Inside the battle to ban puberty blockers

UK health secretary Wes Streeting announced last week that the government’s emergency ban on puberty blockers would be made permanent. Under-18s who have been diagnosed with ‘gender dysphoria’ will no longer be prescribed these drugs either privately or via the NHS.

The news was greeted with the kind of unhinged response we’ve come to expect from the trans lobby and its supporters. Reactions on social media varied from ‘Fuck you [Wes Streeting], you piece of shit, you worm, you quisling prick’ to claims that Streeting is a ‘child murderer’.

Leading trans activist Katie Neeves, who styles himself as ‘a trans ambassador’, exercised his diplomatic skills by suggesting Streeting ‘will have blood on his hands’. Some activists even openly argued that the health secretary deserved the same fate as the American health insurance CEO allegedly killed by easy-on-the-eye nutjob Luigi Mangione earlier this month. ‘Where’s Luigi when you need him?’, asked one user on X.

All this is just a flavour of what the campaigners against puberty blockers have faced for almost a decade. The ban on puberty blockers – first introduced by the previous Conservative government earlier this year in the aftermath of the Cass Review – would never have happened without the agitation of an unlikely grassroots coalition. This involved everyone from radical feminists to people of faith, from trade unionists to anxious parents. Yet their attempts to alert the public to the dangers of these drugs were consistently howled down amid threats of violence and the most outrageous lies.

The biggest lie of all has been that opposition to puberty blockers is not only ‘transphobic’, but also, somehow, ‘anti-gay’. This is the reverse of the truth, yet initially, it proved a devastatingly effective way to silence criticism. The coalition found it almost impossible to counter until October 2019, when LGB Alliance was set up by two veterans of the gay-rights movement, Bev Jackson and Kate Harris. In a sign of the times, LGB Alliance suddenly found that it was the only organisation in the UK to focus exclusively on defending the interests of lesbians, gay men and bisexuals. All the other charities set up to defend gay rights now prioritised trans rights.

Having a gay organisation batting alongside long-term opponents of puberty blockers changed the game. Stephanie Davies-Arai, founder of Transgender Trend, tells me that she suddenly felt the dynamic change. She set up Transgender Trend in 2015, alarmed by the sudden rise in young people identifying as trans. She and her colleague, Shelley Charlesworth, published seminal research on the risks of puberty blockers. In 2018, they distributed a guide to schools that warned about the drugs. Stonewall condemned it as dangerous and urged schools to shred it.

‘Before LGB Alliance, the LGBTQ+ lobby were able to get away with painting anyone who expressed concern about blockers as somehow homophobic’, says Davies-Arai. This was despite the fact all the evidence pointed to homophobia being a large part of the reason blockers were prescribed. Whistleblowers working at the Tavistock youth gender clinic reported that the vast majority of teenagers being given puberty blockers were simply same-sex-attracted. A disproportionate number were autistic. Many of them were both. Yet if staff raised concerns about this, they were sidelined.

In an irony for the ages, the trans propaganda being distributed by groups like Stonewall, Mermaids and GIRES (the Gender Identity Research and Education Society) was also fuelling the demand for blockers by trading in outdated stereotypes. Their ideology suggested that if a boy likes dolls and hates football, he might be a girl. If a girl hates dresses and having long hair, she might be a boy.

In December 2019, LGB Alliance drew attention to this regressive belief in its first ad against puberty blockers. It read: ‘Some people believe girls who like football need puberty blockers and a double mastectomy. We believe they need football boots.’ What you might have thought was an uncontroversial message was slammed by an array of LGBT activists as bigotry incarnate.

At the same time, it was vital to also counter the bogus ‘science’ behind the claims about puberty blockers. Transgender Trend published groundbreaking research by Michael Biggs, which showed a Dutch study that had long been used to justify prescribing puberty blockers was actually a house of cards. Then, LGB Alliance joined that effort. In January 2020, as a member of its management team, I was asked to analyse a newly published paper about blockers, co-written by LGBT activist Dr Jack Turban. It claimed that the drugs reduced suicidality in young people. The research was widely acclaimed in the media. Pink News declared that Turban’s work proved blockers ‘literally save the lives of transgender teens’.

