Scottish Union for Education – Newsletter No112
Themes: the crisis of culture, and why giving puberty blockers to children is both irrational and immoral
Billboard Chris (Chris Elston)
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Billboard Chris, the Canadian ‘anti-trans’ – more accurately anti–transgender ideology – campaigner is now in Australia after being silenced by their ‘eSafety’ commissioner.
Below, Dr Jenny Cunningham notes that the prevention of children taking puberty blockers is being undermined by the clinical trials being set up in the UK. Rather than banning this unethical practice, it seems that pumping kids (kids as young as 12) with these drugs is likely to continue under the auspices of ‘clinical trials’.
But, as Chris Elston summarises well, in only six words, the very idea of children consenting to these life-changing drugs is simply wrong – and indeed, immoral.
……
In a recent discussion I had about the BBC, I was surprised to find the idea of BBC neutrality being presented to me as a potential problem. The point being made was that the BBC has to be neutral, and so even on issues where ninety percent of opinion is on one side, the BBC would still give time to the ten percent argument.
I must admit, this is not my experience of the BBC, and even where this is sometimes true, there is a clear bias at the BBC.
Take, for example, the discussion about Norwood Primary School cancelling its Easter celebration so that it could supposedly be a more ‘inclusive’ school. For some, this is an outrage and an attack on Christianity, or at least a reflection of political correctness taking over another school. For others, it is simply part of being a school in a multicultural society.
The BBC online ran two articles on this issue, both starting from the perspective that there is really nothing to see here – a ‘storm in a teacup’ – another largely made-up story about the ‘woke’ takeover of education.
Easter, we are told here, will still be celebrated; indeed, the BBC even managed to find the local bishop, who said the school was ‘deeply valued’ in the community. So, clearly, according to the BBC, there is nothing to see here. Ironically, if the BBC had any critical capacity at all they might realise that a Bishop shrugging her shoulders at the diluting of Christian teachings or education in a school proves the very point that critics are making about the collapse of culture and tradition in the UK.
Whatever one makes of the school’s claim to still be celebrating Easter, it did cancel its Easter service and Easter bonnet parade, and it did so in large part through arguments about ‘diversity’ and ‘inclusion’.
For some critics, this reflects the assault on the majority culture, and the question is raised about what inclusivity means. After all, if Britain or Scotland stands for nothing, or have no traditions or beliefs of any significance, what is it that people who come to our country are being included in? Even if we recognise that different children have different religions, or none, is there no worth in the stories and morals associated with Christianity, and also with the traditional activities of schoolchildren that go back generations?
For the French political scientist Oliver Roy, what we are witnessing in the Western world at the moment is the ‘deculturation’ of society. Unlike past periods of history, that saw one culture challenged by another, he argues that today what we are seeing is different, not one culture replacing another but the destruction of culture itself. In a sense he is describing a post-modern nightmare where everything (every norm) is deconstructed by academics, professionals and ‘experts’ but nothing is put in its place – or at least nothing of depth or substance.
I must admit that all the talk of diversity and inclusion, to me at least, feels more like the emptying out of meaning and culture from society than anything more positive or creative.
Whatever your take on what schools should and should not celebrate, for many this change is a reflection of the denigration of British traditions. With regard to the BBC, it is quite clear what side of this discussion they sit.
It would be interesting to hear from readers about what role religion and religious traditions and services should play in schools today. So, get in touch if you would like to share your views: info@sue.scot
A key way that the news is manipulated is in the decision about what is and what is not a news story. For example, last week a report was published showing that the UK ranks sixty-fourth in the global academic freedom ranking. There has been a dramatic fall in the space of 10 years in our academic freedom ranking, so much so that we now rank in between Albania and Niger. Is this not a news story?
If freedom and academic freedom were top priorities for society, which I would suggest they should be, it is likely that this story would have hit the headlines. But if you google this issue there is, as the BBC might say, nothing to see here!
Another area where there is far too little public discussion is around what some describe as Britain’s mental health epidemic. Part of the problem, Mark Howarth notes, is that the huge number of children being labelled as having additional support needs (ASN) has meant that the brightest children in Scotland are now receiving less education than previously.
SUE has discussed this issue before, and you can read Julie Sandilands’ brilliant analysis of the problem here. If there are parents out there who have concerns about this, please get in touch.
