Why British Politics Cannot Save British Children from Puberty Blockers

New government will oversee the Pathways trial

The United Kingdom is about to have a new prime minister. Andy Burnham is in the photo above. He is standing on stage with Sarah Wakefield, the Green Party candidate for the Makerfield by-election in Greater Manchester, along with a trash bin and a fox.

You may remember Wakefield for her recent viral moment when she expressed surprise that the laws of supply and demand apply to immigration and housing. Her corkscrewed face became famous. Wakefield got 308 votes in the actual election, about 0.7 percent of the final tally.

Burnham was the runaway winner. Now that Labour has forced out Keir Starmer, they seem ready to give Burnham a go at prime ministering. This bodes poorly for the stability of the office, but that seems to be the new normal in Britain.

Starmer was willing to say that a woman is an adult human female. He welcomed the April 2025 UK Supreme Court ruling clarifying that “woman” and “man” under the Equality Act refer to biological sex, even for those holding a Gender Recognition Certificate.

Burnham has made similar statements and he has walked back his earlier position on self-ID. There is abiding distrust on transgender issues, but a lurch back to the left is unnecessary now, for he has no left flank. Sarah Wakefield solved that problem for him.

Parliament did not waste the opportune moment of anarchy. With Starmer gone, and Burnham not yet in power, the Labour majority decided to allow an NHS puberty blocker study that should never have been proposed. Burnham did not want to spend political capital or take any risks, and now he will not have to.

Why this is happening

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It is to the ultimate discredit of Dr. Hilary Cass that she even suggested a puberty blocker study should happen.

As important as the Cass Review has been in discrediting the manufactured consensus around gender medicalization in children, this poison pill was always written into her text.

“The evidence base underpinning medical and non-medical interventions in this clinical area must be improved”, Cass wrote in Recommendation 6. To that end, “a full programme of research be established.” We must do it for science.

This should look at the characteristics, interventions and outcomes of every young person presenting to the NHS gender services. The puberty blocker trial should be part of a programme of research which also evaluates outcomes of psychosocial interventions and masculinising/feminising hormones.

Dr. Cass is very concerned with “consent”, but no one under the age of 16 can legally consent to a medical experiment, while puberty blockers are most ‘useful’ in children under 16. Parents will instead give this “consent” for kids as young as 11.

The study is unlikely to discover anything new, which is just one more ethical problem in an objective risk-benefit analysis. From her public statements, Dr. Cass clearly believes that further testing is needed before we can be sure that blocking the human life-cycle is harmful to developing humans.

Recommendation 5, on the other hand, was supposed to supply existing data on puberty blockade. As part of the systematic review, Dr. Cass had requested “a quantitative data linkage study” that would “fill some of the gaps in follow-up data for the approximately 9,000 young people who have been through GIDS”, the now-shuttered program at Tavistock.

“Despite efforts to encourage the participation of the NHS gender clinics, the necessary cooperation from GIDS and the NHS adult gender services had not been forthcoming.”

Now, “NHS England … should direct the gender clinics to participate in the data linkage study within the lifetime of the current statutory instrument”, Dr. Cass recommended in 2024.

It has never happened. The NHS has yet to reveal the outcomes for thousands of children who have already had their adolescence delayed or blocked altogether before they do it with thousands more children.

NHS is ready and eager to start the new experiment, but they still have not shared the results of the previous experiment. That is to be expected, unfortunately.

The gender quacks always hide the data

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This is a disturbing pattern with pediatric sex rejection medicine. Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy buried study results when they did not support the kind of risk assessment that she needed to continue blocking puberty in minor children. She is one of the pediatric gender clinicians now advocating for “embodiment goals” to replace terms like ‘medical necessity’ in her industry.

WPATH, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, commissioned systematic reviews of their standards of care by Johns Hopkins University. When the results did not support WPATH practices, the organization buried the research. It was never published.

This week, three Norwegian gender clinic researchers have been charged with research misconduct for two articles that the Integrity Committee wants withdrawn from publication, as well as two more articles declared “reprehensible” that are recommended for further action.

The researchers “have shown serious violations of recognized research ethics standards. The actions are grossly negligent.”

“The whistleblowers are the Patient Organization for Gender Incongruence (PKI) and a statistics expert”, according to the committee report. If the “gender incongruent” fail to appreciate all this effort to commit scientific fraud on their behalf, that is because the side effects of this putative treatment for the supposed disease include lowered bone mineral density, reduced cognitive development, infertility, anorgasmia, weight gain, high blood pressure, diabetes, and cancer.

The new experiment was paused in February, but approved in June. Now Labour has given it the green light. “PATHWAYS TRIAL is the first randomised controlled trial to explore the effects of puberty suppressing hormones among young people with gender incongruence”, reads the King’s College website.

Children must be at least 11 years old to have their puberty blocked to cure this deadly condition of “gender incongruence”. According to Parliament’s definition, gender incongruence “occurs when a person’s gender identity markedly and persistently does not match their experienced gender and sex registered at birth.”

If not for NHS England’s longtime commitment to secrecy, we likely would already have evidence that Tavistock and the GIDS clinic did not achieve better results treating this so-called disease than Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy, WPATH, or Norway’s National Treatment Service for Gender Incongruence for Children and Adolescents.

James Murray MP, Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, reassured the House of Commons Monday night that NHS England is “committed to delivering the data linkage study.” The Cass Review was published in April 2024. Two years later, everyone is super duper double-dog committed to getting this one done, guys.

But the old data is too “limited” to be as useful as the new data, Murray insists. We need more data. Better data. We have to be absolutely sure the obvious harm is harmful before we stop harming children with it.

The insane experiment proceeds

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Tavistock GIDS patient data will reflect their scattershot approach, which varied by clinician. Dr. Cass found that the evidence base for puberty blockade is “remarkably weak”. We need more scientific results, goes the argument.

This argument came from Dr. Hilary Cass herself. There is no popular demand for the Pathways trial, not even inside the Labour Party. A survey by Whitestone Insight for Transgender Trend in December 2025 found that 63 percent of adults agree the trial should be stopped, while only 18 percent support the trial as planned. 59 percent of Labour supporters opposed the trial.

Andy Burnham will act as if he is powerless over Pathways because he probably is. Even if he wanted to stop the study, Burnham would find institutional resistance at NHS. Keir Starmer famously discovered that he could pull the levers of power and watch nothing happen. Burnham is not the man to fix that problem, either.

Hilary Cass oversaw the publication of an important, even historic document that ended the days of ‘no debate’ in pediatric sex rejection medicine. Inchoate rage from some very-online voices on the ‘gender critical’ side actually obscured this problem with the Cass Review right after it dropped.

Over time, Recommendation 6 and Pathways became a major focus of ‘gender critical’ organizing in the UK. James Esses, Genspect, Sex Matters, Women’s Rights Network, LGB Alliance, Gay Men’s Network, Transgender Trend, and the Clinical Advisory Network on Sex and Gender (CAN-SG) all tried to stop Pathways.

Dr. Cass now defends the Pathways trial as the only way to prevent uncontrolled private use of puberty blockers. No one is buying this ‘harm reduction’ argument, however. “There is no safe option” for blockading puberty, Transgender Trend points out. Harm is intrinsic to the experiment.

There was no guarantee that Pathways would happen, and there was time to stop it from happening, and there was an activist focus in time to stop it. The risks of the trial are clear while the proposed benefits are not.

Cass is ultimately the responsible medical figure, but Labour has chosen to let Pathways happen, inscribing politics on the bodies of children. They picked this perfect moment when no one has to be the face of political responsibility. What cowards.