The ban stopped access to life-changing medications
Dr Helen Webberley on Times Radio: puberty blockers, with Andrew Neil, Times Radio
The UK ban on puberty blockers for trans young people is a contained legal technicality, something that affects paperwork rather than lives. People assume that if a global provider is still operating, access must still exist somehow, that families will find a way through.
What I was trying to make clear is that the ban has not created a workaround: it has created a wall. GenderGP operates globally, but it cannot prescribe puberty blockers to young people in the UK, because the ban applies here, and no responsible provider is going to break it. What that means in practice is that families who were already waiting, already frightened, already watching an unwanted puberty take hold month by month, have had the door closed on them entirely. These are not abstract cases. These are children whose parents contacted me in tears, who had done everything right, who had found a path, and then had it taken away. The medications that were available to them are life-changing and, for some, genuinely lifesaving. The ban did not make those children safer. It made them wait, and waiting in puberty is not neutral.
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