In the space of less than 20 years, Howarth notes, the number of ASN children in Scotland has risen from one percent to 40 percent! Some blame Covid, but this trend has been developing for many years and has done so with almost no serious debate about why this is happening and what are the potentially devastating consequences of labelling so many children in this way.
A key part of this development relates to mental health labels and is something that has been examined within the social sciences since the 1960s. Back then, the American Philip Rieff wrote a book called The Triumph of the Therapeutic. In it, he argued that the moral code associated with Christianity was being replaced by a new ethic of the individual and their personal fulfilment. As a result, social meaning and beliefs were being replaced by an inward turn to the self, something that was increasingly being encouraged and managed by therapeutic professionals.
By 1999, another American, James Nolan, wrote The Therapeutic State, where he argued that every institution in America now legitimised itself by relating not to a wider set of principles or ideas but to the feelings, the emotions of the individual. By 2003, Frank Furedi, based in the UK, argued that our Therapy Culture was now the dominant way that modern society understood both the individual and society. He predicted that the labelling of both adults and children with mental health disorders was likely to flourish.
There is a lot to think about in these books, and with the passing of time it is getting harder and harder to suggest that there is nothing to see here. The difficulty we have is that for far too many of the people in authority, the big questions – of what is good and bad and right and wrong, of what is moral – are simply ignored.
Rather than having a full-on discussion about our culture and about what values we should socialise our children into, the evasive talk is all about ‘diversity’ or the celebration of ‘multi’ cultures. As a result, far too many children are now left with little adult direction and have come to rely on therapists and therapeutic educators who diagnose their adolescent confusions and difficulties through ever more mental health labels.
Stuart Waiton, SUE Chair
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Puberty blockers trial: unethical and injurious
Dr Jenny Cunningham is a retired paediatrician who worked in Glasgow for 30 years.
Many, probably most, children and teenagers in Scotland will have been exposed to transgender ideology in school, through Relationships, Sexual Health and Parenthood (RSHP) education in the classroom and government-sanctioned LGBT Youth Scotland groups inside and outside schools.
The fantasy that you can have an inner gender identity different to your sex has led some children and adolescents to socially transition in schools to the gender of the opposite sex – again under the Scottish government’s guidance on supporting ‘transgender’ pupils, and sometimes without their parents’ knowledge.
Large numbers of minors, predominantly teenaged girls, have been referred to the national gender identity service for children and adolescents, at the Sandyford Clinic in Glasgow, since around 2014. There, many of them have been medically transitioned, i.e. given puberty blockers to suppress puberty, followed by cross-sex feminising or masculinising hormones.
So, many Scottish parents, particularly those with vulnerable children or teenagers, who have been particularly susceptible to transgender ideology, will have been relieved when last year NHS Scotland (following NHS England’s lead) banned the use of puberty blockers in under-18-year olds on safety grounds. NHS Scotland went further and stopped the prescription of cross-sex hormones for those under 18. Children and adolescents with significant mental health conditions, with autism, with experience of trauma and abuse, or those in care appeared to have been given protection from harmful medical gender transitioning.
Unfortunately, relief has been short-lived, with the announcement of a new clinical research trial of puberty blockers, in which children and young teenagers in both the UK and Scotland will be given puberty blockers and monitored to see whether these have any beneficial impact on their gender ‘incongruence’ or distress, or adverse effects on their cognitive functioning and brain structure.
The National Institute for Health and Care Research has awarded almost £11 million (funded by the NHS in England) to a research team at Kings College London for this national research collaboration: the Pathways trial.[1]
Dr Hilary Cass, in her influential review, recommended that puberty blockers should be prescribed only as part of a clinical research trial, arguing that treatment offered to distressed minors should be tested by the normal, rigorous standards of medical science.[2] Currently, Cass argues that there is a highly polarised debate about the Pathways trial, with ‘some people’ (in other words, transgender activist and politicians or professionals steeped in transgender ideology) arguing that it is wrong and ‘coercive’ that minors who want puberty blockers can only get them by joining the trial. They should be freely available, they argue.
On the other side of the debate, we find that:
Some people who say that, after years, you haven’t shown any benefit of these drugs, and you’ve shown possible harm – so, it’s not even ethical to consider a clinical trial, [it] should just be stopped. And so, with these two views being so extreme, I think that demonstrates that we do need a trial.[3]
This, unfortunately, is where Cass gets it wrong, because it is extraordinarily misconstrued, or naive, to suggest that these two opposing views are of equivalent moral and clinical weight.
