#jo bartosch

By: Jo Bartosch

Published: Apr 7, 2026

Some ideas are so bonkers they ought never to be put to the test. Big-cat obsessives may believe they have a mystical affinity with lions, but no sane zookeeper would indulge them by opening the enclosure. And yet, it has taken researchers in Finland to confirm what anyone with a functioning brain already knew: telling children that their bodies are wrong does not improve their mental health. It makes it worse.

A recent paper published by Acta Paediatrica examined the outcomes for 2,083 patients referred to gender clinics between 1996 and 2019, and compared them with a large and carefully selected control group. The researchers found an elevated risk of ‘psychiatric morbidity, with hazard ratios approximately three times higher than female controls and five times higher than male controls’. This means that the girls and young women given testosterone and boys and young men given oestrogen suffered significant increases in distress after starting ‘gender-affirming’ treatment.

The patients had all been diagnosed with ‘gender dysphoria’, which meant they were already mentally unwell. But ‘gender-affirming’ treatment didn’t help them. ‘Severe psychiatric morbidity is common among gender-referred adolescents and appears to be more prevalent in those referred after the recent surge in referrals’, the study concluded. ‘Psychiatric needs do not subside after medical gender reassignment.’

This research should prompt some soul-searching among the professionals who pushed the claim that ‘gender-affirming care’ – including everything from hormone treatment to puberty blockers – saves lives and reduces mental suffering. And that includes the charities and lobby groups that told parents they faced a stark choice: sterilise your child with drugs or bury them.

Had a study found the reverse, you can bet trans-activist outfits like Mermaids, Stonewall and the Good Law Project would be crowing about it. Yet oddly, they’ve kept schtum. It is tempting to conclude that they only ‘follow the science’ when they already agree with it. If this were about macrobiotic diets or juice cleanses, it would be harmless nonsense. But it isn’t. It is about children – distressed, suggestible children who were handed over to an ideology that promised relief and delivered the opposite. To gamble with their bodies for political vanity, and perhaps profit, is not just wrong. It is also contemptible.

Now that the promise of ‘gender affirmation’ is unravelling, why is the UK government still behaving as though there is substance to trans medicine? That question hangs squarely over health secretary Wes Streeting, who has signed off on a new clinical trial of puberty blockers, even as the evidential basis for such interventions remains, at best, uncertain.

It was precisely this absence of robust evidence that paediatrician Dr Hilary Cass identified in her landmark 2024 review of NHS gender-identity services for children. As she put it plainly, ‘there is no evidence that puberty blockers buy time to think’.

And yet, on the back of that finding, the controversial puberty-blockers trial – the so-called Pathways Trial – was still approved by Streeting last year. The plan was to enrol at least 200 children, affirm them in a cross-sex identity, and place them on puberty blockers within a research setting. It was presented as a way to gather the very evidence that had hitherto been lacking.

That trial has now run into serious difficulty. It is currently paused after the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency raised concerns about whether it is ethical to enrol children as young as 14 in a study, whose foreseeable consequences include infertility.

Cass was right about the absence of evidence. But absence of evidence is not a licence to go in search of it via experiments on children. Now the data have arrived from Finland, and they point in precisely the direction common sense would predict.

What the Finnish researchers have shown is hardly revelatory. It is the scientific equivalent of discovering that tiger enthusiasts are mauled when they step into the cage. But if stating the obvious is what it takes to bring this grotesque experiment to a halt, then so be it.

By: Jo Bartosch

Published: Aug 11, 2025

Russell T. Davies should stand up for the right of same-sex attracted people

Russell T. Davies, one Britain’s most celebrated television screenwriters, has a new script – a paranoid, progressive potboiler in which human rights teeter on the brink. In an interview with Big Issue, the Queer as Folk creator and Dr Who lead writer warned that “things are rapidly and urgently getting worse” for gay people. 

At home, Reform is gaining support; abroad, President Trump – who danced to Y.M.C.A. at his election rallies – “would be happier with us invisible and gone… if not biologically altered to become as straight as him.” This, apparently, is the hostile climate that demanded he write Tip Toe – a drama, by his own admission, “literally no one asked for.”

