Tag Archives: puberty blockers trial

Somewhere in England right now, a teenager and their family are waiting. They have been waiting, in many cases, for more than five years just to see a specialist. Not for a diagnosis of cancer or a referral for surgery. For someone to talk to about their gender. While they wait, puberty continues. For some of them, that process is a cause of profound, daily distress.

That is what this debate is actually about. Earlier this week, Westminster Hall debated a petition calling for the cancellation of the PATHWAYS clinical trial into puberty blockers for children with gender dysphoria. The trial had already been paused in February after the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency raised concerns about the trial design. Many MPs, drawn from Labour, the Conservatives, Reform and the DUP, used the debate not to call for those concerns to be resolved, but to demand the trial be scrapped altogether.

Their arguments were passionate, often sincere, and in some cases carefully researched. They also contained a contradiction so fundamental it deserves to be named plainly.

Many of those MPs, when the Cass review was published in 2024, demanded it be implemented in full. Several cited Hilary Cass’s authority in the debate itself to justify their opposition to the trial. What they appear not to have noticed, or to have chosen to overlook, is that the Cass review explicitly recommended a clinical trial. That trial was meant to be the mechanism for building the evidence base they say is lacking.

A point of precision matters here. Cass did not personally endorse the PATHWAYS design in every detail. But she did recommend a trial, and when the MHRA paused recruitment she said publicly that no new research findings justified the change, and that the decision felt like a response to political pressure rather than science. The scientist those MPs invoke to close down the research is concerned it is being closed down for the wrong reasons. That is not a minor irony. It is the entire argument.

Puberty blockers are not new drugs. They have been used for decades to treat precocious puberty, where children as young as six or seven begin puberty far too early. In those cases, the same drugs, in the same doses, are prescribed to comparable or even younger children, frequently for longer periods of time. Nobody in Westminster Hall called for that use to be reviewed. Nobody described those children as being experimented on.