Transgender activists and their acolytes will never be satisfied with any amount of evidence. Their advocacy for puberty blockers is not based on medical benefits or harms but on an irrational belief that people have an intrinsic gender identity that can be in opposition to their sex. For them, the sooner youngsters can access puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, the sooner they can approximate the appearance of the opposite sex (their ‘true’ gender identity). This is not just an article of faith for transgender activists. Persuading minors to undergo gender transition is integral to the vindication of transgender ideology and the goal of achieving validation of the transgender persona in law.
The Pathways trial proposal adopts the transgender terminology: ‘Gender incongruence is when a person feels their gender identity differs from the sex they were given at birth’ – iterating the absurd idea that a baby’s sex is arbitrarily assigned. From this perspective, ‘Some people with gender incongruence want their bodies to be more like their gender identity’ – thus they endorse the validity of medical gender transitioning.
Pathways will study whether using puberty blockers affects a trial participant’s learning ability and brain development, as measured by cognitive testing and brain scans, respectively. However, putting children and teenagers into a trial that might damage their brains strikes critics of the trial as shocking.
Known risks and absence of benefits
Dr David Bell, a retired consultant psychiatrist, was one of the whistleblowers who exposed the cavalier use of puberty blockers by clinicians at England’s Tavistock Gender Identity Development Service. He argues that existing clinical studies raise serious concerns about the safety and effectiveness of puberty blockers, ‘including negative impacts on bone density, cognitive development, and future sexual function’.[4]
Transgender Trend points out that the Tavistock carried out its own Early Intervention Study of puberty blockers, from 2011 to 2014 (but reported on it only in 2021). This showed no improvement in minors’ gender distress or mental health following treatment. What it did confirm was that the vast majority of children and teenagers put on puberty blockers progressed to treatment with cross-sex hormones.[5]
The combination of puberty suppression and cross-sex hormones results in lifelong medical dependency, risk of serious health conditions, infertility and impaired sexual function. And this is the point: puberty blockers are not a standalone treatment but the first stage of this high-stakes process. As Transgender Trend puts it, in the case of puberty blockers ‘the treatment IS the harm’. David Bell sums up the issue for opponents of the Pathways trial:
To be clear, the prescription of puberty blockers in the context of a trial would, in effect, introduce a known risk of systemic harm to a physically healthy child. To put it mildly, this is a divergence from normal clinical trial practice.
What is the rationale for suppressing puberty?
Indoctrinated minors come to believe that halting puberty is essential for their desired gender transition. The physical changes in puberty that establish our secondary sexual characteristics start from 9–11 years in girls – breast development, pubic hair, menstruation; and development of the reproductive organs and genitalia is completed by around 15 years. Puberty in boys begins around 11 years – pubic hair, voice changes (breaks), muscle enlargement, increased height; facial hair appears around 15 years. From the perspective of gender transitioning, the purpose of halting puberty is to minimise development of these changes, thereby reducing the need for radical surgical realignment; use of cross-sex hormones thereafter makes it easier to ‘pass’ as the opposite sex. In other words, puberty suppression has a cosmetic role – desirable perhaps, but at enormous cost.
But puberty is a vital part of human development: it involves the cognitive, emotional and social maturation of adolescence. It facilitates the exploration of identity beyond just one’s sexual identity – the consolidation of a multifaceted identity, including one’s personality, interests, aspirations and peer relationships. Like other aspects of our identity, sexuality and conforming or non-conforming gender roles fluctuate as adolescents and young adults gain more life experiences. Suppressing puberty locks children and early teenagers into a narrow gender-focused identity and interrupts the natural arc of adolescent development in progressing towards adulthood.
Which children or teenagers will be selected for the trial?
It is well established that in around 80 per cent of post-pubertal adolescents, gender incongruence or distress will resolve – they will ‘desist’, becoming reconciled with their bodies and sexuality. Hilary Cass believes that a small group of minors might benefit from gender identity treatment – but this is speculative, and she acknowledges that it is not possible to predict which, if any, adolescents will persist in their gender incongruity. It is appalling to think that children or teenagers, who are likely to desist, could be treated with puberty blockers in this trial. Critics of the trial fear that because of very long waiting lists for paediatric gender identity services, and the number of clinicians still under the sway of transgender ideology, there will be pressures to refer children or early teenagers to the trial. The concern is that the desire to access puberty blockers could dissuade those on waiting lists from engaging with psychological assessment and support.