Davies seems unaware that in the UK, gay and bisexual people already have every right worth having – we can marry, serve in the army, adopt, and bore each other senseless about mortgages, just like anyone else. Any threat to those hard-won freedoms now comes not from the state, but from the overreach of activists like Davies himself, and the forced yoking of the LGB to the T – causes that pull in opposite directions. 

If the Right is gaining ground, it’s because the public has grown sick of being bullied into denying biological reality. It’s not Reform UK that alienated ordinary parents; it’s Stonewall-trained teachers telling six-year-olds they might be born in the wrong body. It’s not Nigel Farage who united radical feminists and renegade vicars; it’s activists trying to strip away our language, our spaces and our sexual boundaries. 

Indeed, Reform’s promise to “ban transgender ideology” in schools could shield the next generation from the fiction of being “born in the wrong body” – a lie that disproportionately ensnares children who will grow up to be same-sex attracted. In this, the party has done more to safeguard gay rights than Davies.

The trans lobby has spent the last decade dismantling the definition of homosexuality. Stonewall’s former boss, Nancy Kelley, even smeared lesbians who refuse male “lesbian” partners as “sexual racists.” The Right has stepped into the void left by progressives, and who can blame them?

Yet Davies yearns for the “ansger of the past” and warns of a coming fight. “They’re out to get us,” he says of the US right. “The whole world is keeping all of us awake… I hope [the younger generation] are prepared to fight… because a fight is coming.” On that, at least, he’s half right – a fight is coming. 

But it’s not against imaginary armies of 1950s-style homophobes. It’s against an ideology that makes homosexuality unspeakable by erasing the reality of sex. And if the scenes continue to be written by men like Davies, there is a risk that the hard-fought rights of LGB people could be swept away by the justified tide of fury about the excesses of trans activism.

If Davies truly wants to defend gay rights, he should stand for the right of same-sex attracted people to exist on our own terms. Otherwise, the bleak finale he fears will be one he co-wrote – and this time there’ll be no option to rewind and reset when the credits roll.

By: Jo Bartosch

Published: Apr 21, 2024

How did people emerge from the hysteria of the witch trials? What must it have felt like to live through the period when supposed witches were suddenly revealed to be ordinary women? What did the accusers say when it became clear that these supposed agents of Satan were simply adult human females? Did they feel guilt and try to make amends? Did they shirk their responsibility? Or did they double down?

The reactions to the publication of the Cass Review last week might give us some idea. The activists, medical professionals and celebrities who championed the trans cause have been confronted with the horror they helped create. Dr Hilary Cass’s report into the NHS’s treatment of gender-confused kids has radically transformed the trans debate, exposing ‘gender-affirming care’ as a dangerous experiment. Now, the disciples of trans ideology are scrambling to save face.

The most common reaction from cheerleaders of trans ideology has been to meekly plead ignorance. One such case is that of Dr Adam Rutherford, geneticist, science communicator and president of Humanists UK – an organisation that in recent years has made a hard turn away from science and rationality in favour of worshipping the cult of gender identity. Yet when he was invited to comment on the Cass Review by Sex Matters director Maya Forstater on X, Rutherford said: ‘It’s not something I know much about.’ Really? It’s somewhat difficult to believe that Rutherford has somehow missed seeing this bit of hugely significant medical news.

This is mirrored by the bleating entreaties for ‘nuance’ from television presenter Kirstie Allsopp. For the past few years, Allsopp has smeared gender-critical views as transphobic. Now she is attempting to rewrite history by claiming that it has always ‘been possible to debate these things and those saying there was no debate are wrong’. We all know this isn’t true. As JK Rowling correctly points out, ‘one of the gender ideologues’ favourite slogans is “no debate”’.

