Contribution
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Lewell, and I am grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Reigate (Rebecca Paul) for securing this debate. Everyone, regardless of their particularities, deserves dignity, but that open-mindedness has in recent years been supplanted by an ideology-driven series of harrowing episodes involving, in this case, both medical policy and clinical practice. That led me, in 2019, to raise the issue of the Tavistock clinic when a number of the professionals there drew attention to the fact that they were
“often under pressure to refer young people for life-altering treatment even though they did not believe that it was in the individual’s best…interests…experimental treatment is being done on children who have experienced mental health difficulties, abuse and family trauma.”—[Official Report, 11 April 2019; Vol. 658, c. 479.]
Those kinds of concerns led to the review by Hilary Cass, and Cass was clear, when she published her report, that there was a lack of evidence on the long-term effects of using puberty blockers to treat gender incongruence to know whether they were safe or beneficial. Later, I had an exchange with the current Health Secretary—the previous Government having taken action latterly—in which he assured me that he would be implementing the Cass report in full. It is right that he should, because of the tragic history of the prescription of drugs that even those involved in that process regarded with such concern that they gave up their professional lives.
We have altered young people; we have warped them, and that is a result of a policy that was adopted without proper consideration and of clinical practice that did not have its basis in scientific fact. Given that the Health Secretary has seen most of that and acted upon it, it is important to consider what happens next. We know that the Tavistock clinic has been closed and we now know that there is a new series of measures to deal with these matters. There will be six new regional gender identity clinics for children and young people by 2026.
However, alongside the decision to ban the prescription of puberty blockers for under-18s, the National Institute for Health and Care Research is sponsoring a clinical trial, and I have a number of questions for this Minister about that trial. The trial will be run by a team at King’s College London, led by Professor Emily Simonoff. According to The Times, the study will involve monitoring
“the well-being of children who attend a network of new NHS gender clinics for children, including those not on”
puberty blockers, and
“whether puberty blockers affect young people’s thinking and brain development, using various activities and brain scans.”
All that is disturbing, it seems to me, and that view has been argued by David Bell, who has suggested that other kinds of research could be adopted, other measures put in place. He refers to long-term follow-up studies of those who have undergone such treatment, qualitative research into the experiences of the growing numbers of detransitioners, and further animal studies to understand the biological impact of these drugs on adolescent brain development.
That view has been reinforced by the Clinical Advisory Network on Sex and Gender, which is calling for the Government and NHS to pursue alternative research options to the proposed clinical trial, including evaluating the effects of puberty blockers on children treated by the Tavistock clinic.
It seems to me that, after our having made the mistake that led to Tavistock and then having commissioned the Cass review, which led to its closure, the risk is that we now make another mistake, not out of ill will but out of a concern expressed by some of the people I have mentioned going unheeded. I hope the Minister will heed those concerns. They are not only mine, as I have made clear.
There was an ideological aspect to this situation that we must not understate. There was a belief, on some people’s part, that rather than accepting that young people as they grew might be homosexual, their sex should be altered. That is a chilling perspective, but it did hold sway in a number of cases, with medical intervention to support it. I hope this Government do not perpetuate that distorted view of humankind, and I am immensely grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Reigate for giving us the chance to explore just that.