Health Secretary Wes Streeting is under mounting pressure to scrap the state-backed trial of puberty-blocking drugs after admitting that he is ‘deeply uncomfortable’ with the controversial experiment.
He revealed he has serious concerns about the NHS-backed trial, which will study the effect of banned puberty-blocking drugs on more than 200 gender-questioning children.
Critics have likened the ‘grotesque’ trial to ‘state-sanctioned chemical castration’. And campaigners have already launched a legal bid to have it banned by the courts.
‘I’m not comfortable, candidly, about it [the trial],’ Mr Streeting told LBC radio on Friday. ‘There’s something about the opposition to this. Medication that delays or indeed stops a natural part of our human development, which is puberty, I am deeply uncomfortable with.
‘The clinical advice is to go ahead with the trial, and those who advocate this medication, and lots of other countries are using medication in these cases, suggest that for trans people, this is a better course of treatment than leaving them without and with all of the distress and harm that that could be.’
The extraordinary admission triggered fresh calls for the trial to be abandoned.
Tory equalities spokesman Claire Coutinho said: ‘Wes Streeting is right to be ‘uncomfortable’ about putting children as young as eight, who might have autism and neurological differences, on a pathway to infertility and loss of sexual function.
‘No child can consent to that. It is a grotesque experiment on children and it must be halted.’ Baroness Cash, a former commissioner at the Equality and Human Rights Commission, said: ‘He must do the right thing and halt this scandalous trial.’
The trial was recommended by the landmark 2024 Cass review of transgender services for children, which paved the way for puberty blockers to be banned in light of the lack of evidence the drugs were safe or effective.
As part of a wider £10.7million Government-funded project, known as Pathways, some 226 children aged under 16 who have been diagnosed with ‘gender incongruence’ will be proscribed puberty blockers for two years. Routine use of the drugs has already been banned.
Mr Streeting said the Cass review had uncovered ‘utterly shocking levels of unprofessionalism, lack of proper clinical oversight and the prescription of puberty blockers without evidence’.
He added: ‘But Hilary Cass also recommended that we do a proper study. The Pathways study involves a whole range of treatments and care, including therapeutics or mental health support, but it also included a trial on this puberty blockers thing. We’re following that evidence.’
Former Olympic swimmer Sharron Davies, who was appointed as a Tory peer this week, said he could not ‘pass the buck’.
Posting on X, she said officials should examine the data on thousands of children ‘experimented on’ before the puberty-blocking drugs were banned.
Helen Joyce, director of advocacy at sex-based rights charity Sex Matters, said it was clear that Mr Streeting was ‘rattled by the degree of resistance to the trial’.
She added: ‘It’s outrageous that researchers received ethical approval to subject yet more children to this dangerous treatment when we still don’t know how those already exposed are doing in adult life.’
Downing Street on Friday refused to say whether Sir Keir Starmer is ‘comfortable’ with the trial going ahead.
The PM’s spokesman said: ‘I think the Health Secretary has said and has been clear that children with gender incongruence deserve safe, compassionate and effective care, and that healthcare must always be led by evidence.
‘And that’s why we’re following the recommendations of the Cass review, which, as well as bringing in a ban on puberty blockers, specifically called for this clinical research.’
