To the Left-wing loons who haven’t got the puberty blockers memo: it’s over

At a Royal Society of Medicine conference on cosmetic surgery last month, I listened to an expert in psychology list the sectors of society that were not, statistically, any happier after various aesthetic changes had been made. That young trans people were on the list surprised no one.

There were no scandalised faces in that lecture theatre, or yelps of: “You can’t say that!” Medical professionals don’t get scandalised by inconvenient truths, for one thing. And, of course, this particular truth is no longer inconvenient. We’re living in newly enlightened, post-Cass Report times. Unlike two or three years ago, it’s actually incredibly hard to find any individual who will stand up today and say: “I think medical experimentation on children is a great idea!”

For that reason, I’m curious to know the identities of the Labour MPs who have written to Wes Streeting, asking him to rethink his ban on puberty blockers. The Health Secretary announced last week that his temporary ban on the prescription of puberty-suppressing hormones would become permanent and reviewed no earlier than 2027. According to reports at the weekend, Streeting is now facing a backlash not just, predictably, from the LGBT+ activists and other campaign groups who have been staging protests outside his constituency office in Ilford all week, but his own party.

We know that one of the MPs to hit out at the policy is Kate Osborne, MP for Jarrow and Gateshead East. Osborne has been vocal about the issue in the past, describing the ban (with the usual virtue signaller’s cut ‘n’ paste terms) as “an attack on the trans community” and stating – bafflingly – that she is “hugely disappointed” with the decision to stop giving children life-changing drugs because it “removes the clinical expertise from medical decision-making”.

Osborne seems to have missed the memo here. In fact, she and her fellow dissenters seem to have missed a bunch of memos. Possibly a whole year’s worth. It was, after all, back in April that Dr Hilary Cass submitted her clear-eyed 400-page report to NHS England, summarising that “for most young people, a medical pathway” was not the best way to deal with gender-related issues and stressing that there was “no good evidence on the long-term outcomes of interventions to manage gender-related distress”.

Given Dr Cass is a world-renowned paediatrician, some people might say that her findings put the “clinical expertise” back into “medical decision-making”. That her serene and meticulously researched conclusion (our children have been “let down” by a failure to base gender care on evidence-based research) should probably be listened to. On balance, I’d certainly trust Dr Cass’s views over – oh, I don’t know – those of a bunch of agenda-driven gender zealots from the disgraced and defunct Tavistock Clinic.

I’m assuming Osborne and Co know about the Tavistock, but maybe they’ve been so blinkered by their own virtue-signalling that they’ve missed that too. I hope for their sakes that all the letter writers have been living under a large rock, because if you were aware that the UK’s only child gender clinic, The Tavistock, was shut down after a series of horrifying revelations – including allegations that it was pushing children as young as 10 into taking life-altering drugs and ignoring evidence that 97.5 per cent of children seeking sex changes had autism, depression or other conditions – why would you still be stamping your foot? “We demand medical experimentation on children!”

If you knew about the lawsuits and had heard the testimonies of young victims like Keira Bell, how could you still be waving your placard? “It’s a child’s right to be treated like a guinea pig!” Let Bell tell you the reality of what that feels like: “The consequences of what happened to me have been profound: possible infertility, loss of my breasts and inability to breastfeed, atrophied genitals, a permanently changed voice, facial hair.”

Now, do you really still believe Streeting’s got this all wrong? That Dr Cass has got this all wrong, along with every scientist and child psychologist she interviewed along the way? I’m not sure why I’m appealing to these people’s common sense – I might as well appeal to a black hole.

On Sunday night, Trump announced that “on day one” of his presidency he would “sign executive orders to end child sexual mutilation”, thereby following in the UK’s footsteps.

We shouldn’t feel proud – we went further than so many others in the wrong direction – but we must stand strong. This is not about trans people but children, and never again allowing ourselves to forget the most sacred rule of medicine: first, do no harm.