No more experiments on children

In saner times, nobody would need to spell this out: puberty is not a problem. It’s not a pathology. It’s not something to be halted, postponed or ‘paused’. It’s a normal, necessary part of growing up. But today, in an upside-down world where truth must tiptoe around ideology, even the most basic biological facts need defending.

That’s why Genspect, which I founded, has launched the ‘Memorandum of understanding (MoU) on the role of puberty in adolescent development’. It should be redundant. But it’s not. We now live in a world where the UK Supreme Court needs to clarify that men aren’t women, where state-funded studies propose prescribing powerful drugs to delay puberty in confused kids, and where medical authorities have outsourced their moral compass to activist groups.

This MoU is a line in the sand: puberty is not optional, and children deserve the right to grow up – unmedicated and unmanipulated. Genspect has created a platform, ProtectingPuberty.com. Groups like Sex Matters, CanSG, Transgender Trend, LGB Alliance and Thoughtful Therapists – alongside many other well-informed organisations – have already signed the MoU. Together, we’re pushing back against a tide of institutional cowardice and ideological capture. Around the world, organisations are downloading the MoU compliance badge and joining this public stand for a basic, commonsense truth that should never have been up for debate.

This isn’t some fringe concern. Last year, the Cass Review’s scathing findings led to the closure of the discredited Tavistock gender clinic and to a ban on puberty blockers. Yet despite all this, the NHS is now throwing £10million at a study that will dole out puberty blockers to gender-distressed kids – again.

Yes, even after all we’ve learned, the medical establishment is still flirting with the idea that we can chemically freeze children in time and expect no consequences. Effectively, UK health secretary Wes Streeting has banned puberty blockers with one hand and reintroduced them with the other – dressing up the same failed experiment as ‘research’.

Distinguished clinicians such as David Bell, Marcus and Susan Evans, Az Hakeem, Stephen Levine and others have also added their names to the accompanying ‘Statement of concern’ opposing the proposed NHS puberty-blocker trial. But where is the public outrage?

Let’s be clear: puberty is not just about pubic hair and hormones. It’s a profound metamorphosis – physically, cognitively, emotionally. It’s what makes adults out of children. Strip that away, and you’re left with something chilling: children suspended in a twilight state, medically sterilised and emotionally stalled, with no path back to normality.

And yet, we’re told this is ‘progress’. We’re told it’s ‘affirming’ to block puberty in a 12-year-old girl because she doesn’t like her body. We’re told it’s compassionate to drug children into stasis while their peers grow, mature and explore first love, heartbreak and rebellion – the messy business of becoming an adult.

This isn’t medicine. It’s experimentation. It’s social engineering with scalpels and syringes. There’s no long-term outcome data. No rigorous follow-ups. Just ideology in a lab coat.

Through Genspect’s Beyond Trans programme, I run weekly online support groups for detransitioners and others dealing with the fallout of medical transition. What I hear is often devastating: fear, regret and a haunting sense that a point of no return has been crossed.

Many have undergone major surgeries – ovary or testicle removal – and now live with the irreversible consequences of decisions made when they were too young to understand them. Though they’ve psychologically detransitioned, they’re left in medical limbo. Some are terrified to restart hormones that match their biological sex. Why? Because there’s no roadmap. No one knows what happens next – least of all the clinicians who set them on this path.

Should a woman who never went through natural puberty, but now regrets her transition, start pumping synthetic oestrogen into a body that’s been shaped entirely by testosterone? What happens to a female body that never developed breasts, never menstruated, had a hysterectomy, and was medically masculinised from adolescence?

What does it do not just to the body, but also to the mind and metabolism, when the most fundamental stages of human development have been bypassed in the name of ‘affirmation’? These experimentally constructed adults have reached adulthood having bypassed puberty.

This is not a healthcare model. It’s dystopian. It tramples over ethics, evidence and common sense, echoing the darkest chapters of medical history, when vulnerable people were used as guinea pigs in experiments dressed up as ‘care’.

The silence from the medical profession on this upcoming trial is deafening. Too many clinicians still hedge, clinging to the idea that puberty blockers ‘might help some kids’. But the evidence doesn’t back it up, and if you can’t say no to harmful interventions out of fear of online backlash, you shouldn’t be in healthcare.

I was once one of those gender-nonconforming kids – a tomboy and a misfit. Thankfully, no one tried to ‘affirm’ me with drugs. I was allowed to go through puberty, develop sexually, and to slowly grow into myself. Why can’t today’s kids be given the same freedom?

Let the tomboys be. Let the feminine boys wave their fairy wands and find their own path. Let kids be weird and wild. That’s childhood.

Puberty is not an error to be corrected. It’s the bridge between who we were and who we’re becoming. Blocking it doesn’t hit pause. It derails the individual onto a pathway of lifelong medicalisation.

This MoU isn’t about politics. It’s about principle. And it’s time for the adults in the room to stop dithering. We need to say it loud and clear: no more experiments on children.

No more pretending that halting puberty is a harmless pause. No more pretending this is ‘kind’. Puberty is not negotiable. It’s not up for debate. It is the most natural process in the world – and a vital developmental stage that allows humans to become fully functioning adults.

Stella O’Malley is the director and founder of Genspect.