Perhaps the most egregious response of all has come from former Stonewall CEO Baroness Ruth Hunt. It was Hunt who oversaw the charity’s transformation from a gay-rights charity to an LGBT lobby group, with the emphasis firmly on the T. It was under her watch that Stonewall tried to silence warnings about the dangers of experimental puberty blockers. Yet last week, Hunt told The Times that she had simply ‘trusted the experts’ on puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, so she couldn’t possibly be held accountable. Given that Stonewall itself was deferred to as an ‘expert’ organisation on the issue of gender-affirming care, it is hard to accept Hunt’s projection of innocence. She was hardly some misled ingénue.

Even more deranged and delusional are those who have dismissed the Cass Review as ‘unscientific’. Apparently, Cass’s four years of research and the reams of data she gathered are simply a pretext for promoting a ‘transphobic’ narrative. This rejection of reason is perhaps most eloquently demonstrated by the hyperbolic hashtag, #CassKillsKids, which has been tweeted out by the likes of broadcaster and trans activist India Willoughby. But this position is so patently untrue that only a small minority of the most committed zealots seem to be defending it.

The fact is, it is incredibly difficult for trans activists to obscure their roles in this scandal. Many of them must now be aware that they cheered on a gruesome, ideologically motivated experiment on children. After all, the facts are now indisputable.

In measured tones and meticulous detail, Cass’s report reveals what was really going on inside the NHS’s Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS). She concludes that the ‘gender affirming’ medical treatments it provided, like puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, are based on ‘wholly inadequate’ evidence. Doctors are usually cautious when adopting new treatments, but Cass says ‘quite the reverse happened in the field of gender care for children’. Instead, thousands of children were put on an unproven medical pathway. Worse still, medical professionals seemed largely uninterested in uncovering the side effects and long-term risks of these drugs. Cass says that all but one adult gender clinic refused to share patient data that would allow her team to study how childhood transitioners fared as adults. This made it virtually impossible to research the potential longer-term consequences of transitioning.

The implications of the review are so grave that politicians have had no choice but to act. On Monday, health secretary Victoria Atkins gave an excoriating speech to parliament, laying out the changes in policy that have already been made and those still to come. She reiterated that NHS England would no longer be able to prescribe puberty blockers for children with gender dysphoria outside of clinical trials. She also promised a crackdown on private prescriptions, as well as an urgent review on clinical policy for prescribing cross-sex hormones. Vitally, she also announced that NHS trusts that initially refused to cooperate with the review will now share their data, hopefully opening the door for further research. These developments were all sorely needed.

Atkins also made a point of thanking the clinicians, academics, activists and journalists who raised the alarm. She acknowledged that they had ‘risked their careers’ to do so. She told her fellow politicians that it should trouble each of them that the NHS ‘was overtaken by a culture of secrecy and ideology that was allowed to trump evidence and safety’.

Finally, politicians are taking these concerns seriously. Until very recently, they did not want to know. Back in May 2019, I was one of a handful of people to attend the First Do No Harm meeting at the House of Lords. There, in a tiny cramped room, we listened to clinicians and campaigners who were desperately worried about the goings on in the GIDS Tavistock clinic in London.

First Do No Harm was organised by campaigner Venice Allan and Let Women Speak founder Kellie-Jay Keen (aka Posie Parker), with the aim of bringing together journalists, politicians and medical experts. It was chaired and spon.sored by Labour peer Lord Lewis Moonie, who himself had a background in psychology and clinical pharmacological research. Among the attendees was psychoanalyst Marcus Evans. He had resigned from his post as a governor at the Tavistock clinic in February that year, citing concerns about the influence of lobby groups on clinical practice.

Despite this wealth of knowledge and expertise, First Do No Harm went largely ignored by politicians. Invitations were sent out to every member of parliament. But, aside from Moonie, the only politicians in attendance were Baroness Tanni Grey-Thompson and Conservative MP David Davies. As Evans explained at the time: ‘No one would basically attend, they’d be threatened that they would have the whip withdrawn if they attended… the silencing of opposition in this area is unbelievable.’

