by Maya Forstater, The Critic
On the decision to allow puberty blockers for children
The government has licensed the “pathways” puberty blockers experiment to go ahead. Drugs used for chemical castration will be given to children with the hope of improving their mental wellbeing moderately for a few years. The Health Secretary, Wes Streeting, is the man responsible. Clinicians and parliamentarians have written to him, asking him to think again. He has said he feels “uncomfortable”. So he should. It is obscene to ask an overwrought child to make the unconscionable decision to take this drug for this purpose, and unethical for the state to offer it to them.
Children who are too young to vote, get a tattoo or even decide what subjects to study at school cannot understand what they are being asked to put at risk in order to pursue their desire to “transition”. This includes the chance to go through normal physical and mental development, to understand their sexual orientation, to have a fulfilling adult sex life, to have children and to enjoy decades of life in a healthy body rather than as a lifelong medical patient.
They are also too young to understand, or perhaps too strongly committed to accept, that the promise on the other side is a mis-sold dream. There is no combination of pills, surgeries and laws that can enable a boy to grow up to be a woman or a girl to become a man. The Supreme Court made this clear last year. This should have led to a re-evaluation of this proposed experiment on children. Instead, NHS bureaucrats and the medical researchers carried on regardless, and the Health Secretary allowed them.
On 13 January, Streeting wrote to MPs justifying his support for the experiment by saying the pressure is coming from the children. “Some young people are going to great lengths to source the drugs from unregulated providers”, and others are “experiencing extreme mental anguish” because they cannot access them.
In any case, he claims, the matter is out of his hands. The trial has been through “scientific, clinical, ethical and regulatory review”, including by a research ethics committee. Dr Hilary Cass, who has expressed public support for the trial, has also shucked off responsibility, saying that she would have been content for the trial to be stopped “if the ethics committee had said, despite everything, we don’t think this is an ethical approach”.