Wes Streeting’s announcement that he intends to renew the ban on the private supply of puberty blockers is a very welcome move. Although the new Health Secretary has, by his own admission, accepted the demands of trans activists without reservation, he has clearly embarked on an intellectual journey towards a more proportionate and reasonable position.
And after the Cass study, the evidence – or more precisely, the lack of evidence – on medical interventions for children is absolutely clear. According to its author, the eminent paediatrician Dr Hilary Cass: “We have no good evidence on the long-term outcomes of interventions to manage gender-related distress.”
Yet for decades, in Gids clinics in the UK and around the world, endocrinologists working with psychologists have been chemically arresting the natural puberty of physically healthy children under the guise of combating mental illness: a bold gamble that many would call reckless. A growing number of international clinicians are now expressing serious reservations, both because of the potentially serious side effects and because it is far from clear that blocking puberty consistently alleviates mental distress in all cases.
One of the most well-known issues is the potential reduction in future fertility, early osteoporosis and the shutdown of cognitive function at a crucial stage of brain development. Following the Cass case, the use of progesterone blockers will be strictly controlled in the health service, but commercial suppliers such as GenderGP have insisted they will continue to supply what they see as a huge market. Thanks to the leadership of Streeting and his counterpart Victoria Atkins before him, we now appear closer to protecting thousands of families from the clutches of these unscrupulous companies.
Predictably, the health minister is now facing a backlash, particularly from those who have staked their careers, reputations or incomes on claiming that puberty blockers are simply a fully reversible “pause button”. Susie Green, the former CEO of Mermaids, called the ban “murderous” and said Streeting had “blood on her hands”, referring to her long-debunked claim that using puberty blockers reduces the risk of suicide among young people in sexual distress.
Former tax lawyer turned activist Jolyon Maugham – whose organisation The Good Law Project is currently launching a legal challenge against Atkins’ original legislation – has spoken of an “explosion in deaths among people on the NHS waiting list since NHS England introduced a more flexible version of the ban”, also demanding that Streeting “listen to trans people”.
Asked by a US newspaper about Maugham’s suicide claims, Cass said she had “spoken to a Gids staff member who reported an increase in deaths among children on the waiting list, but no evidence was provided”. Given what we now know about Gids’ ideological orientation and its unstructured and chaotic approach to treatment, the fact that its former staff are again making wild claims without providing evidence is hardly surprising.
The tragedy of this field of medicine for an entire generation is that it has become so intensely politicized, with advocates arguing for infant transition because it supposedly contributes to social justice, not because there is solid, non-anecdotal evidence that it helps the child.
Writings about medical scandals typically describe the “therapeutic fallacy,” where patients and doctors can end up wrongly believing that a drug works in particular cases. Given this possibility, it would be unconscionable to let patients and their families decide whether physically invasive interventions are necessary or not. And yet, this is what campaigners like Green and Maugham seem to want to pressure Streeting to do.
Fortunately, he seems to recognise that fantasies of justice or personal liberation cannot trump the sober application of established research methods – particularly when it comes to the wellbeing of young people. Hopefully, Education Minister Bridget Phillipson will pay attention: as Cass points out, “the importance of what happens in schools cannot be underestimated… it is important that school guidance is able to use some of the principles and evidence that come out of the study.”
In education, as in medicine, it is no longer morally defensible to change juvenile policy based on the demands of activists. We need to see courageous adults back in the classroom, and in this case, Streeting seems to be one of them.
