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've been meaning to find some time to create a new thread to discuss this recent Women and Equalities Committee session about puberty blockers. Time keeps running away with me so I'll drop the link here:

https://committees.parliament.uk/event/22659/formal-meeting-oral-evidence-session/

I'm only part way through it but some highlights so far:

• all 3 doctors/clinicians clearly believe in gendered souls
• the closest to getting how unethical it is to undertake this trial seems to be Dr Grossman
• Professor Chris Butler continuously conflates PBs for precocious puberty with PBs for gender dysphoria. At one point Rosie Duffield pulls him up on it and he offers the "clarity" that apparently he was talking about a (14 year old!) child with precocious puberty in his response.... erm. He then continues the conflation
• at one point the female clinician (didn't catch her name) references a (presumably non-existent) study that apparently validates that these children will not suffer any harm to their brain development. She even has the balls/ovaries to suggest that an animal study on the impact of PBs on the brain couldn't ethically be repeated. WTAF?! That's exactly what this trial is doing, albeit only collecting data for two years... so the full extent of the (surely inevitable) decline in cognitive function won't be within the trial boundaries and will be lost.... in presumably a similar place to wherever all the data from the ~2000 PB recipients from the ~9000 ex-Tavistock patients has gone
• a Lib Dems MP (Alex Brewer) asks if it's normal for doctors to prescribe medication off-label. Yes, say all the doctors. Everyone ignores the fact that in such circumstances, the medicine is prescribed for the same purpose as when used "on" label... but in this case, PBs aren't being used to delay puberty. They are being used to stop it all together. Forever.

What an utter shitshow. I think I saw Hamnah Barnes, Keira Bell and possibly Stephanie Davies-Arai in the room, so hopefully we'll hear their take on it all. Apologies if there is already a thread and I missed it.

I look forward to a more informed debate on 9th March. In fact I hope Alex Brewer attends and brings up how normal it is for drugs to be used off-label for children. I suspect she'd get a different response from the room.

@Mackerelfillets if what you say is true, I would strongly suggest that you ask for you son to be assessed against expected milestones for his age. If he spent 5 years on puberty blockers there is sadly a high chance he will have been cognitively impaired. Obviously not everyone will have been affected detrimentally past "the norm", and he may be lucky - I'm in awe of how well Keira Bell comes across. Sadly, due to lack of data, we have no idea if she's a lucky exception. Or perhaps she is managing cognitive impact and we just can't see it.

If you're in the UK you'll be a medical wonder as so far there is only one record of a child who stopped PBs and didn't go on to cross-sex hormones. If you believe that PBs are a useful "safe" medication, it would be helpful for your son to consider volunteering to undertake the aforementioned tests. There won't be a control against his own personal cognitive development, but some data is better than no data.

Either way, it sounds like you and your son were misled about his options and that he had a lucky escape if you had both been told by doctors that he could go through female puberty. This is an impossibility, as other PPs have said, regardless of any difference of opinion you may have from others on what it means to "be" a woman. Female puberty is a biological reality. It can never happen to a male, no matter what belief anyone holds in gendered souls.

Clarification added:

When the Lib Dems MP asked her question, it was about whether it was normal to give children medication off-label. This is the significant bit. Yes, children are given this medication under strict control but it's for the same purpose as it would be for adults. The off-label bit is because it's not been tested on children for the purpose for which it's being used (but it has been tested in adults for that exact purpose).

Any other use of off-label drugs for children is medical experimentation. Mengele would be proud.

Well, we are getting to the heart of the issue.

Stopping puberty so that a child doesnt develop is the point.

Did she really spend much time talking to trans people, like she said she did?

The 'harms' raised are the whole aim and point of the medications. The clue is in the name, really.

Will the penny ever drop?

'animal study on the impact of PBs on the brain couldn't ethically be repeated.'

Surely they're not saying that you have to test on human children to avoid animal testing?

I think she also needs to explain why she supports a trail that includes children over 14 years of age if it's really really unethical?

Any child seriously distressed by their own genitals should be raising instant referrals and investigation.

Which is one of the very weird questions asked, iirc. The questionnaires are on the study info page.

Gosh if only the people paid to look into this stuff did their actual jobs.

Why is it women on here are years ahead of the curve, time and again?

At the heart of her "unethical" claim is the fact that she wants the trial to find that puberty blockers can relieve mental distress for some children by stopping them from going through the 'wrong' puberty. 14 is too old to do this as 'successfully'.

So, what is "unethical" is preventing the younger children from getting the puberty blockers in the first place. No thought about harms at all......and completely in contradiction and cross purposes to her claim that most children grow out of it after puberty.

The trial has very limited scope - it sets out to measure changes in symptoms only whilst puberty is paused. It always intended to use Tanner stage as a variable, so they could determine if there any differences in responses to puberty pausing at different Tanner stages. They had always intended to include those up to the age of 16.

