Hannah Barnes Article: "Will the new puberty blocker trial put children at risk?"

I've been reading this article and I think it contains a lot of points that I would agree with in terms of overcorrection towards ultra Liberality in politics, the public sector, and civic society generally:

https://thecritic.co.uk/issues/december-january-2026/the-danger-of-civil-service-overreach/

'The potential clashes of rights between different protected characteristics must surely have been obvious to those who framed the Equality Act. What did they expect to happen in these cases? It is hard to believe they really thought that faith schools serving the most segregated religious groups would willingly start to teach sex education lessons that included homosexuality and gender reassignment...

As Professor Tom Simpson of Oxford’s Blavatnik School of Government puts it, civil servants sit “downstream of Parliament”: in other words, departments and other public bodies should not exceed or “gold-plate” what is intended by lawmakers.

Likewise, Paul Tucker argues in his book Unelected Power that as regulators are not subject to democratic accountability, they have a particular responsibility to exercise their powers sparingly and only in the way that Parliament intended them to be used, even if those powers as drafted could be used more widely.

Since 2010, the difficulties in applying the Equality Act proportionately and fairly have swelled, increasing the impartiality challenge for Ofsted and for all other civil servants. The definition of many of the protected characteristics has been broadened to include a wider group of people...

Furthermore, the words “in a way that is fair, just and equitable” obscure the fact that the difference between political parties is sometimes about end goals, but perhaps more often about different conceptions of what is “fair, just and equitable”. In this light, this sentence can be read as an invitation to individual civil servants to substitute their own preferences for those of the government of the day. This is clearly a recipe for tensions and conflicts between the civil service and governments...."

I think that, for me, Leadbeater's Assisted Dying Bill and the Cass Review both come from that same ultra Liberal 'if the individual wants it deeply enough we should allow it' attitude that took precedence in civic discourse and public life during the decades between the 60s and now.

I think society has become more atomised because of this way of thinking and I think that when it comes to public life, we no longer see ourselves as having responsibility towards others. Instead we see the State as having responsibility for giving us what we feel we're entitled to have.

I was extremely in favour of liberalising society when I was younger (I grew up in Catholic Ireland and the society I grew up in was extremely restrictive) but in the last decade I'm beginning to feel that things have gone too far past what was a reasonable correction and that, now, societal responsibility is being ignored in favour of creating jurisprudence to advance the ultimate liberty of the individual, as long as that individual is bien pensant and middle-class.

It often feels to me as thought civic society has become a confusing mass of NGOs and lobby groups trying to convince increasingly activist MPs to give them what they feel they deserve whether it's good for the rest of society or not.

Barry Wall published an interesting article with info related to the trial on TwiX:

https://x.com/HeadWarriorTWM/status/1990683481265876994

"Imagine a government health service, already condemned for rushing thousands of vulnerable children onto powerful puberty-blocking drugs with almost no evidence of safety or benefit, now announcing plans to start doing it again, this time deliberately framed as a “clinical trial”.

That is not a dystopian nightmare. It is NHS England’s actual policy in November 2025.
Eighteen months after the final Cass Review, published on 10 April 2024, demolished the evidence base for “gender-affirming care”, the same individuals and activist organisations that helped entrench the discredited model remain firmly in post.

Despite all evidence to the contrary, medical procedures touted as necessary and humane are still ongoing, not just for children, but also for mentally ill and paraphiliac adults, inflicting sex frauds and con merchants across all spheres of our existence.

Despite this Dr Michael Brady continues to serve as National Adviser for LGBT+ Health at NHS England, with echoes of Stonewall, the LGBT Foundation, WPATH and similar lobby groups still apparent.

Why has he not been fired?

Professor James Palmer remains National Medical Director for Specialised Services, personally responsible for commissioning the adult gender identity clinics that the Cass Review found to be operating on shockingly weak evidence. The eight new regional children’s gender services, ostensibly built on Cass recommendations, are already being shaped by many of the same activist organisations that helped create the Tavistock disaster.

Why has he not been fired?

Most outrageously, NHS England is pressing ahead with a planned clinical trial that will give puberty blockers to children diagnosed with so called "gender dysphoria" a fake diagnosis that means nothing, despite the Cass Review explicitly stating that the existing research is of such poor quality that no reliable conclusions can be drawn about either benefits or harms.
The review recommended that any future use of puberty blockers in children should occur only within a properly designed research protocol, an egregious error in an otherwise excellent report, positing that in some way a medical experiment with a 100% failure rate is ever justified.

The proposed trial lacks a clear hypothesis, has no established primary outcome measure that would justify restarting these interventions, and appears designed primarily to keep the door open for their eventual reintroduction rather than to answer genuine scientific questions."

Excellent description for this board.

FWR predicted the behaviour of the Labour govt - lots of posters told us not to be sceptical and not to take on face value what Kier and Co were saying in the run up to the election. They told us that Kier had a secret special plan that would be great for women so we had better vote Labour to ensure it happened 🙄

We predicted that the Cass Review left too many loopholes for committed ideologues in the NHS, and private medicine, to continue on as before but we were told that it would all be fine because of the indefinite ban and that no-one would actually try to get a PB trial on children through an ethics board and that if they did try to do it then the ethics board would reject it 🙄

I'm in my 50s and I have lived through too much to listen to Pollyanna thinking from politically tribal people who tell us there will be jam tomorrow if we vote the correct way and listen to our betters.

I think you're right, I think the Cass Review did not include a specific recommendation for a trial to be carried out.

However, since the Review was released journalists, activists and politicians have been saying that it recommended a trial and that incorrect information overwrote the original information in my head.