The Regulator Said Fourteen. The Government Said Eleven.
MPs are scheduled to vote on the puberty blockers trial TODAY. Drugging physically healthy children to stop them turning into adults?
Madness. – Jonathan Hinder M
Today, the morning after Keir Starmer resigned and Labour began hunting for its seventh leader in a decade, the House of Commons will vote on the puberty blockers trial. The motion may not bind a thing. The government keeps its majority and can wave it away by teatime. But every Member will have to put their name to a side, and that is worth something. It tells you who was in the room when the question was asked.
Read the age before you read anything else. Eleven. The government’s own medicines regulator, the MHRA, examined this trial in February, took fright, and said the youngest children should be at least fourteen. The approved scheme takes them at eleven. When your own safety watchdog says wait three years and the wheels turn anyway, that is not following the science. That is overruling the science and pocketing its language on the way past.
Be clear about who these children are, because the wording is built to blur it. This is not precocious puberty, the rare disorder where a body begins changing far too soon and a blocker buys back stolen time. That use is licensed and nobody disputes it. This is physically healthy children, developing exactly as nature intended, whose ordinary puberty would be switched off with drugs first licensed to shrink prostate tumours and to chemically castrate sex offenders. The regulator’s own list of worries ran to bone density, brain development and fertility. A child halted at the first signs of puberty may never make the crossing into adulthood that puberty exists to make.
So the question is not abstract, and three MPs refused to let it stay that way.
Jonathan Hinder, a Labour man, gave it the only honest name. Madness. Drugging physically healthy children to stop them becoming adults. Rosie Duffield, driven out of the whip for saying unfashionable true things, asked why the whistleblowers, the detransitioners and the clinicians who lived through the Tavistock years still go unheard, while the minister shelters behind clinical advice that dozens of clinicians reject. Then Dr Caroline Johnson, who is no culture warrior but an NHS consultant paediatrician, said the quiet thing in one clean sentence:
“Put simply, it takes physically healthy children with normal pubertal development and subjects them to powerful drugs which may weaken their bones, affect their ability to think, damage sexual function and make them unable to have children of their own.”
That is the issue. Not flags, not lanyards, not the soft warm fog of activist branding. Children.
THE BILL RUNS DOWNHILL
Here is the part the metropolitan commentary always edits out, the part that makes this our story and not theirs. A trial needs subjects, and recruitment opens in August. So ask which children are gathered into the cohort, and which are quietly steered towards the private second opinion. The articulate family with money and a contact book finds a careful psychologist and asks the awkward questions.
The working class child, on a long list, with a distracted state for a guardian and nothing soft to land on, is the one carried into the experiment. As ever with the bold adventures of the professional class, the bill is posted downhill. The same eleven year old judged too young to be trusted with a social media account is judged old enough to consent to the loss of their own fertility.
The first rule of medicine is primum non nocere: first, do no harm. The first duty of politics is to shield the weak from the strong. The drugs were banned by Labour, and it is Labour, leaderless and lost, drifting between one master and the next, that has reached for them again on its way out of the door.
A society is judged by the children it protects, and the ones it experiments on. We are about to be judged.
There is no such thing as a trans child.
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