More than 200 children will receive dangerous puberty blockers for new UK study
An NHS-backed trial will administer puberty blockers to children as young as 10 despite serious harms and is facing legal action from a prominent detransitioner.
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at the Springfields Medical Centre in the centre of Warrington,
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Mon Nov 24, 2025 - 2:19 pm EST
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(LifeSiteNews) — Over 200 children in the United Kingdom will be injected with puberty blockers as part of an experiment on the effects of “gender transitioning.”
In November, King’s College London announced the Pathways Trial, which will track 226 gender-confused children as they take puberty blockers that are known to damage fertility, bone density, and brain development.
“Right now, there isn’t enough information about the possible benefits or risks that young people with gender incongruence may experience when taking puberty suppressing hormones,” a press release reads. “PATHWAYS TRIAL aims to help fill this gap in the evidence about what we know.”
READ: HHS study confirms dangers of transgender drugs, surgeries for minors
The trial, formally the Puberty Suppression and Transitional Healthcare with Adaptive Youth Services core trial, will administer puberty blockers to 226 children, from ages 10 to 15 years old, recruited over three years from the NHS.
The children will be divided into two groups and receive the drugs 12 months apart. After being given the drugs, the children will receive ongoing therapy, family counseling, and monitoring for two years.
Researchers claimed that the study has been “carefully checked by independent scientists” and is “overseen by two groups of people who are independent from the research team and the funders.”
Prominent detransitioner and outspoken activist Keira Bell condemned the experiment as a “betrayal of the children it claims to help” in a recent op-ed article published by The Telegraph.
“It will undoubtedly lead to infertility and lack of sexual function, to name only a couple,” she warned. “A child cannot fully understand these effects, let alone those that are unknown.”
On November 14, Bell, along with British psychotherapist James Esses, launched pre-action, demanding disclosure of trial documents. If the documents are not released, the pair promised to demand a judicial review.
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The research, approved and funded by the NHS, comes after puberty blockers were banned last year after a major review exposed the practice as dangerous and medically baseless.
The Cass Review is the world’s largest review into transgender interventions for minors. Dr. Hilary Cass, the pediatrician commissioned by the NHS to review the transgender “services” being made available to gender-confused minors, was scathing in her analysis.
Cass found that “gender medicine” is “built on shaky foundations” and that while these drastic interventions should be approached with extreme caution, “quite the reverse happened in the field of [so-called] gender care for children.”
LifeSiteNews has compiled a list of medical professions and experts who warn against “transgender” surgeries, warning of irreversible changes and lifelong side effects.
Moreover, internal documents from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) have shown that doctors who offer so-called “gender-affirming care” know that transgender hormones cause serious diseases, including cancer, but have prescribed them anyway.
The internal documents, dubbed the “WPATH FILES,” include emails and messages from a private discussion forum by doctors, as well as statements from a video call of WPATH members. The files reveal that the doctors working for WPATH know that so-called “gender-affirming care” can cause severe mental and physical disease and that it is impossible for minors to give “informed consent” to it.
As LifeSiteNews has previously noted, research does not support the assertions from transgender activists that surgical or pharmaceutical intervention to “affirm” confusion is “necessary medical care” or that it is helpful in preventing the suicides of gender-confused individuals.
In fact, in addition to asserting a false reality that one’s sex can be changed, transgender surgeries and drugs have been linked to permanent physical and psychological damage, including cardiovascular diseases, loss of bone density, cancer, strokes and blood clots, infertility, and suicidality.
There is also overwhelming evidence that those who undergo “gender transitioning” are more likely to commit suicide than those who are not given irreversible surgery. A Swedish study found that those who underwent “gender reassignment” surgery ended up with a 19.2 times greater risk of suicide.
Indeed, the most loving and helpful approach to people who think they are a different sex is not to validate them in their confusion but to show them the truth.
A study on the side effects of transgender “sex change” surgeries discovered that 81 percent of those who had undergone “sex change” surgeries in the past five years reported experiencing pain simply from normal movement in the weeks and months that followed – and that many other side effects manifest as well.
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- 'gender transitioning' children
- Britain
- detransitioners
- Gender
- Lgbt
- National Health Service
- Nhs
- Puberty Blockers
- Transgender
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