The dangers of ‘gender-affirming care’ are now undeniable

Some ideas are so bonkers they ought never to be put to the test. Big-cat obsessives may believe they have a mystical affinity with lions, but no sane zookeeper would indulge them by opening the enclosure. And yet, it has taken researchers in Finland to confirm what anyone with a functioning brain already knew: telling children that their bodies are wrong does not improve their mental health. It makes it worse.

A recent paper published by Acta Paediatrica examined the outcomes for 2,083 patients referred to gender clinics between 1996 and 2019, and compared them with a large and carefully selected control group. The researchers found an elevated risk of ‘psychiatric morbidity, with hazard ratios approximately three times higher than female controls and five times higher than male controls’. This means that the girls and young women given testosterone and boys and young men given oestrogen suffered significant increases in distress after starting ‘gender-affirming’ treatment.

The patients had all been diagnosed with ‘gender dysphoria’, which meant they were already mentally unwell. But ‘gender-affirming’ treatment didn’t help them. ‘Severe psychiatric morbidity is common among gender-referred adolescents and appears to be more prevalent in those referred after the recent surge in referrals’, the study concluded. ‘Psychiatric needs do not subside after medical gender reassignment.’

This research should prompt some soul-searching among the professionals who pushed the claim that ‘gender-affirming care’ – including everything from hormone treatment to puberty blockers – saves lives and reduces mental suffering. And that includes the charities and lobby groups that told parents they faced a stark choice: sterilise your child with drugs or bury them.

Had a study found the reverse, you can bet trans-activist outfits like Mermaids, Stonewall and the Good Law Project would be crowing about it. Yet oddly, they’ve kept schtum. It is tempting to conclude that they only ‘follow the science’ when they already agree with it. If this were about macrobiotic diets or juice cleanses, it would be harmless nonsense. But it isn’t. It is about children – distressed, suggestible children who were handed over to an ideology that promised relief and delivered the opposite. To gamble with their bodies for political vanity, and perhaps profit, is not just wrong. It is also contemptible.

Now that the promise of ‘gender affirmation’ is unravelling, why is the UK government still behaving as though there is substance to trans medicine? That question hangs squarely over health secretary Wes Streeting, who has signed off on a new clinical trial of puberty blockers, even as the evidential basis for such interventions remains, at best, uncertain.

It was precisely this absence of robust evidence that paediatrician Dr Hilary Cass identified in her landmark 2024 review of NHS gender-identity services for children. As she put it plainly, ‘there is no evidence that puberty blockers buy time to think’.

And yet, on the back of that finding, the controversial puberty-blockers trial – the so-called Pathways Trial – was still approved by Streeting last year. The plan was to enrol at least 200 children, affirm them in a cross-sex identity, and place them on puberty blockers within a research setting. It was presented as a way to gather the very evidence that had hitherto been lacking.

That trial has now run into serious difficulty. It is currently paused after the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency raised concerns about whether it is ethical to enrol children as young as 14 in a study, whose foreseeable consequences include infertility.

Cass was right about the absence of evidence. But absence of evidence is not a licence to go in search of it via experiments on children. Now the data have arrived from Finland, and they point in precisely the direction common sense would predict.

What the Finnish researchers have shown is hardly revelatory. It is the scientific equivalent of discovering that tiger enthusiasts are mauled when they step into the cage. But if stating the obvious is what it takes to bring this grotesque experiment to a halt, then so be it.

That activists refuse to shift under the weight of data is no surprise. Their authority, and often their sense of themselves as good parents, rests on their commitment to gender ideology. The Department for Health, however, is supposed to answer to evidence. It now faces a choice: abandon a failing model, or continue an unnecessary experiment on children to placate gender fanatics. The Finnish study must mark the end of the road for Pathways, and for the dangerous fiction of gender-affirming care.

Jo Bartosch is co-author of Pornocracy. Order it here.