‘Sex swap’ outcomes to be scrutinised

New disclosure rules are being brought in to allow researchers to study the long-term impact of ‘sex-swap’ surgery and drugs on children.

Brought in last week, the new regulations under the Gender Recognition Act 2004 follow widespread concerns that NHS services are harming vulnerable young people.

The change will give researchers working on the Cass Review access to data on about 9,000 people to analyse health problems resulting from the controversial medical interventions.

Life altering

Critics have accused the NHS gender service for young people of rushing children into life-altering interventions and of being too willing to give puberty blocking drugs to young teenagers.

The vast majority of children on puberty blocking drugs continue on to irreversible cross-sex hormones.

Sajid Javid, who signed off on the regulations before resigning as Health Secretary, said at the time that the change would “facilitate the invaluable research being undertaken as part of Dr Hilary Cass’s independent review of gender identity services for children and young people”.

He previously described Dr Cass’s provisional findings on the NHS gender service as “deeply concerning”.

’Guinea pig’

Last month The Times published a special report about an 18 year old girl damaged by puberty blocking drugs who has had no follow-up from the Tavistock.

She said the NHS gender clinic treated her like “a guinea pig”, sending her into the “medical unknown” without any “record of the outcome”.

At the age of 16, after four years on puberty blocking drugs, she felt “even more depressed and isolated”.

Pressure from the clinic towards reassignment surgery finally made her walk away from the Tavistock altogether.

’Without follow-up’

The 18-year-old said the clinic never followed up to ask “How has it been to come off the drugs?” She added: “When you stop the drugs, they ditch you.”

She recalls her time at the Tavistock and the blockers as “the worst decisions I’ve made in my entire life”.

The girl’s mother said: “They are experimenting on our children with absolutely no knowledge about how that’s going to affect their growth or their brain development.”

She believes the Tavistock’s approach was “deeply unethical”, injecting her child with “an experimental drug, then beta blockers, then talking about surgeries. So to come out of that system without any follow-up – that is negligent.”