Trans Experiments on 11-year-olds
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.
Mark warns that gender treatment puts at stake “your future fertility, your ability to have a family”. No child of eleven, he says, can think, “I can’t stand boys right now, but I know when I’m 25 or 30, I’m really going to want a family”. Yet the trial’s protocol settles for “sufficient understanding” on the child’s part, and for fertility preservation to have been “discussed”. Discussed – with an eleven-year-old. So our answer to Thursday’s question is plain: no one under 18 can consent, in a trial or out of it.
Protecting children is the job of their mother and father. “We need to be the adults in the room”, Mark says, and “protect them from themselves”. Yet one family told the Mail on Sunday this month they were reported to police and social services after refusing their daughter puberty blockers. Accused of emotional abuse, they feared she would be taken into care. No mother or father should be punished for saying no.
But there’s real hope. “It’s that process of puberty which resolves gender dysphoria for many children”, Mark explains. Left to grow up, many children come through this. Of 139 boys referred to a Toronto clinic as young children, 122 no longer had gender dysphoria when followed up.
On 8 September, MPs voted 357 to 108 against barring puberty blockers for under-18s and against halting any such trial without Parliament’s approval. On Thursday, Peers can say what MPs wouldn’t.
Please write before Thursday to Baroness Deech, the crossbench Peer who called the debate. Or pick another Peer who has spoken on puberty blockers. Ask them to press the Government on three points:
- No one under 18 should be given puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones, in a trial or out of it.
- The PATHWAYS trial must stop before a single child is given them.
- No parent should be reported to police or social services for refusing them.
Use your own words, or it’ll get ignored.
At C4M, we know children need their mother and father, and deserve the hope of a marriage and family of their own. That’s why we call on the Government to stop this experiment now. Do watch Mark’s interview and pass it on. Speaking up for these children, when 357 MPs wouldn’t, is the work you make possible.