Dr Caroline Johnson

My hon. Friend raises a very good point, and I will come to the data linkage study shortly. What we do know from the Cass review is that the vast majority of children who went on to puberty blockers in adolescence went on to receive cross-sex hormones, which are known to have permanent effects. One fact that is crucially important is that it is not possible for clinicians to confidently determine which children with gender incongruence will persist with the trans identity into adulthood, and which will not. How can the clinicians possibly know that they are not injecting potentially dangerous drugs into children whose incongruence will resolve itself? The answer is that they cannot. Will the Secretary of State tell us whether he is aware of new evidence allowing clinicians to work out confidently which children will persist with the trans identity at 11 and which will not? We need to think about the risk involved in the treatment, and whether it is worth the benefits that they will purportedly receive. The trial researchers suggest that they will take a wide approach to looking at potential benefits, that they will look at quality of life and body satisfaction, and that there must be a reasonable prospect of benefit; but how can they know whether there is a reasonable prospect of benefit when they do not know whether or not the condition will persist? Some have suggested that giving puberty blockers will help the few adults who retain their trans identity into adulthood to pass as the opposite sex. Does the Secretary of State think that the long-term damage to many is worth it for the cosmetic benefit of a few? The Medicines for Human Use (Clinical Trials) Regulations 2004 specify that “anticipated benefits” must justify the risk. This is an ethical rather than a medical question. Does the Secretary of State think that the benefits justify the risk? I regret that we have ended up discussing the details of a clinical trial in the Chamber—the reality is that things should be done impartially by scientists in most cases—but with this topic we have seen the quashing of open debate, which is why we have ended up where we are. I will move on to the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Farnham and Bordon (Gregory Stafford). Even if the Secretary of State thinks the principle of the trial is right, he must surely agree that it is unnecessary and unethically broad. For example, if someone was designing a trial to treat children with a specific form of cancer, the children who would be entered into the trial would have that specific form of cancer. We would not include children with any disease, because that would make the results unreliable in terms of benefit to the target group and children would be unnecessarily put at risk of receiving experimental drugs that they did not need. The same applies to this trial. The Cass report tells us that many of the children in the proposed trial will get better on their own. The Secretary of State said yesterday that “we are talking about a very small subset of a very small group.”—[Official Report, 22 June 2026; Vol. 788, c. 56.]