Planned 'experiment' with puberty-blockers on children is horrific and it must be abandoned

Usually, the answer is that compassion costs us nothing. Rather, in my experience, acts of kindness can pay dividends. To lift the spirits of another is to lift one’s own.

But, though kindness is a good thing, it’s not always easy to perform. Sometimes, true kindness comes in the saying of uncomfortable, challenging truths, truths which might offend or even hurt.

So, occasionally and with the best of intentions, we bite our tongues.

When it comes to the impact of trans ideology, this well-meant silence has had the most devastating consequences.

Urged to “be kind” by activists – many of them funded by the Scottish Government – too many people in positions of authority have kept quiet when they should have spoken up.

Now, the damage caused by that silence is clear to see. Good intentions have paved the road to a hell in which the UK Government is about to fund grotesque and entirely unnecessary medical experiments on children.

The recent announcement that a trial of the effect of powerful puberty-blocking drugs on kids as young as eight has received ethical approval is proof not of kindness but of dangerous stupidity and contemptible cowardice.

The UK Government banned the use of these drugs in gender care last year after the publication of a major review carried out by retired paediatrician, Dr Hilary Cass. She reported grave concerns about the lack of clinical evidence about the safety of using puberty-blocking drugs on healthy children.

Unfortunately, although Cass’s work had the positive effect of stopping the administering of these medicines – developed to treat rare cases of precocious puberty – to children in emotional distress, she left the door open to these trials.

Researchers from King’s College London will look at the effect of the drugs on around 220 children, under the age of 16.

Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme, study leader Professor Emily Simonoff said her team would be “looking very much at the balance between, possibly, benefits for mental health and quality of life, and any possible risks or harms”.

This will include the first-ever study of the impact on brain development.

It is quite extraordinary that these trials on physically healthy but emotionally distressed children are to proceed. This is redolent of the dark days of lobotomies.

We have reached this horrifying pass not because it is the right thing to do but because of the influence of trans activists, aided by well meaning but foolish “allies”.

We all know, by now, the impact of this pernicious ideology on friendship groups. We all know the parent of a “trans child” or the “brave” adult who has chosen to live “authentically” and we all know that it is easier to smile and offer words of support than it is to raise concerns.

To quietly overlook the fact that refusing to accept the delusion that someone may change their sex is characterised as "an act of violence" by activists, who recklessly claim that children denied such “care” will almost certainly take their own lives.We are told that the strictest possible measures will be in place to ensure that children admitted to the Pathways project fully understand the implications of their choice to take part.

This is a cop-out. No child can (or, indeed, should) be expected to understand what being left infertile and unable to experience orgasm in adulthood means to them.

And no parent should have the right to give away their child’s adulthood.

I’ve read, online, over recent days countless angry responses from parents of children currently living with discomfort about their biological sex. I’ve seen opposition to Pathways described as cruel and unfeeling. I’ve seen the horrifically manipulative lie that anyone who thinks these tests immoral in fact wishes trans people dead.

And, like many of you, I’ve have private conversations with others in which they explain that the cost of speaking up is too great.

But speak up, we must. To remain silent when the state is about to physically damage children in the name of progress is wrong and very few of us need this point to be reiterated.

We know that experimenting on children is monstrous. We know it.

During a debate in Holyrood last week, on waiting times for treatment at gender identity clinics, public health minister Jenni Minto fought back tears as she told MSPs she was finding the debate “incredibly difficult”. This, she quivered, was something “close to all of hearts” and she wanted to make a difference.

It was a nauseating display of virtue signalling by a minister who could make a positive difference by calling for the UK Government not to proceed with the mutilation of children but instead contents herself that she is “kind”.

Trans ideology dies in sunlight. The more people know about it, the less they like it.

I hold on to the hope that the Pathways project will be over before it begins, that politicians and medics opposed to experimenting on children will continue to speak up, making clear just how grotesque this course of action is.

UK health secretary Wes Streeting says the puberty blocker trials will provide better evidence for how the NHS can support and treat young people with “gender incongruence”.

No child has “gender incongruence” until they are told by activists and the dangerous dopes who buy into their crank belief system that they were born in the wrong body.

The plan to experiment on children with puberty blocking drugs that will alter their lives forever is not kind, it is horrific and it must be abandoned.