Puberty blockers banned because there is no evidence base
Helen Joyce said:
“in this country we've now banned puberty blockers and rightly because there's no evidence base for their use, they don't improve mental health and there are increasing worries that they're very harmful”
The UK government did introduce a ban on puberty blockers for gender dysphoria, and the Cass Review raised concerns about evidence quality, so the claim that the ban reflects a genuine evidence gap sounds like a straightforward summary of official policy. A viewer who has seen news coverage of the Cass Review would find this easy to accept.
The Cass Review found that the existing studies were of low certainty, which is a methodological observation about research design, not a finding that puberty blockers cause harm or that they do not work. Those are two very different things, and collapsing them into 'no evidence base' does something the review itself never did. The Endocrine Society and WPATH, bodies that have been guiding hormone medicine for decades, continue to recommend puberty blockers in appropriate clinical settings, precisely because the evidence that does exist, gathered over many years in children with precocious puberty and in gender clinics across several countries, points toward benefit rather than harm. What the review called for was more and better research, not a ban, and the ban that followed was introduced as a temporary emergency measure pending that research. A teenager who is told the medicine their clinician recommended has been proven useless or dangerous is being given a false account of where the science actually stands, and that false account has real consequences for whether they and their family feel able to keep fighting for care.
What I said at the time:
“puberty blockers there's a government ban on puberty blockers only in transgender children and only until the age of I forget now whether it's 16 or 18. And you welcome that. No I don't. It's tragic. Absolutely tragic.”
Trans adolescents and their families who are told, on the basis of this framing, that the medicine their clinicians recommend has been proven useless or dangerous, when the honest position is that the evidence is limited and contested.