What they did to children

Inside the battle to protect kids from puberty blockers

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Last week, NHS England announced that puberty blockers will no longer be given to children at its gender identity clinics.

The decision was made after a review found there was "not enough evidence" that puberty blockers are safe or effective.

Coming after a similar pushback against gender ideology in Scotland, the decision is seen by many as another important victory in the battle against woke politics.

But what is less known is the story of how this victory came about, how one or two renegade voices took on the prevailing orthodoxy and won. And I have to say, it’s a story that is deeply shocking, upsetting, and infuriating in equal measure.

It not only throws light on the dangers of radical woke progressivism, revealing the lengths to which the new elite class will go to prioritise their dogma over evidence, but shows how only a few brave people who are willing to put their heads above the parapet and challenge the stifling orthodoxy can make a serious difference.

So I think it’s a story —however shocking, upsetting, and infuriating—that we can all learn from, a story that will empower and encourage all those who are trying, in their own way, to push back against the madness and push forward common sense.

And here is that story.

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The story begins in 2010, when the Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust’s Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) launched a trial of puberty blockers for children in their early teens.

The puberty blockers, which are thought to delay puberty in transgender and ‘gender diverse’ youth, were targeted at very young children thought to have ‘gender dysphoria’ —what the NHS defines as “a sense of unease a person may have because of a mismatch between their biological sex and gender identity”.

It was an experimental treatment.

Until then, puberty blockers had been administered to children when they reached 16 years of age. But now they were rolled out to even younger children.

Ordinarily, you might think an organisation like the National Health Service would only do such a thing, would only consider exposing children to such a thing, if the drugs in question were considered safe.

But this was not the case.

It was not the case at all.

The drugs, which are also used to treat advanced prostate cancer and ‘chemically castrate’ sex offenders, had not been certified safe by their manufacturers, nor the National Institute for Clinical Excellence.

Yet, still, they were administered to children.

One reason why —as the University of Oxford’s Michael Biggs notes— is because of how radical activist campaign groups, such as Mermaids and the Gender Identity Research and Education Society, had continuously lobbied for them to be rolled out.

Many of these groups are dominated by radical progressives who have been shown to be far more supportive of radical gender ideology than most people —who want to see younger and younger children exposed to this contested belief system.

As I wrote last year, radical progressives —elite graduates who lean strongly to the cultural left—think very differently about these issues than everybody else: