#josephine bartosch

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Barely a year after puberty blockers were withdrawn from routine NHS use, ministers have authorised a trial that will give them to children as young as 10.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.