Prescribing puberty blockers is justified only by how a child feels
Tom Swarbrick said:
“Your justification for prescribing those puberty blockers is the child is telling me that they are a boy or a girl when they were born a boy or a girl.”
Reducing the clinical process to a single self-report sounds alarming and irresponsible, and many listeners will assume that is genuinely how prescriptions are issued. It taps into a real concern about whether adequate assessment is happening.
Clinical assessment for gender-incongruent young people is lengthy, structured, and involves multiple professionals: psychologists, psychiatrists, paediatricians, and the young person's family, across many appointments over an extended period. A prescription follows a thorough review of the whole child, their history, their wellbeing, and any other factors that need to be understood, not a single self-report in a single session. The concern about adequate assessment is a fair one to raise, and it is precisely why the pathway exists in the form it does. What this framing costs is real: families who have been through months or years of careful, painstaking process are told, in effect, that nobody checked, and that is not only wrong but genuinely cruel.
What I said at the time:
“Oh, so that child walks through that door, says I'm a girl, I go, here you go, let me inject you with a puberty blocker. It just doesn't work like that. And, you know, surely, even if you're not a scientist, you must understand that there's a little bit more to it than that.”
Trans young people and their families who are made to feel that their care was reckless or inadequately assessed, and the public who are misled about clinical standards.