𝓤𝓷𝓲𝓽𝓮𝓭 𝓝𝓮𝔀𝓼

Nothing sums up the woefulness of Keir Starmer’s government than the green light given last week to the outrageous puberty blocking trial. I’m not sure if Starmer wants this politically correct nonsense as his legacy, or if now he’s a powerless PM, he doesn’t even know what is being pushed through in his name. And so, from August, unless stopped by a legal challenge, 226 children – including girls as young as 11 and boys of 12 – diagnosed with ‘gender incongruence’ (that’s children thinking they have been born in the wrong body) will be placed on it and on a path to radical surgery.

The diagnosis needed to be put on this trial is based entirely on how a child tells someone they feel. There are no lab markers or blood tests that can be used to diagnose ‘gender incongruence’. In fact, the Cass Review states that the vast majority of children will grow out of it during adolescence.

In February, this barbaric trial was halted because the UK’s medicines watchdog, the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), was concerned about serious and “unquantified risks”. And yet only five months later after some hasty changes, this Labour government is pushing for it to go ahead and funding it.

So, this summer, we will have physically healthy children, developing normally, used as guinea pigs. They will be injected with powerful drugs that could irreversibly damage their sexual function, leaving them unable to have children, weaken their bones and affect the health of their brain. Just so some people can learn more about this issue. It is obscene.

How can a child as young as 11 know the full consequences of what they are signing up to? Leaving it to a parent (for it only needs to be one) to give consent (or the state if you’re in care) is absolutely not a sufficiently adequate safeguard. For each family, the decision is life-altering. For each future adult, the question may one day be: “Did the people in authority protect me properly?”

This is a path which starts with puberty blockers then moves to cross sex hormones and ends with surgical procedures to transform the body.

In the case of Keira Bell, a lesbian child struggling with her sexuality, she was diagnosed not as gay but with “gender incongruence’. She was put on puberty blockers, then testosterone shots and then given a double mastectomy. Years later, realising she should never have gone down this route, she set about trying to reverse the process.

If the government wants to know more about ‘gender incongruence’ they could analyse the results of the hundreds of children put on hormone blockers by the discredited Tavistock hospital; or use the results of the Finnish study published in April that looked at more than 2,000 adolescents and young adults who had been referred to gender services. It found medical interventions did not reduce psychiatric problems and may even be associated with worsening mental health.

Instead, this government has chosen to allow children to be used for medical research. This is abuse and needs to be stopped, but I suspect it won’t matter which of them becomes prime minister, the current Labour Party will keep pursuing this madness.