Medical experimentation on children

I was told that by publishing this I risk action in defamation. I consider that everything I publish here is either true and I can prove it, or my honest opinion and I can defend it.

I have thought long and hard and am unable to identify any comparable situation to the medical scandal we are now watching unfold regarding the medical ‘transition’ of children - where adults demand the right to conduct medical experiments on children, otherwise children will kill themselves. Pages 12 and 13 of the Cass Review sets out with horrible clarity where we are now:

There are few other areas of healthcare where professionals are so afraid to openly discuss their views, where people are vilified on social media, and where name-calling echoes the worst bullying behaviour…. This is an area of remarkably weak evidence, and results of the studies are exaggerated or misrepresented by people on all sides of the debate to support their viewpoint. The reality is that we have no good evidence on the long-term outcomes of interventions to manage gender related distress”

The challenge to the Tavistock by Keira Bell in 2020 highlighted the shocking lack of evidence to support irreversible medical interventions to ‘trans’ a cohort of children, and was a loud wake up call to the Government and the medical profession. This led directly to the commissioning of the Cass Review, an independent review over 4 years of the available evidence in support of the medical transition of children – via puberty blockers and then cross sex hormones, in an attempt to allow a child to ‘pass’ as the opposite sex. The Cass Review has had significant ramifications, even the USA is beginning to see the light. Opinion | Why Is the U.S. Pretending to Know Gender-Affirming Care Works? - The New York Times (nytimes.com)

The NHS saw which way the wind was blowing and shortly before the final Cass report in April 2024, had already taken action to restrict access to puberty blockers for children. On 30^th May 2024, the then Secretary of State for Health and Social Care Victoria Aktins went further still, making an emergency order from 3 June 2024 to 3 September 2024 under section 62(3) of the Medicines Act 1968 to restrict provision of puberty blockers by private prescription. By making an emergency order, Atkins did not have to consult any organisations likely to be substantially affected by the order.

This decision was met with fury by those adults who promote medical experimentation on children. The Good Law Project leapt into action to raise money to help the advocacy group ‘Transactual’ make legal challenge by way of judicial review, to declare this decision unlawful. Help challenge the ban on puberty blockers (goodlawproject.org)..

The crowdfunder, unsurprisingly, offers hyperbolic descriptions of the further restrictions on puberty blockers as ‘terrifying’ and repeats Maugham’s earlier bizarre and unevidenced assertions that ’16 people lost their lives’ as a result of the earlier restrictions to the use of NHS services for transition. Not only did Maugham’s own claimed evidence fail to support this figure, publicly asserting one cause of suicide is rightly decried by every responsible organisation. Media_Guidelines_FINAL.pdf (samaritans.org)

July 12^th saw the first day of legal argument in this challenge by way of judicial review, the same day that Wes Streeting declared he would consider making the temporary ban on puberty blockers permanent. Maugham responded via ‘X’ with his predictable irresponsibility, that this measure ‘will kill trans children’.

The legal submissions were helpfully reported by Tribunal Tweets, via live tweeting and on their substack. (12) Group seeks Judicial Review of Ban on Private Puberty Blocker Prescriptions (substack.com) I learned from this that the KC putting the GLP/Transactual argument relied on ‘the risk of suicide’ as a reason to declare the emergency order unlawful, going so far to say that this risk had materialised. It is not clear at all what kind of evidence is being put before the court to support this as a credible argument.  It appears to me to be a wholly manipulative and coercive assertion with no evidence in support. It has been fact checked and debunked by many – here is just one example. Claims of Suicide Surge For Gender-Confused Kids Is Challenged | The New York Sun (nysun.com)

As many have already commented on social media, there is no evidence prior to the surge in referrals to the Tavistock from 2014, of ‘trans children’ dying in droves because they did not have access to puberty blockers. ‘Trans children’ are a wholly modern phenomenon and there is serious concern that a cohort of very vulnerable children have been the victims of social contagion and adult ideological pressures.

Further arguments put to the court were that the Secretary of State did not have sufficient information about the negative impact on ‘trans children’ of banning puberty blockers. This submission is all the more alarming when you consider that one of the reasons for a lack of information about this was that Jolyon Maugham and the Good Law Project explicitly discouraged it.

