The Cass Review and the UK Supreme Court decision were victories for common sense and child safety, and serious setbacks for the powerful transgender lobby in Britain. They are down, but not out – as the recent demotion of a government minister demonstrates.
One of the recommendations from Cass was that there should be a clinical trial on puberty blockers. The Pathways trial will involve 226 children who believe they are transgender being offered puberty-suppressing drugs, with girls as young as 11 and boys as young as 12 eligible to be medicated in an irreversible way.
This is now subject to legal action and will not commence until 1 August at the earliest. It has received fierce opposition, including from the Conservative Party, which used its opposition day to try to force a vote on the matter. The motion was rejected by 283 to 112. For now, the trial will go ahead. And opposition to it is being swept away.
It was reported last week by The Telegraph that Preet Kaur Gill, a junior health minister in the Labour government, was removed from her position by Health Secretary James Murray after she was “preparing to raise concerns about Pathways with officials at the start of last month”. The newspaper said that “she appears to have been sidelined, and by the time the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency announced on 19 June that Pathways could proceed with minimum age limits introduced, responsibility for the trial had passed to Baroness Merron, the minister for women’s health and mental health”.
In male adolescents, puberty blockers slow the growth of facial hair and prevent voice deepening, and for female adolescents, the treatment stops or limits breast development and menstruation. They are licensed for the treatment of precocious, or early-onset, puberty, endometriosis and prostate cancer, but for gender dysphoria, they have only ever been prescribed “off-label”.
It was previously thought that these medications were safe and their effects reversible, but research has since demonstrated that they can have lasting physical and psychological effects, including on bone density and fertility.
Confusion in Labour Policy
Health Secretary James Murray, in a recent interview with Camilla Tominey on GB News, confirmed that he has changed his mind on the novel concept that women can have a penis. This is reassuring from the health secretary. Murray said: “Well, I think a lot of us have been thinking about this issue over recent years. And, you know, I wouldn’t now say that, for instance, trans women are women. I think that biological sex is important.”
Nevertheless, the puberty-blocker trial is going ahead.
The Cass Review, Independent Review of Gender Identity Services for Children and Young People, published in April 2024, was widely seen at the time as a crucial turning point. The review was carried out by Dr Hilary Cass, a former president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health. It took four years to complete.
The review, based on data from 113,000 children, found no evidence to support prescribing sex hormones to under-18s. Dr David Bell, a retired psychiatrist and former president of the British Psychoanalytic Society, described the review as “the most extensive and thoroughgoing evidence-based review of treatment for children experiencing gender distress ever undertaken”. The report’s central finding was “the lack of an evidential base of good quality” that could back claims for the effectiveness of young people being prescribed puberty blockers or proceeding on a medical pathway to transition.
Policy of Affirmation “Wrong”
The Cass Review also said that the policy of “affirmation” – that is, speedily agreeing with a child that they are of the wrong gender – was an inappropriate clinical stance brought about by influential activist groups and some senior Gender Identity Development Service staff, resulting in a distortion of the clinical domain. Studies indicate that a majority of children, in the absence of medical intervention, will desist – that is, change their minds.
The Cass Review was followed a year later by the UK Supreme Court finding, in April 2025, that the legal definition of a woman is based on biological sex and that the “concept of sex is binary”. The Court further found that a person with a Gender Recognition Certificate does not come within the definition of a “woman” in relation to the sex-discrimination section of the Equality Act 2010.
All of these steps were recorded as great defeats, at the time, for the transgender lobby.
Until that point, the transgender lobby in Britain had enjoyed remarkable success. Stonewall – the powerful lobby group for homosexuals – had achieved the legislative victory of gay marriage as the capstone of a decades-long campaign that had seen almost every legal and cultural barrier to gay equality swept away.
The problem with victory, however, is that you always need another cause – and in the UK, as in much of the rest of the world, that cause became transgenderism. This was once a fringe issue, but suddenly terms such as “binary”, “transgenderism”, “cisgender” and “preferred pronouns” were thoroughly embedded into public debate and the lexicon.
War on Language, War on Women
Out of nowhere, businesses, schools, the civil service and ordinary people were expected to accept the fiction that men could change into women and women into men. The media, at first, ran with this – the next great civil-rights frontier. The more extreme the headline, the better: men who were pregnant, “her penis”, chestfeeding and rapists referred to as “she/her” and by female first names, but who looked suspiciously like men. It was a war against the English language.
This was followed by a war against women’s rights. Adults were putting boys and men into women’s bathrooms, changing areas, sports, homeless shelters and prisons. Women were expected to bow down before their mighty transgender overlords and sacrifice their privacy, space and sporting success to the feelings of men. The emotional whims of men had to be accommodated over the interests of the most vulnerable groups of women, such as those fleeing domestic abuse or women in prison.
The attack on the English language and the rights of women was certainly disgraceful. But the attack on the bodies of gender-confused children was worse. Transgenderism and “transitioning”, powered by social media, became popular among vulnerable young children confused about their gender. Thousands of children were “transitioned” and put on puberty blockers, which were sold as a temporary “pause” on puberty that could always be reversed.
The reality was that the lives and bodies of thousands of children were destroyed. Puberty blockers, or gonadotropin-releasing hormone analogs, are medications that stop the physical changes of puberty by affecting the release of hormones from the pituitary gland. They are available in several formats: as a nasal spray, an injection or an implant.
The Only True Transition
The truth is there is only one true transition, and that is puberty itself. It is natural for many children to find this uncomfortable. The change from a child into a man or a woman brings powerful emotions and, at times, overwhelming physical changes. But it is the natural order of things, a biological transition that means young men and women can now create new life. This is what puberty blockers destroy first – the fertility of a young man or woman. It also attacks their emerging sexuality.
This is not just a side effect but a monstrous abuse of a young person who is only coming to terms with his or her sexuality. It was one of the main reasons gay campaigners – men such as Andrew Doyle – see puberty blockers first and foremost as an attack on young gay men.
Yet even now, under a Labour government, children are to be prescribed these drugs. And a government minister, for expressing even mild concerns about this idea, has been swept from her position. Meanwhile, the health secretary, who has belatedly come to the conclusion that biological sex is real, remains too weak to prevent transgender experimentation on young children.
The transgender lobby, far from being defeated, is still scoring wins at political level. And “wins” for the transgender lobby, in this case, could mean life-altering defeats for unsuspecting British children.