March 10, 2025 - 11:45am
Wes Streeting is a skilled operator. The Health Secretary has managed to scale the Labour ranks while carefully curating a moral stance that plays well with voters. For the past few years, as party leader Keir Starmer has tripped over questions about womanly willies, Streeting has executed a smooth political pivot, rebranding himself from a diehard Stonewall stalwart to a born-again gender-critical crusader. But now he’s hit a political pothole, unable to navigate a path between the best interests of children and the demands of vocal activists — some of whom remain his political allies.
Having vowed to fully implement the Cass Review, Streeting has refused to intervene on a controversial £10.7 million NHS puberty blocker trial. In practice, this means a new cohort of children will be placed on a medical conveyor belt toward infertility and long-term side effects we barely understand. And he has approved this despite ending the prescription of puberty blockers just last year.
When Streeting announced the ban on puberty blockers he braced for backlash, telling young trans activists that he understood their concerns. “I know it won’t feel like it based on the decisions I’m taking today,” he said, “but I really do care about this, and so does this government.” Yet, predictably, campaigners met the news with ghoulish histrionics. Lawyer and founder of the Good Law Project Jolyon Maugham even declared that grieving parents would scatter the ashes of their dead trans kids outside Number 10. But Streeting need not have worried about any impact on his popularity, given that 75% of Britons oppose it too.
The ban on puberty blockers was heralded as the end of ideologically driven medical treatments, a bold step back toward sanity. And so Streeting’s decision to give the go-ahead for the continuation of baseless treatments with proven harms feels like a gut punch to many.
Shortly after the trial was announced, campaigner James Esses and detransitioner Keira Bell threatened legal action, demanding that the Health Research Authority (HRA) shut it down. Parents’ groups and clinicians quickly pointed out glaring flaws in the study’s design. Campaign group Transgender Trend nailed the core issue: in most drug trials, the potential benefits of a treatment must outweigh the risks. But in this case, “the treatment IS the harm.”
The very purpose of puberty blockers is to interfere with natural development, turning healthy children into lifelong patients. “Arrested growth is the desired outcome,” Transgender Trend pointed out, “so gender ideologues view this as a ‘success’.”
This is the problem politicians like Streeting face: transgender ideology doesn’t allow for a cozy middle ground. Either you accept biological reality — that sex is binary, and that no amount of medication or strongly held beliefs can change that — or you deny it entirely.
Streeting likely views approving the trial as a convenient way to shift responsibility onto Cass, sidestepping the tough decisions that come with his role as Health Secretary. On the surface, more research sounds sensible. Who could argue against gathering more data? But when it comes to gender identity treatments which are based on ideology rather than evidence, another trial means more children subjected to harmful and unnecessary medical intervention.
By refusing to stop this study, Streeting risks being remembered not as the man who cleaned up the mess from the Tavistock scandal, but as the one who doused its smouldering ruins in petrol. Detransitioners, campaigners and concerned clinicians may not be able to sway him, but the threat to his carefully curated image just might.
Josephine Bartosch is assistant editor at The Critic and co-author of the forthcoming book Pornocracy.
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SubscribeStop it? Too right!!!!
Why not just carry out a “retrospective trial” by analysing the data from cases of previously mutilated children. It might not be a properly “controlled” experiment, but a genuinely objective analysis would probably reach the same conclusions.
The wonderful people who used. The puberty blockerers have not followed up, and even claim to have terminally lost touch with their ‘patients’
The last government changed the law to allow the adult GICs, to whom the previous cohort of medicated kids had been transferred, to supply their data for a study. They refused.
The claim of feminists and trans activists is that while sex is binary, gender is not. This does, of course leave space for tolerance and accommodation of those who do not conform to normal behaviour for their sex. How much tolerance and accommodation is for society as a whole to decide.
It is not that no compromise is possible, it’s that neither side is willing to compromise. The general public tends to be more flexible.
The liberal argument against trans ideology is stronger than the conservative one. It’s teaching queer, gender nonconforming and other vulnerable children that there is something wrong with their bodies. This shit is about as regressive as it gets.
That’s an interesting take, though some gender dysphoria seems to occur without teaching – it long predates the trans thing in schools.
Correct. I deliberately said trans ideology rather than transgenderism. I think that’s a different argument. If anything the strength of such peoples dysphoria would suggest that indeed we don’t need to teach trans ideology. Just be more open when the child speaks up. Still I don’t agree with drugs and surgery for children. If people want to go down that path as adults that’s a different matter.
And what solved it in the past was getting past puberty and into adulthood
Perhaps I’m naive, but I’m struggling to see why such a trial would cost upward of £10m.
Would it not make more sense to determine whether trans phenomena are in fact rooted in biology. For example whether the brains of trans people are in fact different from cis people and in what ways. It would involve no “treatment” but would allow us to understand better what we are dealing with.
Sounds like the search for the gay gene. A fool’s errand if you ask me but probably should be ruled out.
These people are simply pathetic. This issue, among others, will ultimately have to be brought before the criminal courts. Civil actions, even if taken and successful, might not be enough.