Demonstrators, campaigners and parliamentarians gather outside the Department of Health and Social Care to protest against the planned clinical trial to assess the risks and benefits of puberty blockers in gender questioning children (Alamy)
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Labour MPs who oppose the puberty blockers trial are becoming increasingly confident that they can persuade the government to halt it altogether after it was temporarily paused due to concerns raised by the healthcare regulator.
Last week, the Medicines and Health products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) wrote to King’s College London, the trial’s sponsor, urging the university to suspend the trial due to concerns over the participants’ well-being. The government agreed to pause the Pathways trial while clinicians scrutinise further evidence.
The study looks at the possible prescription of puberty blockers among young people with gender incongruence. It was set to enrol 226 children aged between 11 and 15. However, the MHRA said it wanted to introduce a minimum age of 14 for participants, and expressed concern about potential long-term harms.
“This trial will only be allowed to go ahead if the expert scientific and clinical evidence and advice conclude it is both safe and necessary,” a Department of Health and Social Care spokesperson said in response.
As The House magazine reported last month, Health Secretary Wes Streeting is faced with groups of Labour MPs with strongly-held, opposing views on the subject.
For Labour MPs who support the trial, it is an important route to gender-affirming healthcare that will improve the quality of life of children with gender dysphoria and alleviate mental health problems that arise from it.
However, those opposed to the trial, which make up a smaller cohort of Labour MPs, say it is unethical and that not enough is known about the lasting impact of the hormone injections.
MPs in the latter group are making a renewed push to stop the trial altogether.
PoliticsHome understands that Preet Kaur Gill, who is a Parliamentary Private Secretary to technology secretary Liz Kendall, is organising a meeting with Streeting alongside several clinicians and Labour MPs to raise concerns over the Pathways trial. In January, Gill endorsed Blue Labour — the Labour caucus which promotes more socially conservative positions.
Jonathan Hinder, Labour MP for Pendle and Clitheroe, said blocking puberty in young children was “profoundly unethical” and that the trial should be banned over the MHRA concerns.
“It beggars belief that the government ever gave the go-ahead for this trial,” he told PoliticsHome. “A ‘pause’ will not do. The government must cancel the whole trial altogether.”
He added: “Children struggling with their gender identity need love, support and compassion, but they must not be medicalised in this way.”
David Smith, Labour MP for North Northumberland, who also opposes the trial being resumed, added: “To quote it [the MHRA letter] directly, it says, ‘unlike patients with precocious puberty, the proposed cohort in this trial have normal biological hormonal and sexual development but a psychological condition of gender dysphoria’.
“It goes on to raise concerns about the possible long-term harms, such as irreversible bone structural change in participants, raises concerns about cognitive effects, and the long-term potential loss of their fertility.”
Streeting banned the sale of puberty blockers for gender-questioning under-18s indefinitely soon after Labour entered government in 2024. He pointed to the review carried out by Baroness Cass into gender identity services, which raised safety concerns around the lack of evidence for the hormone treatments.
The same review recommended the Pathways trial as a means of research into whether or not puberty-suppressing hormones helped children with gender dysphoria.
Cass told The Observer she was “disappointed” by the MHRA’s intervention and believed that the regulator had bowed to political pressure. Gender-critical campaigners like author JK Rowling have publicly pressured ministers to cancel the trial.
“There are no new research findings and the MHRA hasn’t presented any new evidence,” she told the newspaper. “It feels to me like they are responding to political pressure rather than to science.”
A Labour MP who sits in the party’s LGBT+ caucus said they would be “absolutely furious” if they were Streeting.
“[He] has been put in an extremely awkward position by this massive and unfounded change of heart by a supposedly impartial regulator,” they told PoliticsHome.
“This decision by the MHRA, taken without new evidence, only makes that task harder and undermines public confidence that the system is acting in the best interests of patients.”
