Vic Parsons, 15 December 2024

On Wednesday, the British government permanently banned the prescription of puberty blockers to transgender young people, claiming the medication is dangerous. It remains legal for children who aren’t trans.

This year alone, both the Conservative and Labour governments have used emergency legislation to temporarily ban puberty blockers. It’s a stunning amount of political effort to block a form of healthcare that, in the 26 years it’s been recommended for trans youth in the UK, has been prescribed to less than a few hundred trans kids each year.

Before he made prescribing puberty blockers to trans kids illegal, Labour Health Secretary Wes Streeting conducted a targeted consultation asking organisations that he described as key stakeholders – including at least five anti-trans activist groups and one designated anti-LGBTQ+ hate group – whether they supported a permanent ban on puberty blockers. Fifty-nine per cent of respondents opposed a permanent ban; Streeting ignored them. Many respondents, including those who support the permanent ban, said that enacting it would have a negative impact on the mental health of young trans people.

Some young trans people from direct-action group Trans Kids Deserve Better went to Streeting’s constituency office in Ilford on Wednesday evening. They slept there overnight, drawn together by grief and rage. They kept each other warm. They made tiny coffins out of paper and left them for Streeting outside his office, wanting him to know that they think his decision to deprive trans kids of puberty blockers means trans children will die.

Streeting claims that his decision to ban puberty blockers is being done in the best interests of young trans people. I disagree. Puberty blockers have made life better for some young trans people, and they should be freely and readily available to anyone who wants them. Many studies have shown that transitioning is good for trans teens.

Puberty blockers are a small part of a much larger and richer picture of what it will take for trans people to have better lives; just as easy access to safe and free abortion is one component of reproductive justice, access to puberty blockers is one component of trans healthcare justice. And, like criminalising abortion, criminalising puberty blockers will not stop trans kids from taking them – it will just make it less safe.

For a better world for trans kids, we need hormones to be readily available to trans people of all ages; facial feminisation surgery to be available on the NHS; drastically improved provision of lower surgery for trans masculine people; GPs who can read a hormone levels blood test result. We need a world in which we move beyond such a limited understanding of gender, a world in which we stop confining everyone to one of two narrow and stifling boxes.

The ongoing media circus around puberty blockers reminds me of the one that resulted from government proposals to reform the Gender Recognition Act (GRA) in 2017. Then, legal gender recognition became a defining issue of British trans rights – even though, as with the small number of trans kids who’ve accessed puberty blockers, very few trans people had actually used the GRA to change their legal gender.

Legal gender recognition and access to puberty blockers are neither what make us trans nor the only tools we need to live long, happy lives. Trans people do not spring into existence when our genders are recognised by the state, any more than puberty blockers create trans kids.

I asked Blue, 17, one of the young activists who slept outside Streeting’s office this week, what would improve trans kids’ quality of life. “A world where putting a gender marker next to name and date of birth is remembered as a bizarre obsession we’ve thankfully moved on from,” she said. “Hormones and puberty blockers can be stocked next to birth control in pharmacies and we never have to ask for permission because there is nothing to change. The formerly trans are able to have autonomy over our bodies, and the formerly cis are free to make their bodies their own, rather than measuring themselves by deviations from the all too stale concepts of ‘man’ and ‘woman’.”

“The only thing it takes is acceptance by wider society and a shift away from this whole culture war nonsense,” Blue added. “We are people too, with our own hopes and dreams. To be constantly trampled on by the government is quite dehumanising.”

Trans kids need respect and support from their families, teachers, peers and politicians; equal and timely access to healthcare, including puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones; to grow up without being confined by gender; and to be listened to on issues that affect them. They need the government to stop using them to distract from political failures to tackle the climate crisis, genocide, ballooning corporate profits and child poverty.

Ultimately, children should be free to be themselves no matter whether they go through a puberty that is driven by hormones their own bodies make, or through a puberty driven by hormones they take. A better world for trans kids looks like a 15-year-old girl being able to get hormones without needing the approval of her parents or a psychiatrist, whether she wants them for contraception or for gender transition.

But puberty blockers alone are not a silver bullet that can make the UK a safer and easier place for trans kids to grow up in. For trans kids to be free to be themselves, we need a better world. Until then, as the state continues to attempt to squash trans kids out of existence, in the words of Trans Kids Deserve Better: “We will live out of spite.”