Streeting declares the puberty blocker trial 'safe'

[ArabellaSaurus]

https://archive.ph/CFzK4

'On Monday, Mr Streeting reiterated that he was not “comfortable” with the trial, which involves more than 200 people under the age of 16, but said there were significant “checks, balances and safeguards” that made it safe.

He told Sky News: “The thing I’ve had to continually weigh up is that for lots of people who have been through this sort of gender identity treatment, they describe it as life-affirming and life-saving. But there is an understandable degree of public anxiety and concern.

“The crucial reassurance is that not just anyone will be able to sign up to this trial. They will go through extensive assessment by expert clinicians locally that will be reviewed nationally, and every young person would need to assent.
“They’re not old enough to consent. They would need to assent, and they would <a class="break-all" href="https://archive.ph/o/CFzK4/www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/12/17/children-cannot-consent-puberty-blocker-trial-wes-streeting/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">need the consent of parents.

“And so there are lots of checks, balances, oversights and safeguards and constant monitoring in a way that disgracefully wasn’t there before. That’s what gives me the confidence and assurance of knowing this trial is safe.

“There is a debate about whether this is the right thing to do. I understand that, and there’s one thing we’ve learnt about this particular area of policy is that we shouldn’t silence, debate, dissent, disagreement.

“So we’ll continue to have that, and we’ll continue to be subject to scrutiny and challenge.”

Mr Streeting admitted that the children who will be involved in the trial are “very young” and that the drugs are “very strong”.

But he claimed he had tried to take the “politics out of what has been an extremely <a class="break-all" href="https://archive.ph/o/CFzK4/www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/11/25/nhs-puberty-blockers-trial-repeat-tavistock-whistleblowers/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">difficult and sensitive issue”.

Despite the research going ahead, the Health Secretary added: “I think there are still big questions about how we ever ended up in this situation where these sorts of drugs were being routinely prescribed with and we’re continuing to get into that and looking.
“There’ll be another study looking at what’s happened to that cohort of young people over time.”'

I know a kid who as given thee drugs at 14. She’s now early 20s and still very thin skinned emotional and reactive. Lives at home and writes angsty poetry about gender, hoping for that to become a career. My kid’s the same age but their lives are poles apart. It really makes sense to me that this person is “frozen” at 14 when she should be looking at. next steps on her career, saving for a deposit, having fun with friends.i wonder what it is like for her parents to see this unfold - they made the wrong choice and their daughter’s beard will be a daily reminder of that.

I don’t know, but there’s a job going at King’s College.

How could the ethics committee have concluded £500 is not an unacceptable inducement to take part and stay involved? and how could the HRA, who are ultimately responsible for what ethics committees do, be allowing that to be offered?

It is well known that this specific group of children (because of the unregulated and frighteningly pressurised social media culture that children have to face around gender identity politics), are many times more likely than other children be saving up or crowd-funding for permanent, self injurious ‘cosmetic’ surgery once they’re 18. For example to permanently remove both breasts.

£500 would alternatively go some way towards the child illegally supplementing themselves with cross sex hormones (or buying and taking whatever unknown substance is being sold as that).

And even if this child just spent their £500 bribe on textbooks and school uniform or buying flowers for their favourite gran, £500 is still financially bribing someone to publicly stick in what is actually a trial of identity, when we already know that they might have not otherwise persisted in that identity?
And mostly would go on to desist from that identity if allowed to have a natural puberty?

The HRA is the professional governing body overseeing the ethical set up and conduct of the trial. The Ethics committee are trained volunteers (and I really wonder why their numbers dwindled so much over the course of the meetings.. very odd) . I really hope the paid staff at the HRA are watching this dangerous and politically extremely high-stakes suggestion for a trial like absolute hawks.

In fact ,if allowed, would HRA not have sent some very experienced HRA staff to observe the conduct of the ethics committee meeting, to make sure everything is done perfectly properly? Are there any observers listed on the minutes?

It would be awful if this trial starts and when the shit inevitably hits the fan the HRA could somehow say they didn’t know the full story and thus hang the Ethics Committee out to dry- when actually all of this is the HRA’s overseeing responsibility.

We need ethics committees to run well and to have sufficient volunteers to run, otherwise research grinds to a halt which negatively affects all of us. If this trial goes ahead and there’s a big scandal it could cause real problems much more widely in research. The trial just shouldn’t go ahead though if normal standards are followed, surely.

There has been sustained, evidenced, opposition to this trial since it was announced. That opposition ramped up significantly since the trial received ethical approval last Nov. I find it really frightening that this opposition was ignored by the people who should have been paying attention. Wes Streeting waving it through despite being “uncomfortable” with it being one of the worst.

it seems that preparation for court has focused attention of people who should have been all over this from the first.
—there’s no new info

-the trial is rehashing ground covered by the “disgraced GIDS” - which you’d think would cause people to kick the tyres before waving it through

-this is experimental treatment on vulnerable children in a controversial field

—the trial design self evidently could never produce the robust evidence missing from the literature

and yet NO fucker had the guts to say “hang on a minute”. Furthermore, most of them didn’t even take the time to have a squint at the protocol or read what the opposition was pointing out. They just polished their RSOH halos and assumed someone somewhere knew what they were talking about

I am delighted that the trial has been paused and only hope it will be binned entirely before too long. I am also raging that it took so long and required legal action by private citizens to get here.

sadly there seems to be nothing to stop this from happening again

138 Greenland women were under 18 when the Danish government fitted them with IUDs. Its unclear how many of these ops were carried out without proper consent.

