The UK’s Puberty Blocker Ban is State-Sanctioned Child Abuse
Ban announced despite concerns around suicide risk and criticism of the government’s unethical puberty-blocker trial
The UK’s Health Secretary Wes Streeting has announced that the temporary ban on puberty-blocking medication for those under 18 will become permanent on 1 January 2025.
Can anyone still get puberty blockers?
Those already prescribed puberty blockers before the temporary ban was introduced in May 2024 can continue to access them. However, new prescriptions are illegal, and the ban won’t be reviewed until 2027.
Anyone supplying or buying puberty blockers for the treatment of gender dysphoria will be criminalised and can receive a fine and up to two years in prison.
The only way to legally access puberty blockers will be by taking part in a clinical trial run by the NHS. However, the date for the beginning of the study has still to be announced.
Furthermore, the proposed trial has drawn criticism from the Council of Europe and professional medical bodies for breaching medical ethics around informed consent and coercion.
The announcement has been devastating for trans young people and their families, destroying any hope that they will be able to access blockers in the near future unless they take part in the trial.
The Cass Review didn’t call for a ban, but the government imposed one anyway
The temporary ban was introduced following the release of the Cass Review’s final report in early 2024, drawing criticism from trans rights groups and experts.
The Cass Review is at odds with guidance from globally recognised institutions, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, the Endocrine Society, and the World Professional Association of Transgender Health (WPATH).
The review has received heavy criticism from experts and clinicians working in transgender healthcare for its methodological flaws and apparent ideological influence. In response to the review, the Endocrine Society has stated that “medical evidence, not politics, should inform treatment decisions”.
However, the ban goes further even than the Cass Review recommended. Cass previously stated that her review didn’t find that “puberty suppressing hormones are an unsafe treatment”, and she didn’t call for a ban.
In fact, Cass recommended that puberty blockers should be available to trans people at a younger age according to individual development, in line with international guidance.
Cass now seems to have changed her opinion to align herself with the government’s position. In the government’s announcement on Wednesday Cass is quoted saying that “puberty blockers are powerful drugs with unproven benefits and significant risks”, contradicting her previous statement.
There’s no evidence of major risks from puberty blocker use
In introducing the permanent ban, the government has cited advice from the Commission on Human Medicines (CHM) that puberty blockers pose an “unacceptable safety risk”.
However, what those supposed risks are hasn’t been made clear. Puberty blockers have been used to treat gender dysphoria for decades, and their beneficial effects are well-documented in both clinical and qualitative studies.
Like all medications, puberty blockers can have some side effects, but these are partly reversed after stopping the medication, and any remaining issues are easily treated.
Due to their proven safety and efficacy, puberty blockers are considered the “gold standard” for treating conditions like precocious puberty in cisgender young people.
Cisgender young people will be unaffected by the ban. Only transgender young people are being denied this life-saving medication. This is a clear act of discrimination, given that blockers are used for the same purpose in both cisgender and transgender young people: delaying puberty.
If they’re safe for cisgender kids, why wouldn’t they be safe for trans kids as well? This contradiction indicates that safety is more of an excuse than a genuine concern.
But there is evidence the ban will harm young trans people
Trans youth, their families, experts, and clinicians, have all raised concerns about the negative impact that banning blockers will have on the health and well-being of young trans people, but have been ignored.
NHS whistleblowers tried to raise the alarm over a possible cover-up of increased suicides among young trans patients at the Tavistock Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) following restrictions on puberty blockers for under 16s in 2019, following the Keira Bell case.
The allegations were dismissed by the Appleby Review, which found that the rise in suicides wasn’t statistically significant. Those raising concerns were themselves accused of increasing suicide risk among trans youth, rather than harmful NHS policies.
However, the revelation that Alice Litman, a young trans woman who took her own life while on the waiting list for the GIDS service, was not included in the data provided to the Appleby review has led to fresh concerns about a cover-up. It suggests that data on suicides was withheld from the Appleby Review and that the number of suicides may be higher than stated.
Questions have also been raised about the consultation about the ban held by the government because it included anti-LGBTQ+ hate groups, including Genspect, the LGB Alliance, Sex Matters, and the Bayswater group.
Genspect and its founder Stell O’Malley have actively pushed for “conversion therapy” and a ban on gender-affirming care for anyone under the age of 25. Genspect recently hosted Helen Joyce at their conference, where she discussed an “end to the idea of the trans child”. Joyce has also called for the eradication of transgender people.
Parents associated with Bayswater have been accused of abusing transgender children, including denying them access to Childline and rape crisis services because they are gender-affirming. Bayswater has successfully lobbied England’s Crown Prosecution Service to water down guidelines on anti-trans domestic abuse aimed at protecting trans kids.
I recently wrote about Sex Matters’s call for its followers to help compile a list of transgender women in sports teams for targeted harassment.
The LGB Alliance has received funding from right-wing conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation, the group that wrote the Project 2025 manifesto to introduce fascism in the US via a Trump Presidency.
