As prime ministers in mortal political danger often do, Keir Starmer spent much of the past few weeks hastily attempting to assemble a legacy. Item one on the list? A ban from social media for Britain’s teenagers, who have been deemed simply too young to consume the high philosophical musings of the user known as Catturd and other such luminaries on Elon Musk’s X or to browse “funny dog” videos on TikTok.
Item two on the agenda? Finally resolving the vexed issue of whether it is legitimate to perform a historic medical experiment on a mass scale with troubled children by changing their genders. To that end, the prime minister’s administration has signed off on a new trial program that will perform that historic medical experiment on a much more limited scale, by testing the efficacy of puberty blockers. To be eligible to take part in this experiment in dispensing with puberty, a child must be 11 years old, the government announced.
This, then, is Starmer’s Britain: a young person must attain the age of 16 before they can watch YouTube videos about cooking, but the state will consider their application carefully if they wish to chemically castrate themselves at the age of 11.
Literal Child Experimentation
The nature of the puberty blockers trial cannot be overstated or exaggerated. All that is required to understand it is to read what the scientists from King’s College London, slated to operate the program, say about it in their own description. They describe the trial’s purpose as being:
“To evaluate benefits and risks of using gonadotropin-releasing hormone analogues (GnRHa) for puberty suppression in children and young people (CYP) with gender incongruence […] This will take a comprehensive approach to domains of possible benefit and risk, including quality of life, mental health, gender identity/dysphoria and body satisfaction, impact on cognition and brain development and physical effects including bone mineral density.”
A careful reader will note that the purpose of the trial is to evaluate both benefit and risk. However, the risks are to be determined by providing these drugs to children and then observing the effects that the drugs have upon them – likely over years, and over a period in which the effects of the drugs become irreversible. If, as is a perfectly foreseeable outcome within the range of possibilities of the trial, it is found that the risks significantly outweigh the benefits, then the trial’s participants will have been harmed for life.
That sort of outcome is possible, of course, in any medical trial. What makes this one different, however, is that it is explicitly to be performed on some of the most vulnerable and troubled children at an age when all of common law – and every European criminal code – states that they are below the age of reason. An adult signing up for a medical trial of a new drug might be expected to know the risks and be able to make an informed decision. A child who has never experienced puberty, by contrast, does not even understand, and can never understand, what it is that they are giving up. Informed consent is definitionally impossible.
The Western Governing Philosophy: Where Is It?
Comparing the puberty blocker trial to the social media ban for teens is not simply a cheap way of making one or the other look more absurd in comparison to its peer – it is fundamentally symptomatic of a Western governing philosophy that has become unmoored from any coherent set of principles, right down to the very nature of adulthood.
The British government, for example, still maintains a board of film classification that gives age ranges for movies: classic – and by modern standards tame – movies such as The Terminator or The Shawshank Redemption still maintain, in the UK, a 15 certificate, which means that a person must have attained that age before it is legal to admit them to a cinema showing the film, or to rent the film to them if any video rental stores still exist.
To attain a 15 certificate, a movie in the UK must contain mild sexual content, strong language or have some element of discrimination showcased in it. These things are considered unsuitable for children under that age.
In this sense, it might be argued that the social media ban is at least consistent with UK society’s approach to these issues in the days before social media.
Yet two other issues confound matters: first, there is the UK government’s commitment to reducing the voting age to 16 – meaning that one day before their 16th birthday, a teenager is not considered mature enough to watch The Shawshank Redemption, but a day later they are considered adult enough to choose the government of the world’s fifth military power.
And then there is the puberty blocker issue, where a child not old enough to watch TikToks is considered informed enough to abandon their own biological development.
Diagnosing the Patient
What is it, this schizophrenic philosophy that has infected the UK – and to a large extent the rest of Western civilization?
Part of it, of course, is the simple malignancy of transgender ideology, which diagnoses puberty itself as a kind of illness and presents the prevention of puberty as a form of medical intervention on a par with using radiotherapy or chemotherapy to shrink a cancerous tumor. This is the point of the trial: it is a medical trial, which definitionally is presented as offering potential treatments for an illness. As such, the medical ethics of it have been allowed to be warped by that framing. Few people would object to an experimental treatment for a deadly childhood disease that posed some risks to children but offered the potential of a cure, on the grounds that the disease itself was so awful that the risk was worth it.
In this case, however, the normal healthy functioning of puberty has been presented to the public, and accepted by some elements of the political and medical establishment, as being akin to leukemia. It is this warped analysis that has permitted the trial to take place – a trial that poses risks but cures no disease.
Further, this negates the consent issue: a child’s consent for leukemia treatment need not, necessarily, be sought – only parental consent is required. Where parents have become convinced that their child’s natural gender or sex is an ailment, they are therefore being permitted to impose the treatment on their child.
It need not be said that all of this benefits the producers of puberty-blocking drugs, and indeed the many taxpayer-funded groups that purport to represent transgender people – all of whom have an obvious interest in there being more transgender people.
The Right's Category Error
Yet the basic premise – that a person’s bodily identity is a form of illness – is still too widely accepted among even compassionate critics of the puberty blocker trial, who advocate for things like waiting until the child is old enough to make the decision themselves. This is a mistake because it accepts the fundamental lie that the normal male or female body is a form of illness that requires correction. And when all that can be mustered in terms of argument concerns the timing of that correction, then the basic need for the correction has been implicitly conceded.
This is a form of category error: accepting the premise that the healthy human body need ever be altered for medical reasons is to concede the point entirely. Once that is accepted, then the question arises: why should treatment not be given as early as possible?
The answer? Because there is no disease to treat.