But then it seems the idea of 'consent' can be massaged into 'assent'. The fact a child is deemed unable to consent should be instructive.

I wonder how the rationalising paperwork looked for the Danish doctors at the time?

www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c5yelp5466no

link for BBC coverage. Thank god they are pausing the start of this trial.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cjd9z0p27k5o

MHRA said:
‘This trial will only be allowed to go ahead if the expert scientific and clinical evidence and advice conclude it is both safe and necessary.
The safety and wellbeing of children and young people have always been the driving consideration in every decision we have made regarding this trial and always will be.’
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/pathways-clinical-trial-paused-following-new-mhra-advice

That at least sounds robust. It’s specifies how important this trial is specifically.

yet it is actually the HRA not MHRA who has the remit of participant protection and protecting public interest around research. Yet the HRA tone is very managerial and not in a good way. HRA website shows that this approval is now going to be going back to REC because of the pause (rightly). That’s good, even if it’s just following the process HRA have to follow.

But HRA could be proactive and announce for example that for belt and braces they will move it to a different REC to consider, if they are having such worryingly low turnout at the current one, and to ensure fresh eyes. However, little to hope for that in their comment:

https://www.hra.nhs.uk/about-us/news-updates/an-update-on-the-pathways-trial-20-february-2026/

‘As the PATHWAYS study has been paused, we will review the study again, in line with our standard operating procedures, before it can restart. We continue to work closely with MHRA to manage and respond to concerns raised about the trial.’

Sounds PR based to seek to ‘manage’ concerns (surely you want to ‘investigate’ and then ‘resolve’ them?) and ‘before it can restart’ seems inappropriately presumptive.
i thought it hadn’t started? The BBC is saying it hasn’t recruited anyone. Or do they just mean it’s started in the sense of they’ve begun staffing it up at Kings College London and getting the systems ready to begin recruiting?

Big contrast with the MHRA placing child safety as ‘paramount’ though. There must be complicated politics going on behind the scenes.

This trial will only be allowed to go ahead if the expert scientific and clinical evidence and advice conclude it is both safe and necessary

Interesting. In the context of the entire premise of the trial being completely flawed - what is gender dysphoria? what are you trying to achieve? why do you have to do it by this means rather than other methods? how can you tell from the outset which children will desist and which children won't in order to ensure you aren't harming some children?

@Slothtoes, I have worked with researchers who genuinely believed that getting ethical approval for human behavioural studies was a thorn in their side, a pain in the ass hoop to be jumped through, and a block on their ability to do “good”
research. There will, I’m sure, be plenty of people involved with this study who are saying “what the fuck is the problem, I jumped through all your ethics hoops already, just let me get on with my research.”

Totally understand that and that why I feel so strongly about the regulators whose jobs it is to govern research in the public interest, being seen to do their jobs properly without fear or favour. Otherwise there’s no trust in UK research and it all falls apart.
Successive govs have tried to make up for Brexit losses by pushing UK life sciences as an industry. An essential part of that is decent regulation.

what is gender dysphoria?

I don't know but thankfully they found a cure for it, they change it to 'gender distress', which they in turn found a cure for by turning it into 'gender incongruence'. Ain't medical science grand. 🤯

And even better, it is totally no longer a medical condition, or a mental health issue! Even though it somehow still requires puberty blockers, wrong sex hormones and mastectomies, but only in teenagers and young adults. In contrast, if it happens to develop in older men, it doesn’t require any medical intervention, only the judicious application of spinny skirts, lipstick and pronouns.

There is a case for rigorous assessment of what harm (suicide, mental illness, eating disorders etc) comes to the cohort of children they have identified as having 'gender incongruence' when they follow them up with conventional treatment (ie not puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones) for several years. Unless they can prove there are severe problems with this group there seems to be no justification for a trial of drugs with known serious side effects. The serious side effects might be justified if the follow up showed that this group had bad enough results in the first place. But I don't think this has been done. There is no point in developing dangerous treatments for an illness unless the illness is sufficiently harmful to justify draconian treatment.

What you describe is precisely what we had before the Dutch Protocol - psychotherapy and “watchful waiting” (ie doing nothing).

And the outcome was that 90-95% of children with gender dysphoria desisted - they simply outgrew it. Many of them turned out to be same-sex attracted.

But there were the tiny percentage who didn’t outgrow it. And more importantly there were the men who became gender dysphoric (AGP or HSTS) in adulthood. They were “treated” by being given wrong-sex hormones and surgeries. And yet when they were examined post-treatment they were still not happy and successful.

