Children being ‘used as guinea pigs’ in puberty blockers experiment

Health Secretary Wes Streeting is allowing a trial of puberty blockers for children to go ahead despite confessing to being “uncomfortable” about the risks involved and receiving strong and widespread opposition.

The Pathways trial, recommended by the Cass Review (which examined NHS gender identity services for children and young people) was set to start in January. Concerns regarding the impact of the drugs include issues related to brain development, fertility, and bone density, as well as the subject of whether young children are capable of giving consent.

“It is hard to believe the Government is prepared to use children as guinea pigs for experiments with drugs that we know can be dangerous for them,” said Simon Calvert, Deputy Director of The Christian Institute. “The risks to fertility, bone density and brain maturation are well documented. The only reason this is going ahead is to placate the radical trans lobby. They do not care about the best interests of children, only their own extreme and increasingly unpopular political demands.”

King’s College London, which is heading up the research, plans to provide injections to more than 200 children under age 16 over the course of the two-year trial. Funded by the Government, it is expected to cost the taxpayer £11million, according to the Christian Institute.

“To subject children to puberty blocker trials is to treat them not as image-bearers of God, but as experimental material for ideology,” said Andrea Williams, Chief Executive of Christian Concern. “Scripture teaches that children are a gift from the Lord, entrusted to us for protection, not exploitation (Ps.127v3). When the state authorises irreversible interventions on healthy bodies, it abandons its God-given duty to do no harm.”

Peter Benjamin, a man who detransitioned after undergoing irreversible surgery and living as a transgender woman for seven years, said giving access to puberty-blocking drugs is “a very dangerous experiment” and “is not love”.

After becoming a Christian, Benjamin returned to his biological male identity. However, he still lives with the effects that the surgery and the hormones he took had on his physical and mental health.

“They’re very reluctant to put me on a higher dose of male hormones now,” he said of the gender identity clinic which originally aided his transition. “It will never reverse the process, the damage, that was done…” he said. “Being on the hormones, they’re dangerous, they’re killers.”