by Hannah Barnes, The Times
The medicines regulator says Kings College London’s research proposal puts children at risk of infertility but a safer way to find clinical evidence will not be easy
Friday evening is rarely a time chosen to release news a government wants to be questioned about, or media outlets to pore over. And so it was that at a little after 8pm on February 20 we learned that the new NHS-backed trial of puberty blockers in gender-questioning children had been paused. The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) is no longer satisfied the proposed research is safe. It has asked the trial team to look again at the study and make changes.
When, in November, researchers from King’s College London (KCL) announced they had the necessary regulatory and ethical approvals to begin new research into puberty blockers, the short-lived consensus that had emerged after the Cass Review evaporated. Dr — now Baroness — Hilary Cass’s four-year inquiry into NHS youth gender services painted a shameful picture of what had taken place at the now-closed gender identity development service (Gids) at the Tavistock in north London. All under the eye of NHS England, politicians and healthcare regulators. Youth gender medicine was “an area of remarkably weak evidence,” Cass said. There was “no good evidence on the long-term outcomes of interventions to manage gender-related distress”.
Among the most damning of her observations, though, was that the NHS had allowed the routine prescribing of puberty-blocking drugs to gender-distressed children for a decade, without any robust data to support that decision. Going forward, Cass recommended these drugs only be made available as part of a research programme.
As soon as the details of that trial emerged, it was clear it would not achieve what had been intended: plugging the gaps in the weak evidence base, especially long-term outcomes. As I wrote at length for the New Statesman, the trial seemed to ignore — or flatly contradict — much of what was contained elsewhere in Cass’s 2024 review. It could not explain how it could identify the small number of children who might benefit from the drugs (Cass acknowledged there was no reliable predictor), and was using a rationale that Cass found “no evidence” to support: that puberty blockers brought children “time to think” about their gender identity. In fact, the study wasn’t really looking at the impact of puberty blockers per se at all. It compared children who received them immediately with others who received them a year later.
Read also: Gender Doctors – We’re Coming for You by Parents with Inconvenient Truths about Trans (PITT)