𝓤𝓷𝓲𝓽𝓮𝓭 𝓝𝓮𝔀𝓼

The Girl Guides have finally done what most parents assumed was already the case: confirmed that only girls, yes – actual, biological girls – can join them. A radical concept, I know. It’s been eight months since the Supreme Court reaffirmed that biological sex is not a hallucination, but the organisation has now bowed to legal clarity and common sense. The announcement – which means they will no longer accept biological boys who identify as girls – came with the usual corporate phrasing about “detailed considerations” and “expert advice”. The Guides were once a place where girls learned first aid, survival skills, leadership and teamwork; all the things that build confidence and resilience. Instead, we’ve spent the better part of a decade pretending not to know what a girl is, while children look on and wonder why the adults have lost the plot.

Frankly, whoever thought it was acceptable to even entertain the idea of trans-identifying boys in the Guides needs to be investigated. Thirty years ago, no family would ever have believed that the organisation might allow a man who identifies as a woman to bunk in a tent with their daughter, possibly without a parent’s knowledge. Yet that is exactly where we were headed, until now.

Unsurprisingly, the activist class is furious. Trans rights groups claim this is a targeted “act of violence”, as if safeguarding children is somehow hateful. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, the Government still hasn’t published new transgender guidance for single-sex spaces. Ministers are apparently waiting until the country has reached a state of complete confusion before stepping in with clarity.

And we are confused. Because while one part of Britain is rediscovering biological sanity, another is doubling down on experimental ideology.

Enter Health Secretary Wes Streeting. Not long ago, he backed the ban on puberty blockers following the Cass Review, which found that evidence for these treatments was – to put it nicely – flimsy. Thousands of distressed teenagers went through the Tavistock Clinic and many now live with irreversible consequences, including sterilisation, stunted development, lost fertility and profound regret.

We do not need a philosophical debate to know puberty blockers can cause irreversible harm. We have the testimonies. And we have the lawsuits. Yet here we are again. Last month, regulators approved a fresh experiment; a new clinical trial called PATHWAYS that will put another 200 or so children on puberty blockers.

Some of the participants will be as young as ten and all of them will be taking the drugs either immediately or after a short delay. There will be no placebos and long-term ‘follow-up’ will only last up to two years.

This Frankenstein horror show is supposedly about giving children “time to think”, even though previous studies showed no improvement to mental health and almost every child went on to cross-sex hormones anyway. Once you interrupt natural puberty, the next step becomes inevitable.

Let’s be very clear: puberty isn’t an inconvenience that can simply be paused. It is one of the most crucial periods of brain and bone development that humans ever undergo. Stopping it is not a neutral choice. And no other area of medicine treats psychological distress by suppressing healthy bodily function. If I were convinced my arm didn’t belong to me, I don’t think the NHS would rush to amputate it.

We have entered the realm of moral madness. Instead of asking why so many children – especially girls, and especially those with autism or trauma – are rejecting their own bodies, the medical establishment is offering puberty-free limbo and hoping for the best. That is not compassion.

Streeting insists he is simply following scientific advice. But the job of an elected minister is not to surrender to whichever academics shout the loudest. It is to govern with the wisdom to know when an ‘expert consensus’ is still guesswork in a lab coat.

If more evidence is needed, researchers should start with the hundreds of young people who’ve already been through this process — many now detransitioning and asking why no one protected them.

Instead, Britain is running the same experiment twice and praying it turns out differently. So in the same week that the Guides strengthen boundaries to protect girls, our health system prepares to blur the boundaries of childhood itself.

Britain has forgotten the first rule of safeguarding: when adults are confused, err on the side of the child’s safety.

Streeting still has time to stop this. The Guides have shown that courage and clarity remain possible. Now it’s the Government’s turn to decide: do they stand with fashionable ideology, or with the biological, developmental and moral truth that children deserve protection, not ideological activism?