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

[UtopiaPlanitia]

I thought it would be useful for this article to have its own thread - it would make it easier to find and to discuss:

https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2025/12/will-the-new-puberty-blocker-trial-put-children-at-risk

"Asked whether she understood why there was concern about the trial and whether it would answer the questions she herself highlighted, Cass said: “Nobody is wrong on this. It’s a finely-honed decision, and, with justification, you could come down on either side of it.” She drew comparisons with the assisted dying debate taking place in the House of Lords: “Whether you are in support or against it, it’s an ethical decision about what you know, how many people you think you’re going to do something positive for against how many people might be harmed… and everyone makes their decision.” Cass explained that she had recommended a group of people should explore a trial, but that “I didn’t even necessarily anticipate whether or not such a trial would get through an ethics committee, or whether a group of academics would be able to even design a trial, given the circumstances that we’re in now. So, I didn’t prejudge whether it would happen… And if the ethics committee had said, despite everything, we don’t think this is an ethical approach, then I would have been content with that too.”

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."

Thank you for this - it really needs to be shared everywhere.
The demands to "be kind", the insistence on the "sacred caste" and the forced teaming with LGB has resulted in all this being repeatedly denied and hidden.

Even on here discussing AGP would once result in a deletion for daring to point out the sexual fetish aspect of this.

Wasn't it Brady who wrote to trans lobbyists claiming that Cass would change nothing? Which shows remarkable confidence in the power that they hold in the NHS?

I think that's a bit of over reach. She may think that;we can't tell from what she's said.

She's comparing the two in that they are both contentious areas of policy, ridden with moral dilemma and a balance of harms vs positives.

A reply on X to the Barry Wall article states that Dr Michael Brady was responsible for Annexe B (allowing trans-identified people to use the opposite-sex ward). Did we know this when we did the audit @TwoLoonsAndASprout ?
Edit for clarity

I think so - @KnottyAuty may be able to confirm. We had a parallel investigation into the history of Annex B which uncovered quite a lot.

Both assisted dying and messing up the homeostasis of a child’s body with puberty blockers have in common the causing of harm ( death or a wrecked body) in the supposed cause of a greater good ( end to suffering or end to a ‘wrong’ body). Or you could also say the harm caused in both cases is being purported to be the lesser of two evils.

As you say, she may well have just meant, perfectly simply. that both issues are contentious. But whether or not unwitting on her part, when I read the article, I saw similarities. And by ‘a kind of suicide’, I meant that the puberty blockers lead to a certain negation of self, even if not through the extreme of actual death.

One of Cass’ key points was that there is no consistent explanation for why puberty blockers are prescribed to gender-questioning children.

That doesn’t go away in a clinical trial.

Why are they being prescribed? What are they supposed to do? Which children would they benefit? How can this outcome be measured? On what time scale should it be measured? None of this will be clarified by the trial.

The trial has a big empty hole where clinical justification should be, because people feel so strongly that children should be given these drugs, that they make up a shifting set of explanations to justify the prescribing.

I wonder if the Cass report should be seen in its social context as a ground breaking first stepping stone towards a more rational and evidence based position, but not at all as the final word on this topic.
I’ve no doubt that Cass was well intentioned in writing it but as the first government commissioned report of its kind perhaps she pulled its punches feeling that it wouldn’t be accepted by government or the TRAs or parents who have been misled and gaslighted into supporting these ‘treatments’ if the full horror of what’s been happening to children and young people was fully pointed out publicly.

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.

I agree.

I can't help noticing too that it only ever applies to some individuals and not others. It creates a hierarchy, a caste system, and this destroys equality, effective law, belief in justice, all the systems for universal rights set up at the end of WW2, and means - never processed by those pushing it - the caste system varies according to whichever popular group is in power at the time. The rulers can end up the oppressed by a simple change of government.

It's not going anywhere rational or good.

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...."