There was certainly a cost for Moonie. After over 40 years in the Labour Party, he was told by party general secretary Jenny Formby that his membership would be at risk if he proceeded with the event. So he resigned. Five years on, and the concerns of Moonie, a small band of whistleblowing clinicians and tenacious campaigners have finally been acknowledged.

While First Do No Harm was the first public meeting bringing concerned voices together, staff within GIDS had already been sounding the alarm for some time. It was all the way back in 2004 that Susan Evans, wife of Marcus, first spoke out about the ‘precipitous referral’ of gender-confused children on to a medical pathway. As a clinical nurse at the Tavistock, she tried to raise the possibility that there were alternatives to medically transitioning children. But she was advised that GIDS would be unable to attract patients without offering puberty blockers. Evans resigned in 2007.

Today, Evans tells me that, while she is relieved about the findings of the Cass Review, she is frustrated to see ‘what happened at GIDS described as a debate between two sides’:

‘I wanted to ensure that kids were receiving a thorough assessment and that as a team there would be a more holistic exploration… That’s not a toxic debate, that is clinical discussion and that’s what a responsible clinician ought to do. All I ever did was raise ordinary but important clinical and safeguarding concerns and questions. I was inquisitive.’

Thankfully, there were still some other inquisitive clinicians out there. In 2018, Dr David Bell, consultant psychiatrist and staff governor at the Tavistock, wrote an internal report that slammed GIDS for promoting a model of uncritical gender affirmation. He blamed trans lobby groups like Mermaids and Stonewall for infecting the organisation. He also explained that many of the young patients seeking to medically transition would otherwise grow up to be lesbian, gay or bisexual. For this, senior management at GIDS threatened Bell with disciplinary action, in an attempt to silence him.

Shortly afterwards, in 2019, clinical psychologist Kirsty Entwistle, who had previously worked at the GIDS satellite clinic in Leeds, penned an open letter, echoing similar concerns. She warned that patients were falsely being told that puberty blockers were ‘fully reversible’ and that accusations of transphobia were stifling important medical and safeguarding discussions.

GIDS was desperate to silence anyone who expressed doubts about how clinics were operating. One such whistleblower was Sonia Appleby, who was a social worker and safeguarding lead at the Tavistock. In 2016, Appleby began to raise concerns about the shambolic record-keeping and the potential over-prescription of puberty blockers. For this, she was bullied and monstered by management, and shunned by GIDS director Dr Polly Carmichael. Carmichael apparently told her team that Appleby had ‘an agenda’ and discouraged staff from sharing any safeguarding concerns with her. In a small act of justice, in 2021 Appleby was awarded £20,000 in damages for the appalling way she was treated at the Tavistock.

Many of the stories from those who spoke out chime with one another. They talk about being alarmed that children’s underlying issues were being systematically overlooked. GIDS was more interested in prescribing medical treatments than in helping children who were suffering from homophobic bullying, mental-health issues, sexual abuse or other traumas. When questions were asked about the safety of puberty blockers and hormones, staff faced an atmosphere where clinical curiosity was discouraged. In all, between 2016 and 2019, a total of 35 clinicians left the Tavistock, with many citing concerns about children being over-diagnosed. Meanwhile, management ignored all these concerns and children continued to be prescribed puberty blockers.

It was shortly after Carmichael’s appointment in 2011 that GIDS began its first trial of puberty blockers. Before the research had even concluded, these drugs, which have also been used to chemically castrate sex offenders, were made more widely available to children. In 2014, the minimum prescription age was dropped from 16 to 11. Some private clinics even started prescribing them to children as young as nine.

GIDS management, it seemed, was remarkably unbothered by the lack of evidence for puberty blockers. In 2016, Carmichael told a World Professional Association for Transgender Health conference in Amsterdam that they were crucial for trans-identified kids and ‘incredibly successful’. But in the same speech, she admitted that ‘actually, the Dutch are the only team really who have published long-term perspective studies about this. So there is very little data available.’ Indeed, as Carmichael admits, virtually the only bit of evidence ever referenced in support of puberty blockers is a piece of flawed research from the Netherlands. It was later revealed that the findings from GIDS’s own puberty-blocker trial were far from reliable.

