Health Secretary Wes Streeting is being strongly urged to abandon plans for a puberty blocker trial involving scores of gender-confused children.
Parliamentarians, Tavistock whistleblowers, campaigners and newspaper columnists are among those raising serious concerns about giving experimental drugs to more than 200 under-16s.
Even King’s College London (KCL), which is leading the research, concedes there are short and long-term “potential side effects” to puberty-blockers, including severe headaches, mood changes, fertility problems, an increased risk of fractures, and impaired cognitive function.
KCL intends to recruit approximately 226 gender-confused children for the two-year drugs trial, roughly half will be given puberty-blocking injections every six months from the outset, while the remainder will only receive the injections for the second year of the trial.
Researchers state that the upper age limit for participation is “15 years 11 months”, but acknowledge there is a possibility that some children under the age of eleven may “show the necessary level of understanding of the treatment to be able to take part”.
The Government-funded trial — which is said to be costing the taxpayer £11 million — is expected to run for five and a half years.
Conservative Party Leader Kemi Badenoch branded the study “activist ideology masquerading as research”.
In a letter to Streeting, she said: “Your job is to promote the health of the nation, not indulge an ideology that has permanently damaged so many children.” Badenoch urged the Government to “stop this trial from going ahead before more damage is done”.
Rosie Duffield, the Independent MP for Canterbury, said she could not “believe I came to Parliament to have to point out that we should never use experimental/irreversible drugs in trials on children under 13 which halt their puberty”.
Tavistock whistleblower Dr David Bell told The Daily Telegraph that the trial was “neither safe nor will it provide meaningful evidence”, and the clinic’s former employees Susan and Marcus Evans warned that the “stakes are too high and the lessons from recent failures too fresh to ignore”.
The Bayswater Support Group, which represents over 650 parents of gender-confused children, described the decision to proceed with the trial as “a profound betrayal of children by the NHS”.