Wes Streeting has defended plans for the NHS to conduct a puberty blocker trial. The Times report:
The health secretary has defended an NHS trial of puberty blockers as he faces pressure from dozens of MPs for the study to be halted.
Up to 250 girls and boys as young as ten will be recruited from NHS gender clinics to join the clinical trial of hormone-suppressing drugs, which is being run by King’s College London.
Streeting has argued the trial has ‘ethics and safety at its heart’. But it is a struggle to understand how a human trial on children, using drugs that are known to cause irreversible damage already, can possibly be described as either ethical or safe.
The Times go on:
Streeting banned puberty blockers for under-18s in gender medicine last year over fears that they were harmful. The drugs pause the development of secondary sex characteristics such as breasts, periods or facial hair. They were given to children at the Tavistock Centre’s gender identity clinic from 2011 until 2023 and in April last year the Cass review found there was little evidence to support their use.
Their answer to this lack of evidence is to create a trial using children. The Times state:
Children will be put on puberty blockers for up to two years and monitored until early adulthood. Participants will be placed randomly in one of two groups, one starting treatment immediately and the other after 12 months. Their brain development, quality of life and physical and mental health will be monitored.
This is a human trial testing the efficacy of drugs that have already been used on around 2000 children. The evidence is surely in already. What good will subjecting 250 more children to harmful effects achieve beyond proving what we already know – puberty blockers are life-altering, permanently damaging and not credible for treating gender dysphoria?
Not only is a trial of this sort reckless and damaging in a bid to indulge ideology, it fails at an even more basic level. When the brain and the body do not align, what is the most appropriate solution? Do we aim to force reality to fit the faulty mind or do we help the mind align with reality as it really is?
Imagine this approach to an anorexic, encouraging them in their untrue view of their body by helping them damage themselves in pursuit of a false reality when the real solutions lie in helping the mind see reality as it really is. It is incredible that this does not seem to be the obvious and clear approach to minds that cannot recognise the biological reality of their gender. It is sadder still that we seem happy to encourage it with trials and damaging drugs that will cause irreparable harm. Harm that is obvious to all with eyes to see.