While the consultation also included professional medical bodies, experts in transgender healthcare, and transgender charities, the overwhelming opposition to permanently banning puberty blockers documented in the consultation seems to have been ignored.
Of the 51 organisations that responded to the government’s consultation, 41 advised that permanently banning puberty blockers would pose a risk to young transgender people’s mental health and well-being, including some of those in favour of the ban.
The temporary ban has already been shown to increase suicidality, self-harm, and psychological distress.
We also know from research in the US that similar bans on puberty blockers and gender-affirming care result in increased rates of trans youth people taking their own lives.
Did the NHS admit it knows the ban will be harmful?
The government and NHS have appeared to admit that they know how much this ban will continue to hurt young trans people.
James Palmer, NHS Medical Director for Specialist Services, has acknowledged that “this will be a difficult time for young people and their families who are affected”, and has offered “targeted support to anyone affected by the banning order from their local mental health services”.
Anyone who has tried to access NHS mental health services will know that offer is hollow. Much like gender clinics themselves, waiting times for mental health support can be long, and therapy is usually limited to a small number of sessions.
The NHS has a dismal record of supporting transgender young people stuck on years-long waiting lists for treatment, some of whom, such as Alice Litman, have taken their own lives as a direct result of a lack of support.
Even if better mental health support is forthcoming, no amount of therapy can prevent the irreversible puberty these young people are trying to escape from. Only puberty blockers can do that.
The proposed trial is unethical according to human rights conventions
As noted, patients will still be able to access puberty blockers — but only if they agree to take part in a clinical trial. It’s a stark choice: take part in the research, or face irreversible puberty.
That’s not a choice at all.
Withholding treatment as a way of forcing children into taking part in an experiment means that those involved cannot be said to have given informed consent, since that consent is effectively coerced.
As highlighted by Trans Safety Network, the Council of Europe (CoE), which the UK is a member of, Oviedo Convention on Human Rights and Biomedicine requires that research participants are informed of “their right to refuse consent or to withdraw consent at any time without being subject to any form of discrimination, in particular regarding the right to medical care”.
Referencing the proposed puberty blocker trial, the CoE has said there are “ethical implications of only offering treatment to a small group of patients, potentially violating the fundamental ethical principles governing research”.
The trial also goes against the guidance of the General Medical Council, which states that participants must have the right to withdraw from research “with an assurance that this will not adversely affect their relationship with those providing care, or the care they receive”.
Bioethicists have argued that it’s difficult and likely unethical to carry out the kind of “double-blind” randomised control trial (RCT) proposed by the NHS, which involves one group getting treatment and another a placebo, without either doctors or patients knowing which is which.
It would quickly become obvious which young people were in the placebo group and which had been given the real treatment, because puberty blockers suppress puberty so well.
As a result of blinding being broken, participants might be more likely to drop out of the trial and seek puberty blockers elsewhere — which now, as a result of the ban, could lead to criminalisation and even jail.
RCTs are usually reserved for experimental or novel treatments, but with a medication that's been in use for decades and known to be effective, doing a trial where some patients are denied that treatment is simply unethical and unworkable.
It’s also the wrong kind of study for investigating long-term health effects, one of the justifications for carrying out more research around puberty blockers.
Another troubling aspect of the trial is that Professor Simon Wessely has been appointed as the chair of the NHS National Children and Young People’s Gender Dysphoria Research Oversight Board.
I’ve previously written about how Wessely conducted unethical and methodologically flawed research into disabilities to justify government policies aimed at restricting access to welfare for disabled people.
Given Professor Wessely’s track record, it’s alarming that he will have oversight of the puberty blocker trial.
What can we do to stop this?
Wes Streeting’s puberty blocker ban is unscientific, unnecessary, and cruel.
Introducing this ban despite being made abundantly aware of the harm it will cause while coercing trans youth to take part in an unethical clinical experiment is an act of state-sanctioned child abuse.
The government doesn’t care.
But we do, and we have to let them know that what they’re doing isn’t acceptable.
If you live in the UK, I urge you to contact your MP or the Health Secretary, directly to tell them that you don’t condone their abuse of transgender young people.
Tell anyone who’ll listen what these monsters are doing.
Yes, monsters: what else do you call the kind of people who willfully hurt children?
Transgender kids deserve better.
They deserve to grow up to be healthy, happy transgender adults.
Thank you for this article. I was horrified when they announced the ban despite it being entirely unnecessary. I’m a trans adult so it doesn’t impact me, but my heart breaks for all the trans kids out there who will be forced to experience puberty and have their dysphoria worsen.
Sadly, cruelty appears to be the point of the ban and I’m more scared than I’ve ever been for the future of trans people in the UK.
So the Heritage foundation is holding a smoking gun. They can't possibly be the only motivation for what going on in the government. We need to find out who else had deep pockets and unfair influence on this issue. What was their agenda and where their money came from.