This is a recording of a conversation I had on Times Radio on 3 March 2025 with Dr Louise Irvine, co-chair of the Clinical Advisory Network on Sex and Gender (CAN-SG). An AI transcript of the conversation can be found below.
NW: Let’s turn our attention to the new puberty blockers trial which is being proposed by the NHS. It hasn’t yet had ethical clearance but there are some people who think it’s profoundly unethical – it will harm children and not add anything to existing medical knowledge. A campaign launched by the psychotherapist James Esses aims to curb this trial completely. It’s going to give drugs to children and monitor them for two years, doing brain scans and tests to see how they fare. Speaking to Times Radio this afternoon, Helen Webberley, founder of Gender GP, defended the study.
HW: “Changes of puberty are irreversible, and actually if a cisgender child, so a child that’s not transgender, if they get to 14 and they haven’t started puberty yet, we as doctors start getting very worried about that, and transgender children are no different. We need them to be in puberty with their peers, with their friends, experiencing those body changes, the body development, doing that in line with everybody.”
NW: Well let’s speak now to Dr. Louise Irvine who’s a GP and co-chair of the Clinical Advisory Network on Sex and Gender. Dr. Irvine, good evening. I don’t know whether you heard Andrew Neil’s full half-hour interview with Helen Webberley earlier today but you heard that clip just now. What what would you say to her about puberty blockers?
LI: Thank you, Nick. Well, puberty is a vital and a crucial stage of normal human development and to interfere with that process and to freeze it and to actually prevent a child going through puberty and therefore becoming an adult with all the facilities… the faculties that an adult has, including fertility and sexual function, is absolutely unethical. It should never have been allowed to happen in the first place, and we, in our group CAN-SG, which is a group of over 100 clinicians who are concerned about the evidence for gender. healthcare and the ethics of it. We just think that is completely untenable and I’m very surprised that there’s a proposal to, as it were, restart the whole process.
NW: The money’s already been set aside, hasn’t it? £10.7m going to King’s College. Just explain to those of us who may not be into the details. How do puberty blockers actually work?
LI: Well, they affect the pituitary gland and therefore prevent the normal pubertal surge of sex hormones. So in boys you get a rise in testosterone which leads to the changes of puberty. which is the maturation of the sex organs and secondary sex characteristics, but also other changes in puberty, and at the same with girls, you get a surge in oestrogens, and that leads to the pubertal changes in girls. Now, it’s not just physical changes. There’s also changes and an impact of puberty on the adolescent. brain. It actually stimulates adolescent brain development and changes which move towards a more adult way of thinking and planning and making decisions. So this is the transition from childhood to adulthood is very important and this is partly driven by the pubertal hormones.
NW: But – Dr. Webberley said today that puberty blockers are completely reversible. All it does is give a gender questioning child, who may be in considerable distress, the opportunity just to decide what… to give them more time… time to think, in the title of Hannah Barnes’ book, time to think about whether or not they want to change gender or they want to go through with puberty as their birth sex.
LI: Well that’s absolutely untrue and that’s been shown by all the research that the blockers don’t give time to think. This was shown by first of all the early research, the Dutch trials.
NW: So Dr. Webberley, who is a transgender specialist, coming on to Times Radio and saying that they are completely reversible, is what… not telling the truth?
LI: She’s not telling the truth because the evidence shows that 98% of children who take puberty blockers go on to take cross-sex hormones. Puberty blockers are a first step in a pathway, a three-stage pathway. First of all, puberty blockers, then the opposite sex hormones, and then in many cases, surgery. They were always conceived of as part of a pathway right from the very beginning when the Dutch first pioneered it, and then again in England when the… did their research, early intervention studies. So all these children taking puberty blockers are going to go on to cross-sex hormones and considering puberty blockers in isolation tells you nothing about the real effects of puberty blockers on these children because…
NW: You’re going to have to explain that because that’s precisely what this survey, sorry, this study has been set up to do.
LI: Yes. So the study isn’t going to tell us anything that we don’t already know. Puberty blockers, for example, when they’re used in children with precocious puberty, that’s children who enter puberty because of an abnormality in the production of their hormones, they might enter puberty at the age of, say, 3, 4, 5, which is very distressing and not good for their health. Now, if they are given those puberty suppressing drugs for a period of time until they reach an age when they can then, those drugs are stopped, then they will carry on and go through a normal puberty. Now that’s certainly true. So you’re talking about an abnormal puberty being delayed so that a normal puberty can happen. So what puberty blockers that are used for children with gender dysphoria? dysphoria. They’re used differently. They’re used in a situation of normal development. Healthy children who take these puberty blockers as part of a pathway where at by the time they reach the age of 16 they then go on to take either if they’re girls they take testosterone, if they’re boys they take oestrogens and this is an almost inevitable pathway with 98% of children who went on puberty.
NW: I see what you’re saying, but are you saying therefore, and forgive me we’re running out of time, are you saying therefore that there are no circumstances where puberty blockers are appropriate for children even if those children are acutely distressed about the gender that they’re in?
LI: No, because there’s no evidence from the research. has been done that puberty blockers in any way relieve distress. The research that was done, the early intervention study in England, did not show any psychological or well-being benefits from having been on puberty blockers. That was similar to the other research that’s been done. There’s been some research done recently in America showing similar. So we know already. just taking puberty blockers isn’t beneficial for mental health or well-being.
NW; So this is a £10 million waste of money? What do you think it will… are you saying that you think it will cause harm to the children involved in the study?
LI: Absolutely, terrible harm. We’re actually restarting using children as guinea pigs for no reason, there’s no good reason, there’s no rationale for using them. For stopping puberty. There’s no rationale for it being a treatment for any kind of distress. There’s no evidence of benefit. There’s a lot of evidence of risk. There’s risk to bone development, to sexual development, to fertility, to long term cardiovascular risk, metabolic risk. There are big risks and minuscule of any kind of benefit. So the risk-benefit analysis is not in favour of actually subjecting children… These drugs are going to put them on a pathway to lifelong, irreversible and profound changes. We already know that. There’s no point in spending £11 million looking at it again. That money would be better spent on doing things like looking at the data linkage to the 9,000 children that already went to the gender identity service? What happened to them? Let’s follow them up. Let’s see what their outcomes were. What helped them? What didn’t help them? Now the adult clinics have refused to collaborate in that data linkage study. They have refused to help us to learn what happened to all those 9,000 children. Until we know what happened already, it’s completely… It’s completely immoral to even consider doing further research.
NW: OK. Dr Louise Irvine, thank you very much indeed. Dr Irvine is the co-chair of the Clinical Advisory Network on Sex and Gender.
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