let’s just give them the drugs, see what happens.

Despite the fact these drugs have been routinely prescribed for more than 30 years, we do not really know what they do. Several observational studies have found that puberty suppression is associated with reduced bone mineral density accrual, particularly in the lumbar spine. But there remains insufficient information about the long-term consequences of puberty blocker use in gender-questioning children.

This dearth of evidence is no accident. As Baroness Cass observes in her own review, it is because gender services treating children globally have failed to investigate long-term outcomes….

Baroness Cass knows this. She has experienced first-hand the reluctance of NHS clinics to provide information about the outcomes of patients who have already received these drugs. So why, without any progress made on investigating existing patient data, is she prepared to endorse the government’s plan to recruit 226 more children to find out if puberty blockers really are dangerous?

This is a game of Russian roulette. And a completely unnecessary game at that. If ministers forced the NHS to produce data, there would be no need for another clinical trial.

It always seemed to me that Cass’s suggestion of a new trial was little more than a sop to the trans activists who were so vigorously attacking her.

In conclusion: we’re not sure if these very powerful drugs cause harm or not. Thousands of young people have already taken them – but the NHS doesn’t want to talk about that for some reason. So let’s take a new batch of deluded chidren – with deluded parents – and give them these drugs, and see what happens. It may ruin their lives; it may not.

It’s just vile.