February 11, 2026 - 4:00pm
Has the ban on puberty blockers really driven a surge in child suicides, as the Good Law Project (GLP) claims? Or are campaigners drawing sweeping conclusions from fragile data about a small and deeply vulnerable group? Those hoping for a headline answer will be disappointed. The facts are complex, and demand a careful reading.
Suicide, especially among children, is one of the most serious subjects any journalist can cover. Reporting guidelines warn against attributing deaths to a single “trigger”, and caution that young people are particularly susceptible to suicide contagion and as such, emotive or sensational framing should be avoided.
Perhaps the outlet Pink News forgot this when, earlier this week, it repeated the GLP claim under the headline: “Trans youth suicides surged when the NHS banned puberty blockers, tragic report suggests.”
Activists have long engaged in this grisly waving of a somewhat opaque shroud. In 2024, Professor Louis Appleby, the Government’s suicide prevention adviser, was commissioned to examine claims by the GLP and others that “there has been a large rise in suicide by current and recent patients of the Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) at the Tavistock since an earlier restriction of puberty-blocking drugs.”
After reviewing data from NHS England, Appleby identified six cases in which gender dysphoria was considered a contributing factor. He was scathing about those who weaponised claims of suicide, and now the GLP has hit back.
In its latest report, the lawfare group cites figures from the National Child Mortality Database (NCMD), which records 46 deaths between 2019 and 2025 in which a child was noted as identifying as transgender and where the primary cause was categorised as “suicide or deliberate self-inflicted harm”.
The breakdown is uneven: five deaths in 2019–20, four in 2020–21, 22 in 2021–22, 10 in 2022–23, three in 2023–24 and two in 2024–25. Even at a glance, this is not a steady upward trajectory which neatly maps onto policy change. The NCMD explains that the totals for the more recent years may yet increase once reviews by the Child Death Overview Panel have been completed. Nonetheless, this is a fluctuating series drawn from a small base, with a notable spike in the period following the pandemic, when youth mental health indicators worsened across the board.
Weighty claims have been built on these flimsy figures. GLP founder Jolyon Maugham KC wrote on Bluesky that the data “exposes the truth” and accused Health Secretary Wes Streeting of promoting “politically convenient falsehoods about suicide rates amongst young trans people”. The GLP website adopted similarly emotive language, saying that “those of us in or close to the trans community have been to the funerals of those we love. And we have wept together.” It added that the Health Secretary’s report “denied the reality of trans deaths, as Streeting’s ban on puberty blockers denied the reality of trans lives”.
In a topic so sensitive, definitions are critical. There is no legal or medical category of a “transgender child”. Gender recognition certificates are unavailable to under-18s, and a diagnosis of gender dysphoria does not make a child “trans”. Many young people who experience gender distress reconcile with their sex as they mature, particularly if allowed to progress through puberty without medical intervention.
NCMD itself confirmed in an FOI response that “trans” was used as an umbrella term covering transgender, non-binary, gender-questioning, gender-transitioning or gender-dysphoric children, a broad and heterogeneous grouping rather than a single clinical category. It is also well established that young people presenting with gender-related distress often have many comorbid mental health conditions, including autism and eating disorders.
The FOI data released to the GLP in fact confirmed Appleby’s findings: six children who died by suicide who specifically had gender dysphoria recorded as a contributing factor. Six is still six too many, but it does not follow that puberty blockers would have prevented these deaths or that there has been a surge in numbers. Ultimately, the absence of evidence for a policy-driven suicide spike should be a source of relief. As Appleby wrote in 2024: “Suicide should not be a slogan or a means to winning an argument. To the families of 200 teenagers a year in England, it is devastating and all too real.”
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