NHS England had earlier in 2024 contacted providers of mental health support to children to invite those on a national waiting list for gender services for a face to face appointment. Children were sent directly a ‘Gender Experience Summary Form’ asking them about the treatment they were receiving and its source. The Good Law Project considered this an ‘exercise in bringing very significant pressure to bear on trans youth and their families to cease private treatment, backed up with a threat of a safeguarding referral to social services if they do not’. It took ‘urgent advice’ from a specialist KC and set up yet another crowdfunder to attempt to challenge this attempt at data gathering. Maugham urged children and clinicians to ignore the requests. We’re taking urgent legal advice on mental health guidance for trans youth (goodlawproject.org) The crowdfunder raised £20,427.90, which was then allocated to the current case.

Transactual’s KC also referred to the ‘world wide consensus’ about the efficacy of puberty blockers, relying on organisations such as WPATH- apparently ignorant or uncaring about the recent scandals to engulf this organisation. As Jesse Singal noted in the Economist on 27^th June 2024 Research into trans medicine has been manipulated (economist.com), court documents recently released in a US Case about youth gender medicine, showed that WPATH interfered with the production of systematic reviews it had commissioned from the Johns Hopkins University Evidence – Based Practice Centre in 2018. Evidence which did not support medical transition of children was suppressed.

What we are seeing here is a head on collision, noted by Dr Cass, between the ‘social justice model’ of health care - where a patient requests certain care and reframes caution on the part of clinicians as ‘gatekeeping’  - and the evidence based model. But the situation is far, far worse than simply a clash of ideological perspectives. It is one thing to support a ‘social justice’ model of health care out of a misguided but genuine belief that what you are doing is the best thing for children. It is quite another to support such a model when it is underpinned by corrupt organisations, profiteering private companies such as Gender GP and by adults – such as Maugham, who are implicated in the medical transition of their own children and thus are utterly incapable of admitting to anyone, least of all themselves, the harm they have done.

It is very alarming to see Maugham now berating politicians on social media and even claiming to have the key to a ‘new moral universe’ regarding issues of childhood transition Jolyon Declares Himself 'Holder of Key to Moral Universe' in Trans Meltdown – Guido Fawkes (order-order.com) I can only hope that the court acts to shut down these continued attempts by gender identity ideologues to expose children to medical and social experiments which have no evidence base.

There are some encouraging signs. I represented a mother in a case decided shortly after the Cass Review who objected to her then 16 year old trans identifying daughter taking hormones. The court had made injunctions to stop any access to puberty blockers or hormones while the child was under 16, but having reached that age, the court declared that a decision about medical transition was one for the child to make in consultation with clinicians. However, is interesting to note what the court said at para 51 of its judgment  about the mother’s resistance to her daughter obtaining puberty blockers. O v P Final Approved Judgment.pdf (judiciary.uk)

The mother has made some mistakes (for example, posting things online and expressing herself in trenchant terms), but the lack of confidence she feels in the treatment of teenagers suffering from gender related distress or dysphoria has force and is shared by many others. If she had not objected to medical treatment there is every likelihood that Q would have approached a private resource offshore and been prescribed puberty blockers. The long term effects of such treatment remain a matter for further research, but it is possible that in future Q will have reason to be grateful he did not ever take them.

This case raised serious concern about the activities of Gender GP and asked the father to agree that he would not attempt to seek any treatment there. Such concern was repeated in another case decided a few days earlier, which noted that Gender GP had given a teenage girl an initial dose of testosterone so high that it could have killed her. J, Re (Transgender: Puberty Blocker and Hormone Replacement Therapy) [2024] EWHC 922 (Fam) (01 May 2024) (bailii.org)

Adults can go to hell in whatever hand cart they want. The only acceptable form of health care for children is evidence based. They cannot possibly understand or consent to giving up their fertility and adult sexual function in pursuit of an adult lie about ‘gender identity’.

Let’s hope Wes Streeting continues to do the right thing. Otherwise, this will remain a medical scandal of continuing and epic proportions and will blight the lives of thousands of children.