It was left to those on the outside to bring public attention to what was happening at GIDS. Yet, just as with the silencing of clinicians, those outside the medical profession were also smeared as transphobic for questioning the new wisdom about so-called trans kids.

One of the earliest groups to demand an evidence-based approach was Transgender Trend, which was founded by Stephanie Davies-Arai in 2015. She and her organisation were almost instantly hounded and derided by trans extremists. A children’s book published by Transgender Trend was even compared to ‘terrorist propaganda’. But this smear campaign wouldn’t stop the truth from being revealed. Transgender Trend soon attracted the attention of Oxford professor Michael Biggs. In 2019, he published a report with the organisation, showing that the use of puberty blockers did not reduce the mental distress experienced by patients – a conclusion now backed up by Cass.

This reality became impossible to ignore, especially as ‘detransitioners’ began to speak out. The existence of people who regretted their decision to transition proved to be a thorn in the side of the trans movement and a powerful testimony against so-called trans healthcare. In November 2019, a women’s rights group called Make More Noise hosted the first panel discussion of detransitioners in the UK, giving them an opportunity to share their stories with journalists. With testosterone-cracked voices and mastectomy scars, these young women embody the harms of gender medicine. They were the ‘data’ that the clinicians at GIDS had overlooked.

Detransitioners fought to make themselves heard. In 2020, a high-profile legal challenge by detransitioner Keira Bell against the Tavistock prompted NHS England to commission the Cass Review. Leading paediatrician Dr Hilary Cass was then tasked with finding out what was really happening at GIDS.

Detransitioner Sinead Watson, who, as a young adult, took medical steps to present as male, is one of those who gave evidence to the Cass Review researchers. She tells me: ‘They asked about my story, how I was evaluated, how quickly, about the side effects of [testosterone] and about the surgery. They asked how I was helped to deal with the regret when I sought out support from the NHS, and seemed genuinely surprised I had received no help.’

It truly is a scandal that children and youngsters were put on a pathway to medicalisation and then promptly abandoned. There are now calls for a public inquiry, and it looks like adult services will also now face their own Cass-style review. But the problem with the trans ideology is that it extends far beyond medicine. It is a mind virus that has infected almost every British institution.

Certainly, there can never be true justice for detransitioners. They will continue to carry the mistakes of the medical establishment, and the failure of the government, on their bodies. It also seems unlikely that any of the whistleblowers who were vilified for raising the alarm will receive apologies or retractions. Trans cheerleaders will continue to deny any complicity. No doubt the GIDS management and healthcare professionals who tried to suppress the truth will be able to slink off to lucrative careers elsewhere.

By: Jo Bartosch

Published: May 3, 2023

Twenty years ago, after one too many beers, I met some pagans in a pub in Gloucestershire. They invited me to travel with them to Ireland the next morning on a spiritual pilgrimage. I expected a mystical experience, but I remained unmoved. On returning to Ireland last week to attend two rival conferences on how best to help people distressed about their gender, I realised that my scepticism is still intact – and that mad beliefs about magic have spread far beyond damp hippies.

The two conferences were very different. The larger, more established conference was organised by the European Professional Association for Transgender Health (EPATH), which claims to promote the ‘mental, physical and social health of transgender people in Europe’. The other conference was organised by a relative upstart called Genspect. Founded in 2021, Genspect is an international organisation that aims to ‘promote high-quality, evidence-based care for gender-nonconforming individuals all around the world’.

In a press release from March, Genspect’s director, psychotherapist Stella O’Malley, summed up the difference between the two organisations’ approaches when dealing with those experiencing gender distress: ‘The EPATH programme promotes heavy medical interventions while Genspect favours the least-invasive approach first.’ Genspect, explained O’Malley, aims to ‘crack open EPATH’s mono-focus on medicalised modes of treatment’.

