MPs can’t stay silent on this grotesque experiment on kids

Parliament is packed with Westminster weasels dodging a very simple question: is it ethical to run medical experiments on children who are confused about their sex?

Most Labour and Liberal Democrat MPs have ducked responsibility entirely, terrified that stepping into the so-called culture war might dent their career prospects. In reality, the toxicity in this debate has come from only one direction: furious and entitled transgender activists.

Last Tuesday, politicians, including many who have previously shirked the issue, were finally confronted. A coalition including LGB Alliance UK, the Women’s Rights Network and Sex Matters organised a mass lobby of parliament over the NHS-backed Pathways Trial, which will prevent more than 200 healthy children from undergoing puberty. Around one hundred people travelled from across the UK to demand meetings with their MPs and to call for the controversial study to be scrapped.

Among them was a mother who had taken time off work to meet her MP, Liberal Democrat Danny Chambers, after witnessing in her local school ‘the level of fear from teachers afraid to say the wrong thing’. She described the conversation as constructive. ‘We made some progress’, she said. ‘He is a vet and understands the science.’

Another attendee was a lesbian detransitioner who had been prescribed puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones as a young woman, and now lives with the permanent consequences. A gay man told me he had travelled to parliament because, had he grown up nowadays, his effeminate behaviour might have triggered a referral to a gender clinic. ‘When I was a kid I was camp’, he said. ‘All my friends were girls and I was desperate to fit in. Today that would be treated as evidence that I was meant to be female.’ These concerns are not hypothetical. Estimates suggest that between 80 and 90 per cent of young people referred to gender-identity services are same-sex attracted.

Kate Barker, chief executive of LGB Alliance, said the lobbying effort had forced the issue on to MPs’ desks. ‘They now know that silence will be considered complicity by their constituents’, she said. ‘Prescribing powerful drugs to healthy children, most of whom would grow up to be lesbian, gay or bisexual, will be considered the medical scandal of our generation.’

The Pathways Trial, recommended by Dr Hilary Cass in her 2024 review, and reluctantly nodded through by health secretary Wes Streeting, is already descending into farce. The NHS-funded study, led by King’s College London, has been halted following an intervention by the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA). The regulator raised concerns that it may not be ethical to enrol children as young as 14 in a trial whose ‘expected effects’, as the MHRA delicately puts it, include sterilisation, when puberty blockers are followed by cross-sex hormones.

The controversy has since been compounded by a row involving the regulator itself. Professor Jacob George, the MHRA’s chief medical and scientific officer, who raised the safety concerns that halted the trial, was subsequently recused after an old post emerged in which he described JK Rowling as a ‘treasure of our time’. George also expressed concern about ‘the denial of basic biological fact’ in relation to the male boxer Imane Khelif. Apparently, in the topsy-turvy world of gender medicine, George’s apparent view that biology exists makes him too ‘biased’ to be involved in the trial.

Yet beyond the row over Pathways lies a deeper absurdity. Thousands of former Tavistock patients have already been given puberty blockers. But like schoolchildren hiding bad report cards, NHS adult gender services have refused to hand over the results of these immoral experiments. Last month, the UK government changed the law to force their release. Under the new legislation, the records of around 9,000 children treated at the Tavistock clinic before it closed in 2023 will be linked with adult NHS files to see how these patients have actually fared. This makes the Pathways Trial all the more unnecessary.

Many adults remain heavily invested in the myth of the ‘transgender child’. Some undoubtedly have less than wholesome motivations, whether fetishising prepubescent bodies or seeking a medical gloss for their own desire to present as the opposite sex. Others may sincerely believe they are helping a persecuted minority or supporting relatives who identify as transgender. Labour’s Emily Thornberry has spoken publicly about having a female cousin who identifies as male. She says it is her ‘business is to love him and protect him from bullying’ (sic).

It seems the voters are catching on faster than their elected representatives. A poll last December found that 67 per cent agree puberty blockers should never be given to under-18s ‘even as part of a clinical trial’.

Prescribing puberty blockers to children because they believe they are the opposite sex is about as ethical as giving Ozempic to anorexics. The Tavistock scandal exposed a medical system that abandoned its most fundamental duty – do no harm – under activist pressure. The Pathways Trial suggests those same mistakes are still being made, because our political class would rather allow an unnecessary experiment on children than risk angering trans zealots.

MPs can no longer pretend this is someone else’s problem. If they lack the courage to face the issue and tell the truth, they have no business making decisions about the welfare of children. Indeed, they have no business being in parliament at all.

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