NHS to give puberty blockers as part of new clinical trial

A new clinical trial of puberty blocking drugs will begin in the new year for a group of 200 children, potentially as young as eight-years-old, who feel they might be transgender.

Puberty blockers were banned last year by the Health Secretary, Wes Streeting, following the Cass Review which found that there was “remarkably weak” evidence to support the use of such drugs.

Two past members of the Tavistock Clinic have criticised the new trial. The Tavistock Clinic was a centre for gender identity development services, which was shut down by the NHS after a report found it was not safe for children.

Susan and Marcus Evans, who were employed by the Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust, have written a nine-page letter calling for an “immediate halt” to the trial.

“The stakes are too high and the lessons from recent failures too fresh to ignore,” they write, and call on Wes Streeting to stop spending “money on this shallow, harmful medical trial”. The trial has been given a budget of £10 million.

“There is huge value in learning more about the ongoing longer-term outcomes for them before we impose puberty blockers on a new cohort of children,” they said, arguing for restarting research into those who have already received puberty blocker drugs.

The former Education Secretary, Gavin Williamson, added his name to a letter by a fellow MP which said, “We cannot, and must not, repeat the catastrophic failures of the Tavistock era, and we cannot allow twisted ideological pressure to override our duty to protect children”.

Rosie Duffield, MP for Canterbury, wrote on social media that she could not “believe I came to Parliament to have to point out that we should never use experimental/irreversible drugs in trials on children under 13 which halt their puberty”.

Dr David Bell, a former psychiatrist and Tavistock whistleblower said the trial was “neither safe nor will it provide meaningful evidence… It is unethical as it will be exposing children to risk for no clear benefit”.