The Genspect conference set out to challenge both the magical thinking of trans ideology and the medicalisation of childhood distress that this has led to. This was reflected by the presence of around a dozen ‘detransitioners’ among the delegates – that is, people who regret transitioning and want to revert to their original gender. These detransitioners, who were predominantly under 30, are now living with the consequences of taking hormones and having their healthy body parts amputated. In time, they might recover their mental health. But in many cases the harm done to their bodies will be permanent.

Michael Biggs, an associate professor in sociology at the University of Oxford, has long been investigating the effect of puberty-blocking drugs on sexual maturation. Presenting his findings at the Genspect conference, Biggs revealed that patients who have suppressed their puberty as children before surgical transition may never be able to orgasm as adults.

Speaking after the conference, Biggs told me that there is a wilful lack of published research on the long-term effects of taking puberty blockers. He said that ‘puberty blockers have been used in the Netherlands for over three decades, and yet the long-term effects are known for only one person’. By the age of 35, that ‘one person was depressed and ashamed of their genitals’.

Biggs also revealed that where research has been carried out into puberty blockers there have been attempts to suppress it. The NHS’s Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) at London’s Tavistock clinic, which is due to be closed down later this year, began a study of 44 children aged between 12 and 15 in 2011. But GIDS director Dr Polly Carmichael effectively kept the results of this trial to herself. The findings remained unpublished until they were discovered and first analysed by Biggs in 2018. ‘It required a complaint to the Health Research Authority, questions in parliament, and a judicial review’, Biggs tells me, ‘before Dr Carmichael finally published the full results’.

Most disturbingly, Biggs told me of the awful fate of one healthy Dutch teenager. After having his puberty blocked as a child, the teenager underwent a vaginoplasty aged 18. The complicated procedure involved taking tissue from his bowel to create a replica vagina and vulva. Within 24 hours of having surgery, he had died in hospital of necrotising fasciitis.

Predictably, EPATH’s conference featured no such criticism of these surgical or medical interventions. Far from it. The conference was even spon.sored by a company offering facial-feminisation surgery, and from the off EPATH went on the offensive. In the opening address, the organisation’s outgoing president, Joz Motmans, attacked ‘anti-gender and anti-trans voices, legislation, policies and movements’. Motmans even claimed that the growing public scepticism towards trans ideology was driven by ‘far-right parties’. ‘We respect everyone’s freedom of speech’, he said, ‘but we choose not to listen to it’.

In the interests of actual free speech and debate, EPATH attendees were told that they would be permitted access to Genspect with their EPATH ticket. This gesture was not reciprocated. Indeed, EPATH has even blocked Genspect from its Twitter account.

Whether or not EPATH chooses to listen, the debate over how best to treat patients with gender distress is gaining momentum across Europe. Last year’s announcement that the Tavistock clinic would be shut down, on the grounds its model of care is ‘not safe’ for children, has sent shockwaves across the continent. Medical bodies are now sounding the alarm in Sweden, France and most recently Norway. More and more clinical professionals are coming out to ask for the evidence that mental distress can be successfully treated by ‘gender-affirming’ medical interventions.

Last week in Ireland, the authority of EPATH’s gender priests took a battering. They showed themselves to be unwilling and perhaps even incapable of engaging with those who hold opposing views. More damning still, they refused to engage with the evidence.

Trans ideology is now being exposed for the magical thinking it always was. Its adherents are doing real harm.

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Telling people to get a facelift or a boob-job when they're depressed or anxious used to be regarded as unethical.

By: Josephine Bartosch

Published: Dec 12, 2025

Imagine, for a moment, that the NHS unveiled a clinical trial for children who believed they were ugly: a programme of experimental “pre-cosmetic” injections designed to make them better candidates for breast enlargements or pectoral sculpting in adulthood. If it emerged that these injections were already known to disrupt brain development, weaken bones and eliminate sexual function, there would be national outrage. We would call it grotesque and anti-medical, a parody of care in which children were harmed to deliver an imagined future aesthetic to get rid of an imagined future dysmorphia.

