A child cannot make a decision about their future like this
Julia Hartley-Brewer said:
“How can a young child, how can anyone under the age of 18, how can they make a decision about their future like that?”
The idea that children lack the maturity to make consequential medical decisions is a widely shared intuition, and it maps onto existing legal frameworks around consent that most people are broadly aware of.
Children and young people make consequential medical decisions all the time, and nobody questions their capacity when the treatment is for something other than gender. What makes this question feel different is not a principled distinction about maturity or decision-making: it is a specific anxiety about gender care that gets dressed up as a general concern about age. The actual framework, Gillick competence, exists precisely to assess whether a young person understands enough to participate in decisions about their own body, and puberty blocker prescribing sits within that framework alongside multi-disciplinary assessment, parental involvement in most cases, and careful ongoing review. When we apply a blanket assumption of incapacity only to gender-related decisions, we are not protecting young people: we are telling trans adolescents that their understanding, their experience of their own body, and their voice in their own healthcare count for less than everyone else's.
What I said at the time:
“I think we have to give young people credit for understanding a lot of things in healthcare. So whether it's going in for a broken arm, whether it's going in for adenoids, whether it's going in for grommets, whether it's going for puberty blockers, whether it's going for open heart surgery. You have to understand that parents and children make decisions.”
Trans adolescents who are denied any agency in their own healthcare on the basis of a blanket assumption of incapacity that does not apply to other medical decisions made by young people.