Leaving aside the health risks to participants, I think the biggest flaw in the study is its failure to explore the impact of PB once puberty resumes. It is, to some extent, immaterial whether symptoms reduce or not whilst puberty is suppressed, the key measure should be the impact on symptoms once puberty is resumed - in light of puberty being positioned as the cause of distress.

I think some children (and their parents) do want puberty to be paused to bring them respite from the despair that they are experiencing. They are not able to think beyond the current crisis and don’t know what should come next. It is unconscionable to me that no intervention would be paired with puberty suppression to prepare for the resumption of puberty.

We know that others want to permanently block puberty and instead control their physical development via exogenous hormones. The Pathways trial completely ignores this. I don’t think it is coincidental that the scope of the trial is so limited. They don’t want to touch this.

The way out of this quagmire is for medics to clearly articulate that the best outcome for gender dysphoria/ gender distress is for puberty to be fully completed, without the use of any gender related endocrine or surgical treatment. This would provides the context for developing and trialling effective interventions - because we’d fucking know what the goal is. Ways to limit/ reduce distress, suicidal ideation etc. could remain the goal/ focus.

Well its either that they havent realised the implications and issues, or they very much have.

I think that's included because it's one of the criteria for a diagnosis of gender dysphoria. There has to be distress about the sexed body as well as not conforming to stereotypes. But as you say, this sort of distress raises other questions about why the child is distressed by certain parts of their body.

An interesting research question is do gender questioning children experience greater distress regarding puberty than other children? I recall disliking puberty and having various period disasters/humiliations - and boys having embarrassing wet dreams/inappropriate erections is a cultural running joke. What level of distress about puberty is average, and is it higher in children with autism/ADHD/same sex attraction/childhood abuse/gender questioning thoughts/behaviours?

It's an important question- if puberty related distress is actually NOT independently correlated with gender questioning behaviour then using puberty blockers is even more dubious.

Not to mention parity of treatment of other groups of child patients.

If 'distress' is being used as an excuse to run half assed unsafe trials, bend and ignore rules as unfairly limiting, and take extreme risks such as sterilisation- well there are many groups of children with known higher risk and distress that are expected, with their families, to get on with being at risk and in distress, largely without resources.

The SEND white paper released yesterday is already causing fear and distress, and will have a significant impact on Autistic children, and that isn't making anyone at the DfE run around saying they must have whatever they say they want.

How is this justifiable in both directions - because you could argue that these children being treated in this unique way are both lucky and extremely unlucky that adults are choosing to see them as so very different from other children, and that entitlements granting immediate wishes comes with a much lesser entitlement to protection, safeguarding and properly ethical, safe medical care.

@OpheliaWitchoftheWoods

Two words: sacred caste

Given we now know that Cass was pushing for a trial two years before her report, did Wes Streeting also know this? Presumably he did.

Why was this not made clear when the report was published? It was presented (as I recall) as more of a hypothetical rather than something already planned and in the pipeline.

100% agree and the only argument against this is ideological.

I think many (most) are blind to the ideological nature of it all.

They don’t recognise that their whole operating model is build on sand.

Presumably this is because transactivists (including those with dangerous motives) are so embedded in the NHS, even at the very top, that nobody dares to challenge. Group think all round.

A big performance about the details can detract from first principles, which are often assumed. Conveniently, people assume different things.

James Esses has today published the grounds that he, Keira Bell and the Bayswater Support Group are relying on for their application for judicial review.

Given that the trial is now paused, whether that case is still going ahead I don't know.

He links to it from his tweet here:

https://x.com/JamesEsses/status/2026225129630364099?s=20

Or, for those that don't do twitter, the actual document is here:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1gNuRmXauysDWsnxDNAzZZEpg19xtkH9F/view

It's 38 pages plus an appendix. I haven't read it any sort of detail.

I think that lots of clinicians are influenced by the patients in their clinics. So many of them have such poor quality of life which they find difficult to improve/ influence - so they end up buying in to the over simplistic formulation that halting puberty is what’s needed.

I still look for parity with other groups. Fibromyalgia patients for example - called 'heartsink patients' as almost nothing really helps, and creates an awful quality of life, but painkillers are still very strictly regulated and despite pleas to medicate better for pain, the guidelines are held to regardless of the human and emotional cost.

It's just this one group. It's always just this one group.

This is so true.

While everyone is flapping about what age of child should be included/ excluded, etc, they can conveniently forget we are talking about preventing some children from reaching maturity - possibly permanently, to fix an as yet inadequately undefined psychological problem.

And is it influenced by the adults around the child looking for a means of making the child happy, as compared with the adults around the child saying “Yeah, it’s rough, but it will pass. Let’s go out.”