Yet this is ultimately logic which underpins the newly-approved Pathways puberty-blocker trial. This week, three claimants — detransitioner Keira Bell, psychotherapist James Esses, and the Bayswater Support Group — launched a High Court challenge to stop the £10.7 million study. They argue that far from being a scientific inquiry, Pathways is a fresh round of experimentation on vulnerable children, without the evidence required to justify the risks.

Barely a year after puberty blockers were withdrawn from routine NHS use, ministers have authorised a trial that will give them to children as young as 10. Around 230 participants will be assigned either to receive blockers immediately or to wait a year. There is no placebo group. The primary outcome is a 10-question wellbeing form that asks children whether they felt energetic or sad in the previous week.

The Cass Review, which exposed the failures of the Tavistock model of gender-affirming care, could not have been clearer. The evidence base for blockers is “remarkably weak”; the long-term outcomes and the rationale for early suppression remain “unclear”. Cass also noted that the vast majority of children who start on blockers proceed straight to cross-sex hormones. By her own admission, the claim that blockers “buy time to think” is unsupported by evidence. If anything, they appear to strap children onto the medical conveyer belt.

And yet Cass has lent her support to Pathways. The charitable explanation is pragmatism: the NHS wants to keep distressed young people away from private prescribers and black-market hormones, and believes it must be seen to be offering something.

But to understand why this is a feeble basis for a paediatric drug trial, we must confront the real appeal of blockers. Early suppression of male puberty makes it easier for boys to look more like women in adulthood. Without the testosterone surge, they grow into adults with narrower shoulders, softer faces, no Adam’s apple and voices that never fully break.

These are aesthetic effects, and of course a person’s psychological self-perception is deeply intertwined with how they look. But they are not solely aesthetic — they are biological and not without hormonal and functional complications. This approach concerns the future adult, not how to rectify the child’s distress. As Cass herself noted, one rationale offered by proponents of early suppression is to prevent pubertal changes that might later make it harder for a young person to “pass” in their intended gender role.

This is part of the fiction sold to vulnerable teenagers: that altering their bodies early will guarantee a future identity which “passes” under the gaze of others. It is a strange logic, according to which appearance eclipses wellbeing and the cosmetic is prized above any holistic concern for the child’s development.

Once this is acknowledged, the structure of the trial becomes easier to understand and harder to defend. The focus of the trial is short-term self-reported feelings in a group already convinced that blockers will help. Those who receive the drugs immediately will feel affirmed; those who must wait are likely to feel rejected. Any difference between the groups risks measuring expectation, not efficacy.

What the trial avoids is even more revealing. Around 2,000 under-16s were referred for blockers at the Tavistock Clinic. A national data linkage study to track their adult outcomes was approved and ready to proceed, then stalled when adult gender services refused to release the necessary information. Instead of insisting on that essential evidence, the NHS has pressed ahead with a new cohort of children.

As Keira Bell told the BBC: “Puberty does not happen in a vacuum. It is your brain sending signals to your body. I did not understand any of that. There are children who have already been down this pathway. Why are we not following them up?”

The High Court claimants are right. The Pathways trial is the institutional repetition of a mistake we already made. If the health service refuses to learn from the children it has already harmed, the courts may have to ensure it does not harm thousands more.

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By: Jo Bartosch

Published: Sep 3, 2025

We must stand up for freedom against radical activists and overbearing cops.

What accounts for the hold trans activists have on the police? Footage of Sir Mark Rowley gyrating in a thong stuffed with roubles? Photographs of senior constables sacrificing puppies to Baal? Whatever the kompromat is, it’s working.

On Monday, Graham Linehan  — comedy writer and campaigner — was treated like a war criminal arriving at the Hague. As he stepped off a long-haul flight into Heathrow, five armed officers were waiting. A police van ferried him across the tarmac and his belongings were seized. 

“They escorted me to a private area and told me I was under arrest for three tweets,” he wrote. 

“In a country where paedophiles escape sentencing, where knife crime is out of control, where women are assaulted and harassed every time they gather to speak, the state had mobilised five armed officers to arrest a comedy writer… (and no, I promise you, I am not making this up).”

