A British medical trial on puberty blocking drugs will involve girls as young as 11 years old, despite the government banning such drugs for children in 2024.
The UK government’s Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) said on Friday that the previously paused Pathways transgender medical trial is set to go ahead in August after being paused in February.
The controversial trial will see young girls as young as 11 and boys as young as 12 being given puberty blockers to study their impact, London’s Daily Telegraph reported.
In 2024, left-wing Labour Party Health Secretary Wes Streeting suspended the use of puberty blocking drugs for all children under the age of 18, saying that it had been a “scandal” how they were administered to minors.
This came after a review from top paediatrician Dr Hilary Cass, which found that the evidence used to justify such treatments for children was “built on shaky foundations” and therefore the National Health Service (NHS) should no longer prescribe them.
However, the Cass review crucially left room open for continuing to administer such potentially life-altering drugs to children, provided that it is done within the context of a medical trial.
Earlier this year, Dr Cass told the BBC that it was “vital” to conduct medical trials on puberty blockers for children under the age of 16, warning that otherwise “we’re going to have ongoing charlatans just handing out inappropriate drugs”.
“There are a tiny number of people who will never be comfortable with their biological sex, with the gender associated with their biological sex,” she claimed.
“And for them, a medical pathway is the only way they’re going to live their life comfortably. And we don’t understand why that is, but we have to try and help those people thrive as much as the young people who are going to grow out of this.”
However, others, including Claire Coutinho, criticised the planned trials, arguing that children cannot provide actual consent to having their bodies altered potentially irreversibly. She urged Britons to sign a petition calling for the trials to be halted.
“Just think about what you were like when you were 11,” Coutinho said, adding, “No child that young can consent to the consequences of these drugs. It can mean loss of fertility, loss of sexual function, loss of bone density, real serious consequences for the rest of their lives.”