The clinicians who developed the Dutch Protocol decided, on the basis of who-the-fuck-knows, that the reason these middle-aged transsexual men were not happy was because they didn’t “pass” as women. These same clinicians thought “ah, if we had only got these men before they went through male puberty, we could have stopped them developing male secondary sex characteristics, and they would pass better, and then of course they would be happy!”

But now you have a conundrum: you don’t know which of the children who come to you with gender dysphoria are going to be the tiny percentage who might possibly not outgrow it. You can’t know that until after they have gone through puberty, because puberty is the time when they all seem to outgrow it - by which time it is too late for the men who would supposedly benefit from not developing an Adam’s Apple and an adult-sized penis, etc.

So what did the Dutch do? They put all the kids on blockers and made a claim that the blockers themselves had a mental health benefit (they claimed they gave “time to decide” if transition was the way forward for that child or not - which has been demonstrated to be utter bunkum, see the Tavistock disaster).

It’s not clear how you row back from this: the political climate has changed, the cohort of children who are presenting with gender dysphoria has changed. I hope that the furore around this trial is the beginning of the end, but there is a lot to undo that is not just stopping the trial.

@TwoLoonsAndASprout

The morbidity in a small proportion that you describe could not possibly justify the trial that is being proposed. Surely they must have more "evidence", even if it is purely anecdotal, to justify the trial? Otherwise it wouldn't have got past the ethics committee I was on (and that was an adult one).

I mean, I have no idea! I’m not a clinician, just a ex-academic researcher, and not in this field. But nothing I have read has suggested any justification or evidence for the use of puberty blockers. It might be out there, but if it was, surely people would be crowing about it rather than hiding it (see the Tavistock, Olsen-Kennedy in the US). It seems to have just been adopted as gold standard - promoted by WPATH - with no one questioning.

It is a mystery!

There is a case for rigorous assessment of what harm (suicide, mental illness, eating disorders etc) comes to the cohort of children they have identified as having 'gender incongruence' when they follow them up with conventional treatment (ie not puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones) for several years.

It's almost as though they are denying the existence of sexually mature adults who identify as trans.

I should clarify - there is the study published on the Dutch Protocol itself, but it is exceedingly problematic (huge loss of subjects, one death, flipping of questionnaires post-treatment) and critically, no one has been able to replicate the findings.

People can keep trying to replicate it, I guess, but at some point someone should probably call time and say it’s not replicable because the original study is dodgy as fuck.

The thing I really struggle with is the lack of record keeping about the impact of PB. We know PB have been prescribed for both precocious puberty and also Gender Dysphoria; not just in the UK but globally.

The US carried out social experiments on twins and triplets. The most well known triplets have had documentaries about them as one ended up taking their own life. The detailed note taking and record keeping was staggering so why is there a gap for PB?

Trigger Warning
Dr Josef Mengele was horrific but kept such detailed notes it created an ethical dilemma of whether to use his notes to advance medicine.

Record keeping is an integral part of R & D and medical developments.

So the question is why with GD and prescribing PB is the record keeping so poor? I don’t believe it and think the records do exist.

Do I think they had a true baseline and identical methodology - no.

Do I think proper evaluation of medical records and, with consent, a full physical exam e.g. bone density scans etc. of those who were prescribed PB may provide sufficient evidence - yes.

Why would you not do that first?

Feeling that they are incongruent with sex stereotypes necessitates sterilising children, lest they kill themselves.

That is the basic premise.

Despite all these middle aged blokes, now identifying as stunning and brave, who claim to have been dysphoric since early childhood who clearly didn't kill themselves.

There are two different diagnoses situated in 2 different diagnostic manuals.

DSM‑5 (an American manual specifically focussed on mental disorders) references ‘Gender Dysphoria’, and focuses on the distress someone may feel when their gender identity doesn’t match their sex. The diagnosis is about the distress, not the identity itself.

ICD‑11 (is a global manual - produced by the WHO and covers all areas of health): references ‘gender incongruence’. This diagnosis doesn’t require distress and is listed under sexual health as opposed to mental disorders.

The Pathways trial design requires participants to have a diagnoses of Gender Incongruence and does not require the presence of gender distress, but gender distress is one of the outcome measures.

The thing is though how much of the decision-making behind those classifications and descriptions is driven by a desire to atone for homosexuality once having been included as a mental disorder?

In an effort to avoid making the same mistakes again, they've managed to make a whole bunch of new mistakes all of their own.

Oh gosh I hadn’t thought of that. I’m going to bet there will be extensive coaching of these children by activists and obviously truth is an alien concept. It’s quite horrifying really.

Yes, no puberty blockers for them, yet they have not only survived, but many have built successful careers and married and had children. These guys are the tiny minority of the (for want of a better term), worst case scenario where medication and surgery have taken place.

How many more have we not heard from where an unhappiness with their developing body at a young age resolved itself and is buried deep in the past and life is now successful and healthy?