Health Sec challenged over ‘ideologically driven’ puberty blocker trial

The planned puberty blocker trial legitimises transgender ideology and should be abandoned, concerned parents have warned.

Genspect, a group which helps families whose children struggle with gender confusion, told Wes Streeting MP that the clinical trial rests on an “activist-crafted diagnosis” that has no basis in scientific fact.

King’s College London has been given £10.7 million in Government funding for the Pathways project, which includes the controversial trial. Puberty-blocking drugs will be given to children with “gender incongruence”, who will be monitored for two years with brain scans and tests.

‘Inappropriate’

In an open letter to Streeting, the support group wrote: “Our main concern is that the clinical trial you defend rests on a diagnostic concept —gender incongruence —whose origins are political rather than scientific, rendering it an inappropriate basis for medical intervention in young people.”

It described the definition as “the product of a decades-long depsychopathologization campaign by activists and advocacy organisations, whose explicit goal was to remove psychiatric framing and guardrails around hormonal and surgical interventions”.

Genspect continued: “The activist influence is clear in the language itself. ‘Experienced gender’ is an unfalsifiable inner claim, not a measurable clinical marker. ‘Assigned sex’ is not a scientific term; it is activist language designed to obscure the reality that sex is determined at conception, observed before or at birth, and plainly immutable.”

While the support group agreed with the Health Secretary’s stated view that “unregulated self-medication is dangerous, and that some young people are in profound distress”, it challenged the notion that “testing a highly invasive medical treatment on healthy adolescents given an activist-crafted diagnosis is the only or best response”.

“… it is important to reiterate that gender incongruence is real and [an] internationally recognised disorder. It is defined in the International Classification of Diseases Eleventh Revision as ‘a marked and persistent incongruence between an individual’s experienced gender and the assigned sex’.” Wes Streeting MP, in a letter to Parliamentarians seeking to explain the rationale behind his decision to proceed with the trial (13 January 2026)

Public opinion

Last month, a poll on behalf of Transgender Trend found that 63 per cent of the British public agree that the NHS puberty blocker trial should be stopped, with opposition being particularly strong among parents of under-18s.

Stephanie Davies-Arai, Director of Transgender Trend, called the results “a clear mandate from the British people to stop the trial”.

She explained: “The British public instinctively knows that medically experimenting on children is wrong. Most understand that children are too young to make medical decisions that will affect them for the rest of their lives.

“It’s not a party political issue but common sense. The government now needs to listen and do what’s right.”