by Tony Rucinski, Coalition for Marriage
An NHS trial is preparing to experiment on girls as young as eleven with puberty blockers. The Government banned the sale and supply of these drugs in the UK for gender-distressed under-18s over “an unacceptable safety risk”, but announced it was setting up a clinical trial. Too dangerous to prescribe, but fine to test on children. The medicines regulator wanted no child under 14 in the trial, but it gave in. On Thursday 22 October, Peers debate at what age a child can consent to these drugs. At stake are little girls’ futures, the marriages and children they may one day want.
Dr Mark Pickering, a GP and Chief Executive of the Christian Medical Fellowship, tells me why he thinks the trial is such a bad idea. You can watch our discussion here.
The trial, Mark says, gives powerful drugs to “normal children with normal functioning hormonal systems”. King’s College London, which is running it, says blockers “pause puberty”. Mark says they pause the brain too: “You’re sort of Peter Panning them and you’re turning them into an eternal child.” That, he says, is why nearly every child who starts them goes on to cross-sex hormones. In the Tavistock gender clinic’s own study, 43 of 44 did. It’s “a pathway or a conveyor belt”, Mark says, and for many it ends in “lifelong regret”. Children are not experiments.