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.”'

This. It is so very important to not permit the fig leaves, and to state this in plain terms. Streeting and everyone else need to face what they are doing without nice branding and language disguising it. If he wants to sterilise children he can bloody well own it.

Just to say: signatures on James Esses’ petition are now over 28,000 and climbing.

Yes, 'injecting primary school aged children with powerful drugs to prevent them growing up' doesn't quite have the same ring as 'puberty blocker trial', does it?

PIE never went away, did it?

Spookily I was just thinking about PIE. I was too young to remember/be aware, but I can’t help wondering when the turning point was from people looking away, justifying, minimising to finally condemning and closing it?

30k already on the petition.

What a great letter.

I particularly like this bit from the annex (bolding is mine):

As you are aware, GnRHa administered throughout adolescence will prevent puberty from taking place, preventing all sex steroid dependent physical and neurocognitive development from proceeding.

In other words, "Mr Streeting, you already know that with this trial you have allowed paediatric brain damage".

Well, it's certainly a brave move. Mengele would presumably be proud of him.

Ps I had a scroll through the signatories but couldn't see Dr Hillary Cass in the list. Perhaps I missed it by skimming too fast?

Sarcasm aside, I hope someone has approached her to request her signature.

Obviously the permanent sterility is awful (and no child can assent to this) but my preference would be "Streeting's child brain damage trial".

He's promoting experiments on children's brains. Even lobotomies didn't get the go ahead from the (then) health secretary when they were brought in under the NHS. They just slid in to common medical practice. But Streeting is actively saying this latest brain experimentation should go ahead, even if he is "not comfortable".

FFS Wes, you should be using your discomfort to block it.

After making the (flippant) comment about not seeing Cass' signature on the CAN-SG letter, I saw the quote from Baroness Cass a little further down.

Arabella's legalise heroin analogy says it all. Just as with heroin, we already know that PBs cause harm. We already know it causes sterility and stops brain development.

Apologies that I can't remember which PP said it but it's spot on that the significant reduction in demand for PBs could highly likely be a result of the message finally getting through to enough parents that they are dangerous. Surely Cass knows this is a possibility?

When we said no to our daughter's request for PBs back in April 2022 the NHS website explicitly said that it is "not known whether hormone blockers affect the development of the teenage brain". Here's the archive of the page from then: https://archive.ph/LwIm3 We told her that it was a no because we didn't want her brain being experimented upon. At that time I had never heard of PBs before, so this information was all we had.

It's no longer that explicit. It's just wishy washy and doesn't mention brains at all. The "risks" section only refers to cross-sex hormones in its main wording and the section specifically about PBs says:

Puberty suppressing hormones are not available to children and young people for the treatment of gender dysphoria or gender incongruence.
This is because there is not enough evidence on their clinical safety and effectiveness.
If you're already receiving these medicines for gender dysphoria or incongruence on the NHS, you can continue to access them.

This is the current page: https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/gender-dysphoria/treatment/

I wonder why they've removed the part that makes it obvious (it certainly did to me, back in 2022) that this is an experiment on children's brains... just before starting a trial involving such experimentation 🤔

I think someone posted Dr Cass’s presentation to the Lords that was not so long ago about how this trial was necessary because parents had gone private to access PBs. Her reasoning, presumably, is that if parents are doing this already, better they access the PBs under controlled conditions with follow up.

However, I’m wondering if this isn’t a bit naive. Instead of the current off licence users of PBs all switching over to the trial, they’ll find it’s a new set of parents signing their gender dysphoric child up to the trial. Parents who think the trial is safe because it’s run by the NHS and parents who wouldn’t have otherwise sought out the drugs.

Yep.

It's absolutely no diffirent to noting that teenagers self harm, and that the NHS should therefore offer clinically approved surgical cuts with clean scalpels.

I recall back in 20....18? 19? or so the NHS website explicitly said PBs were "safe and reversible'.

I remember them changing it.

Somewhere there will be an archive.

Instead of the current off licence users of PBs all switching over to the trial, they’ll find it’s a new set of parents signing their gender dysphoric child up to the trial. Parents who think the trial is safe because it’s run by the NHS and parents who wouldn’t have otherwise sought out the drugs.

This. A thousand fold. I credit myself as not being stupid but if the NHS had been running a trial, given how distressed my daughter subsequently became (about 5 months after she made the PB request), I can't rule out the idea that I might have thought about it. The key reason why I can say that would never have happened is that the wording on the NHS website was so clear (to me) when I first read it that I would never have been open-minded enough to think that the trial was a good idea.

