Children cannot meaningfully consent to puberty blockers
Tom Swarbrick said:
“According to the Cass Review, there is insufficient evidence to conclude that children 16 can fully understand the long term consequences of medical transitions such as infertility, effects on sexual development or lifelong medical dependency.”
Citing the Cass Review and the Swedish National Board of Health gives this the weight of official regulatory opinion. The idea that children cannot grasp abstract long-term consequences like infertility is also intuitively plausible to most parents.
Informed consent in paediatric medicine is not a test that children must pass alone: it is a process that involves the young person, their family, and the clinical team together, and it is the same process used when a child faces chemotherapy, organ transplant, or any other treatment with lasting consequences. The Cass Review raised questions about how that process was being documented in gender care, not a finding that children as a category are incapable of consenting to it. Framing this as a problem unique to trans healthcare implies that every other area of paediatric medicine somehow sidesteps the same questions about future fertility or lifelong medication, which is simply not how medicine works. The cost of believing otherwise is real: families who are genuinely trying to do right by their child are made to feel that seeking care is reckless, and young people who need support are told, in effect, that their understanding of their own life does not count.
What I said at the time:
“Well, it's the same as any other medical treatment. It's called in terms of medical consent, it's informed consent. See what the child and family understand by the treatment and you go ahead with it.”
Trans young people and their families who are made to feel that seeking care is inherently irresponsible, and clinicians who are falsely portrayed as bypassing consent processes.