When those of us who were enraged by the scandal that was the Tavistock Clinic and its wholesale and unaccountable distribution of puberty-blockers to very young children pointed out that this was an experiment without a control group, we didn’t mean that they should go and run one. But that is precisely what is going to happen. What we wanted was for it to stop.
It is almost inconceivable that NHS England (the ‘H’, incredibly, stands for ‘health’) would commission a randomised controlled trial of puberty-blockers. Yet they are, providing yet another good reason why the NHS ought to be decommissioned, dismantled and discontinued. The trial is ‘to assess the benefits and risks of puberty-suppressing hormone treatment in children and young people’.
From the damaging evidence provided in Time to Think, an account of the horrors at the Tavistock Clinic, by Hannah Barnes which I reviewed for The European Conservative, I think we can answer the question. Widespread damage was done to very young children, very poor records were kept of the consequences, and the Tavistock Clinic kept its Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) operating in the face of increasing criticism, probably for financial gain. It took questions and a debate in Parliament to have the GIDS closed.
However, this did not spell the end of such services permanently, only the clinic at The Tavistock. The services were to be dispersed across the NHS, which led me to predict, in these pages, that instead of having one place to monitor, a ‘cluster bomb’ was being created which would explode unexpectedly in various places across the country. One problem was simply being replaced with a much bigger one.
But what we have now, in the form of the proposed clinical trial, is a veritable nuclear bomb. Given the widespread acceptance amongst our ruling classes and the ideological push towards gender identity insanity, we can be sure that this trial, regardless of the results, will simply confirm, to those who can profit from this madness, that puberty-blockers are a good thing.
In terms of ‘benefits and harms’ what benefit could possibly be accrued by interfering, for non-pathological reasons, with the endocrine system of a child or adolescent? There is no benefit; it is all harm. With very few anomalous exceptions, sex is ‘assigned’ at conception by dint of the genes inherited by the baby. A baby subsequently born with a penis is male and one born with a vagina is female. It is binary and remarkably simple to grasp.
Of course, if a fully sentient adult (although their sentience is always questionable, which is why gender realignment clinics are under the auspices of the mental health services) wants to have his bits chopped off and grow a pair of tits using female hormone supplements then there is little to prevent him doing it. Perhaps, however, we could stop providing such mutilating surgery and misuse of pharmaceuticals free on the NHS. That ought to reduce the numbers a bit.
But a child or an adolescent is in no position to make decisions regarding their gender. Until our frontal cortex is fully developed – sometime in our mid-twenties – then we should arguably not even be allowed to vote. Young people expressing gender dysphoria should, of course, be taken seriously, but efforts should be made to dissuade them or, at least, to wait until they are old enough to make an informed and rational decision.
Gender dysphoria seems to be a current fashion, and no middle-class dinner table is complete without someone announcing gleefully that one of their children is ‘transitioning’. The cinematic classes have a lot to answer for.
But back to the NHS England trial which is to be conducted at King’s College London. You would think that an institution of such standing would wish to keep quiet about embarking on a mission to poison hundreds of young people. But no, they are seemingly proud of their folly with a dedicated webpage for what they are calling the Pathways Trial.
What were the members of the King’s College ethics committee thinking when this was being scrutinised? And what of the design of the trial? Well, it is a trial which will randomly assign children to two groups. But, in the words of King’s College London: ‘One group will start the treatment straight away, and the other group will start the treatment after 12 months.’ Fantastic; everyone enrolled will eventually be poisoned.
The fact that both groups will eventually receive puberty-blockers tells us all we need to know; the outcome is decided: puberty-blockers are a good thing and should be administered on demand. I referred above to the standing of King’s College London but, according to Michael Rainsborough in The Daily Sceptic, who suffered much at the hands of the hierarchy of King’s, the institution has ceased to be a university. He may have a point.
Roger Watson is a retired academic, editor and writer. He is a columnist with Unity News Network and writes regularly for a range of conservative journals including The Salisbury Review and The European Conservative. He has travelled and worked extensively in the Far East and the Middle East. He lives in Kingston upon Hull, UK.
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Is patental/guardian consent required? Or are confused and/or mentally ill children able to give their consent and this be deemed sufficient?
Seems to me that a normal rush of hormones at puberty might sort out the delusions of strange children and ever stranger adults and ‘health care professionals’. Of course that wouldn’t be lucrative for big pharma nor free up the NHS for the basic interventions that it was designed for.
All the people involved in these tests should be lined up to a wall and machine gunned so that none of them survive.