I know someone who runs clinical trials (not an NHS employee) and I have no doubt that I would have spoken to her and come away reassured that the NHS had enough checks and balances in place. Perhaps that would have been enough to go for it, given my daughter ended up in such terrible distress with her mental health that she was violent at home. With no other source of information, and no real understanding at that time how polarised this whole subject was (I didn't know about MN until about 8 months after her request), perhaps that would have been enough? I knew plenty of "LGBT" people from the work environment and had gone to that community first, within the work network, for advice as it seemed like the most obvious place to start.

To be clear, I fully trust her to know how to run trials. I was speaking to her about the PB trial recently and her start point was that every step will have been taken to ensure it is a safe trial to run. I can fully understand why she has faith in the system within which she works. Sadly, I no longer do. It was interesting talking to her about how ethics committees work. It sounds like they don't need to take broad context into account (e.g. parents who have been gaslit to believe it's transition or suicide) but instead effectively need to think about whether it's a laudable aim and is being run in an ethical way when considering whether or not it's ethical. So presumably a lobotomy trial, with assenting children and consenting parents, would have passed through just fine (albeit possibly with a Health Secretary who was "not comfortable", had he/she been asked) if it's aim was to cure mental illness.

Too late for the edit.

This should have read:

I know someone who runs clinical trials (not an NHS employee) and I have no doubt that I would have spoken to her and come away reassured that the NHS had enough checks and balances in place, had I not already seen the original wording about PBs on the NHS website.

Parents are giving their children heroine because they can buy it privately. Therefore the NHS should supply it instead.

This doesn't sound like a logical argument to the sane.

It is a pro-abortion argument though: women will access dangerous backstreet abortions, so abortion should be provided by the State in safer conditions.

Yes. That's a good reason for not leaning on that argument when defending access to abortions. It's politically more difficult, but better I think, to say that nobody should be forced to use and risk their own body to support another human.

( "Forced" rests partly on patriarchy, and partly on fallibility and limited availability of contraception. Partly on changing circumstances too - as a thought experiment, imagine a future world in which contraception genuinely was easily, privately available to every woman for free (perhaps with a social default to having it turned on at puberty), so that if someone got pregnant, it really was fair to assume that at that time she had made a choice to risk getting pregnant. I think we'd still need to allow abortion because of the possibility that something important for her changed after she got pregnant. I also think it would be intolerable to make an individual woman justify her choice for abortion, so we'd only use those arguments to support the general fact that abortion should be available. Still, personally, I find this a harder area than I used to. Maybe a discussion for another thread some day.)

Since when is there a parallel between abortion and taking puberty blockers?!

Im sorry but if that's your parallel you need to get your head out your arse.

Not taking puberty blockers isn't going to risk your life and result in a little person running around. Taking puberty blockers even by prescription is going to have long term medical consequences and potentially shorten your life.

The parallel is not only gross and offensive (and clearly farted out by the delusional wing of the US democratic party, when we live in the UK) but it's completely bloody illogical and doesn't fit with medical ethics anyway.

@BonfireLadyI was prescribed one of the drugs used as a puberty blocker as a fully consenting and, I thought, informed adult in my early 30's for endometriosis. The physical, emotional and mental effects of being on them for 7 months were horrific and to some extent may still be effecting me now over 20 years later.

From the language used around these drugs I'm sure that none of the people making starements about them have ever taken them.

I applaud your decision to protect your DD, from my experience you absolutely did the right thing despite the heartache on both sides.

Since when is there a parallel between abortion and taking puberty blockers?!

The parallel is in the argument that X could be more harmful if accessed privately, so the State should provide it under safer conditions.

@RedToothBrush (and clearly farted out by the delusional wing of the US democratic party, when we live in the UK)

Nope, I'm GC, UK and centrist. When people started using that argument I immediately saw the parallel

They imply that they might be in the link that I shared above. They distance themselves from the idea that they might not be:

Although GIDS advises this is a physically reversible treatment if stopped, it is not known what the psychological effects may be.

GIDS is/was obviously part of the NHS, so that's a very curious way to write this. Surely it would be "although this is a physically reversible treatment" if the NHS actually believed it was? Why pre-emptively throw one NHS department under the bus if NHSE believes them? It's arse-covering in plain sight.

To add: I looked through all the archived pages a while ago and this wording seems consistent. Haven't looked for a while though and definitely could have missed something, including elsewhere on the NHS pages.

And also edited to add a previously missing word.

It's also the argument for methadone or even heroin maintenance for opiate addicts.

Yep. Although, I'm guessing the NHS didn't start methadone trials on children when first looking at it as a drug to manage addiction.