As I read Turban’s paper, I was astonished at how shoddy it was. While the evidence it cited suggested there was a marginal decrease in suicidal thinking, I discovered young people given blockers were in fact twice as likely to be hospitalised after a serious attempt to commit suicide compared with those who hadn’t been prescribed blockers.

Worse still was a note buried in the small print of the paper. This acknowledged that the guidelines for prescribing puberty blockers recommended recipients should have any previous underlying psychiatric conditions under control. In other words, it was likely that those teenagers who were given blockers were in better mental health to start with than those who weren’t. Yet having been prescribed blockers, they were then twice as likely to be hospitalised after trying to kill themselves.

Rather than attempting to counter my points with research and evidence, as you might expect a scientist to, Turban accused LGB Alliance of transphobia and blocked me on Twitter. The fact that opposition to his agenda was now coming from a gay organisation was just a taste of what was to come.

Behind the scenes, a few key MPs and peers were beginning to respond. A crucial role was played by Baroness Anne Jenkin. Appalled by the idea of children having their puberty stolen from them, she was soon bending the ear of any minister who could not outrun her. She presented the concerns of LGB Alliance and similar groups to then Tory health secretary Sajid Javid. In the autumn of 2020, he commissioned the Cass Review.

Jenkin soon helped open other doors, too. In the autumn of 2021, I joined LGB Alliance’s Kate Harris and Eileen Gallagher for a meeting at 10 Downing Street with Munira Mirza, who was then director of the No10 policy unit.

I have no way of knowing for sure, but I suspect the meeting with Mirza, one of the Conservative Party’s leading intellectuals, was a critical turning point. After our half-hour presentation, she shook each of our hands and thanked us ‘sincerely for your courage and your resilience’. ‘I’ll do what I can’, she added.

A month later, then prime minister Boris Johnson sent an official message of support to LGB Alliance’s first annual conference. Despite Johnson’s backing, the battle for hearts and minds within the Conservative Party had only just begun. Most gay Tories remained signed up to the LGBT lobby’s agenda. The wealth of that lobby was so vast and its influence so pervasive that LGB Alliance was still very much the underdog. By this point, though, our opponents were increasingly coming to be viewed as what they had always been – just one side of an important debate. No longer could Stonewall and its playground army of LGBT organisations get away with claiming to speak for all lesbians and gay men. The narrative that had sustained their unchallenged domination had now well and truly been disrupted.

Although that was achievement enough, LGB Alliance did something even more powerful. Its example acted as a shield. All the other groups who opposed the trans agenda could no longer be painted as homophobic, for they were in agreement with us. This meant that Transgender Trend, For Women Scotland and Sex Matters could mention us in dispatches and the homophobia accusation ran into the sand.

The resilience of LGB Alliance also helped create space for a spate of new lesbian and gay groups to emerge into the limelight, like the Lesbian Project, the Gay Men’s Network and Lesbian Labour, among others. These all sang from the same song sheet on puberty blockers as we did. A sense of momentum had been generated.

By 2022, the scandal at the Tavistock had also deepened. When the much-delayed results of its trial into puberty blockers was released in 2021, it included an astonishing admission: these drugs didn’t help relieve gender dysphoria.

LGB Alliance is by no means solely responsible for the permanent ban on puberty blockers. But no one can deny that it helped change the political landscape around the subject, so that experts and politicians could focus on the evidence. They could no longer be bullied into self-censorship in fear of being accused of homophobia. LGB Alliance also met all the key opinion-formers on the ban, including Kemi Badenoch and, more recently, Wes Streeting. The starting point in all these meetings was the same concern that brought LGB Alliance into being just five short years ago. No longer did anyone deny the NHS was unnecessarily medicalising young lesbians and gay boys. The question was how to prevent that or at least limit it.

LGB Alliance is now campaigning against plans to continue prescribing puberty blockers as part of a large medical trial. There can be no justification for giving these dangerous drugs with no proven benefit to children. As such, the ban is a small battle won, but the campaign to reverse the malign influence of the trans lobby has only just begun.

Malcolm Clark was LGB Alliance’s head of research from 2019 to 2022. Visit his Substack, The Secret Gender Files, here.