March 1, 2025 - 4:00pm
The NHS has this week announced its £10.7 million clinical trial into care for gender-distressed children, following the recommendations of the Cass Review last year. Including the prescription of puberty-blocking drugs — currently banned in the UK — the trial has been christened Pathways. As if there are multiple ways of becoming an adult in a sexed body, as opposed to just one.
Dr Hilary Cass herself has welcomed the news, but there are many who had hoped it would never take place. In another world, the Cass Review would have offered a route — tentative at first — to undoing what is a medical scandal of epic proportions. For the past decade, more and more children have been subjected to damaging treatments based on the lie that one can be born in the wrong body. The pertinent question should be “How did this happen?”, not “How damaging is it, really? And if we’re careful and ask the right questions, can we still make it look okay?”
Perhaps we should not be surprised that things have progressed in this way. When it comes to “gender-affirming care”, it is hard to acknowledge that so many people have been complicit in doing so much harm. It is natural that many will want to keep insisting that this is an incredibly complex area where more data is needed. After all, “Let’s do more research” feels, on the face of it, much more reasonable than “This has always been a terrible idea and anyone could have seen this from the outset.” But the latter position is the correct one.
There is already plenty of evidence that puberty blockers have a negative impact on bone density and brain development, and that almost all of those who are prescribed them end up taking cross-sex hormones. Even if that were not the case, seeking to press pause on an essential life stage is intrinsically damaging in social and emotional terms. Blockers do not create a neutral space for learning the truth about one’s “real” self, free from the onslaught of adolescent hormones and the stress of a changing body. As the detransitioner Keira Bell told the Beyond Gender podcast this week: “the trope that [blockers] buy you more time is a complete lie, because your body’s in shutdown”.
The limited scope of the Pathways trial, not least its proposal to monitor participants for just two years, creates the uncomfortable impression that the aim is not to find better data. Instead, it is to find a way of justifying what is already, self-evidently, wrong. Regular brain scans may or may not show damage within the two-year window, but as the psychotherapist and Tavistock whistleblower Marcus Evans has tweeted, “the consequences won’t be evident in two years, when individuals may still be caught in the euphoria of having seemingly triumphed over their biological development. The real reckoning will come in twenty years, after prolonged use of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgical interventions”.
Puberty blockers are the cure that creates the illness. The very existence of the Pathways trial implies that halting puberty, rather than supporting a distressed child through it, is not in and of itself a form of abuse. It implies that, unless there are specific negative effects unrelated to the glaring one of pausing a child’s development, the treatment is justified. It is like deciding cutting is not harmful if septicaemia can be avoided, or rubber-stamping bulimia as a coping mechanism providing the cost to tooth enamel is lower than assumed.
It is missing the bigger picture. No one knows, two, three, four years after going through puberty, whether it was “worth it”. This is not a meaningful question. You grow and change, even when it hurts, because that’s what being human is. No £10.7 million trial is going to prove otherwise. Simply, it should not be taking place.
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So those who criticised the Cass review for legitimising gender “care” were right after all.
It’s a blooming disgrace wasting money on this.
Cass had the opportunity to discredit ‘gender’. She had the platform. Instead she conformed to the ‘gender’ narrative and became just another piece of the broken UK.
I don’t know who gave you the thumbs down. 2 of them. Cass is a coward. Like most public figures, she was too afraid to say the obvious. She was brave enough to say just the nice parts, but stopped short of condemning the whole mutilation industry.
She lost the opportunity to nip the evil practice in the bud.
Yes. And you can see it in her face in recent photographs.
Certainly hasn’t taken Cass very long to go from darling to devil. Not long ago her report was met on here with hurrahs.
This is an odd statement coming from anyone, but especially so coming from a feminist. Obviously there are multiple ways of becoming an adult in a sexed body, with gay or straight being just the most obvious. And clearly people do become trans,
Isnt it the feminist position that women (and perhaps men) should not just be limited to one way of being a woman (or man).
I didn’t interpret the remark in this way. I thought that the point was that you become a man, say, in only one way, that way being passing through puberty. Likewise, obviously, for a woman.
How you then go on to live and how you present yourself to the world is quite a different matter and something that you have considerable autonomy over.
Sure, but nobody is suggesting that biological men can become biological women – only that trans women should be classed as women by society. This is actually an aspect of how you choose to live, and the classification is sociocultural.
I think her bizarre way of putting this is because she doesn’t want to say the more obvious: boys grow up to be men and girls grow up to be women. Some feminists find themselves in a bind here – they think gender should be flexible, but only in terms they define.
You’re confusing biology with culture. There are many ways of being a woman culturally and socially, but puberty is fairly uncontroversially the only biological pathway for a young girl to mature into an adult woman.
Looks like the entire article was over your head.
The feminist position is that men are harmful and not necessary.
Clearly the Cass report was right – we do need more research, we cannot simply act in ignorance.
One key area we need research in is whether trans people’s brains really do differ from those of cis people. Do they most resemble the brains of the sex they are or the sex they desire to be. And is this brain difference present from an early age.
Some research does indeed suggest this is the case. If we knew for certain then we would at least know what kind of a phenomenon we are dealing with and could rule out some other hypotheses.
“Puberty blockers are the cure that creates the illness,” is a superb line.
My wife and I are reluctant to take pharmaceuticals that might help us (HRT and blood pressure). We’re not wildly radical; we’d bite the bullet and do so if we thought they were the least bad option.
Much of the reason for our reluctance is our understanding that given sensible living, the human body is remarkably good at fixing itself but we also believe that doctors have got above themselves.
Too often,they believe that they have found wonderful solutions to the problems that we face. Occasionally this is true but generally these solutions come at a cost.
While, I find it hard to imagine, I trust what they say and that some people suffer great distress over their gender.The question is not, should we help relieve this but at what cost does our intervention come?
Once again the Left has championed child abuse, just as it did in the 70s when supporting paedophiles.
Delay puberty until the child reaches the age of consent …
I have been operating under the impression that puberty was a non-negotiable stage of human development.
It seems to follow that drastically tampering with and stunting this necessary stage of development probably isn’t good.
Too many unevidenced foundational certainties there for the ideological faithful I suppose – ”Puberty is not dispensable, men and women are not interchangeable at a fundamental biological level,” etc.
They’ll need to do some more medical experiments on children apparently
Like the Left’s many species of human monsters, these noxious “gender affirming care” people will not give up. We’d lend you our Donald Trump to begin segregating them from normal humans but we’re still using him.
An articulate, no-nonsense indictment of pediatric gender experimentation. That such arguments must still be made against the medical and surgical mutilation of physically healthy, emotionally distressed children — always and ever a fundamentally monstrous idea — is mind boggling.