Locked in a cell, his blood pressure spiked to stroke levels and he was taken to A&E. He has since been released on police bail. 

Linehan had flown in from the US to attend a separate hearing arising from a complaint by trans activist Sophia Brooks, who alleges he harassed him online and damaged his phone. That case is listed for Thursday.

On Substack, the writer set out the three posts on X said to be at issue. The most contentious, sent on 20 April, reads: “If a trans-identified male is in a female-only space, he is committing a violent, abusive act. Make a scene, call the cops and if all else fails, punch him in the balls.” In another, he captioned a picture of a trans march “a photo you can smell,” and, replying to a further post, wrote: “I hate them. Misogynists and homophobes. Fuck ’em.”

Trans activists duly crowed about his plight. Dr Helen Webberley — the internet’s best-known prescriber of cross-sex hormones — said, “Let this be a sage warning to all those who think it is OK to have views that are hateful towards trans people – your time is coming.” To emphasise the point, she added emojis of a clock, a police van and a coffin.

But one of the first to trumpet the arrest of what he called a “leading anti-transgender activist” was Stephanie Hayden — a man with a criminal record who is well known for prolific civil actions and complaints around online speech. Hayden has spent years pursuing gender-critical people through the courts.

Most memorably, when Kate Scottow referred to Hayden online as a “pig in a wig” she was arrested in front of her 10-year-old daughter and her 20-month-old son who was, at the time, still being breastfed. Scottow was taken to a police cell where she was held for seven hours before being put through an hour-long interview. She was convicted of improper use of a public communications network in February 2020 — though this was quashed in December the same year. 

Meanwhile, Linehan suspects that trans activist Lynsay Watson — a former Leicestershire constable sacked for gross misconduct over abusive, pseudonymous tweeting — was responsible for mass reports of his posts. 

A serial litigant, Watson has pursued actions against his former union and employers in cases dating back decades. In recent years he has begun to target gender critical people on social media. Watson took particular umbrage at the police scrutiny group Fair Cop, headed by Harry Miller. On X he sent around 1,200 messages to Miller, including some which accused him of being part of a “terrorist organisation,” a “right-wing bigot,” a “homophobic, transphobic bigot,” a “narcissist,” and an “evangelical wingnut.”

Courts have already warned forces off this terrain. In Miller’s own case, Humberside Police were found to have acted unlawfully in ways that chilled free expression. Yet here we are again: airport arrests over jokes, censorious bail conditions, and interviews about bollocks. The cultural capture is so deep that rank-and-file officers are clearly baffled by the politics, yet they keep turning the handle for the organ grinder.

A decade of Stonewall-style “training” has colonised public bodies so thoroughly that officers now repeat activist slogans as if they were law. When Linehan asked what “trans” meant, the police officer’s answer — “someone whose gender is different from what was assigned at birth” — could have been lifted straight from a trans lobby group’s website.

Once you train an organisation to believe dissent is “hate,” you create a system where one vexatious complaint can trigger a full-scale response. Better to send in five armed officers than to risk being called transphobic. In this climate, the law is no longer about justice, but about punishing dissent.

So parents in WhatsApp groups, lesbians who won’t sleep with men, and comedians who tell jokes are criminalised, while lobbyists demanding men in women’s prisons are feted as human-rights defenders. 

Linehan’s arrest matters not because he’s famous, but because it shows how activists can direct the police like a private militia. And his bail condition, not to use X isn’t a quirk, it’s a gag.

Do the police serve the public — or the furious vendettas of angry activists? Until chiefs stop outsourcing judgment to lobby groups, we’ll keep seeing blue lights for online blasphemy while victims can’t rely on timely help when they’re stalked, mugged or assaulted. The fix is simple: police crime, not opinion. Treat complainants — even the loud, litigious ones — with even-handed scepticism. Apply the criminal threshold rigorously. And remember: in a free country, causing offence is not a criminal offence.