This trial cannot resolve questions about long-term outcomes
Each trial participant will be followed up for 2 years. However, it is long-term outcomes that are lacking. Tavistock published the results of its Early Intervention Study in 2021, 10 years after it began, but these adolescents were lost to follow-up once they transferred to adult gender identity clinic at 18 years.
Alternative, safer avenues for research
The most glaring problem found by Cass in her critique of the Tavistock practices was the lack of follow-up of the children and teenagers they treated. Around 9000 minors were treated through the NHS gender services in England and Wales, including an estimated 2000 who were prescribed puberty blockers. Cass had proposed a data-linkage research study using data from the adult gender identity clinics to assess the outcome for all these cases. All but one of these clinics refused to hand over the required data – and the opportunity for the data-linkage research was lost once the Cass Review closed in April 2024. But this is exactly the safer and more ethical research programme required to provide long-time outcome evidence that the Pathways trial will singularly fail to do. A similar data-linkage study could follow-up those minors treated by the Sandyford Clinic and transferred to the four adult gender identity clinics in Scotland. This could provide invaluable outcome information.
Detransitioners
It is well known that a number of those treated with puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and in many cases surgical realignment have, after an average of 5–10 years, experienced regret about transitioning – and some have detransitioned. The rate of detransitioning and numbers involved are not known with any precision. These adolescents and young adults are justifiably reluctant to re-engage with NHS services, but there is an independent specialist support service for detransitioners provided by Genspect: the Beyond Trans project. Genspect is gathering data on the outcomes for these detransitioners. Carrie Clark, Genspect UK director, says: ‘Above all, puberty blockers prevented [NHS] service users from addressing the real causes of their distress, with the focus on gender often overshadowing other issues’. Needless to say, no Beyond Trans service users were invited to help shape the design of the Pathways trial.[6]
References
1. The Cass Review: Independent review of gender identity services for children and young people: Final report, April 2024. https://cass.independent-review.uk/home/publications/final-report/
2. National Institute for Health and Care Research. Research Award, Pathways: Puberty Suppression and Transitional Healthcare with Adaptive Youth Services. https://fundingawards.nihr.ac.uk/award/NIHR167530
3. Lane B. ‘Trial and Tribulation’, report on bilingual webinar for Chilean and Spanish speakers. 8 January 2025.
4. Bell D. The Telegraph. 6 March 2025. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/03/06/why-im-sounding-the-alarm-on-the-next-trans-scandal
5. Transgender Trend. Was a puberty blocker trial ever ethical? 4 March 2025. https://www.transgendertrend.com/puberty-blockers-trial-ethical
6. Clark C. Detransitioners deserve to be heard. Academy of Ideas.
News round-up
A selection of the main stories with relevance to Scottish education in the press in recent weeks, by Simon Knight.
https://archive.is/wTgGW Gerrett Stell and James McEnaney, Bad schooling experience linked to increased chance of prison. 02/04/25
https://thecritic.co.uk/the-stupidification-of-scottish-schools/ Malcolm Clark, The stupidification of Scottish schools. Scottish education is being dumbed down in the name of diversity. 02/04/25
Andrew Doyle, Why the establishment loves ‘Adolescence’. The new Netflix drama is being used as a tool to promote ideology. 03/04/25
https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/04/03/the-assault-on-shakespeare-impoverishes-the-world/?utm_source=Today+on+spiked&utm_campaign=278cf9ed8a-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2025_04_03_04_23&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_-278cf9ed8a-99442038 Cory Franklin, The assault on Shakespeare impoverishes the world. The campaign to turn the Bard into a symbol of racism is reactionary and stupid. 03/04/25
https://archive.is/wovwN Andrew Learmonth, Watchdog pressed to review transgender prisoner policy. 04/04/25
https://archive.is/PY2cF James McEnaney, Concerns that SQA history marking has been compromised. 04/04/25
https://www.thetimes.com/article/ddfbeb9c-4d83-4d1c-a8a1-b59e4cfb2074?shareToken=8bbd06baf1d6f7e30a79ee7885546b73 Chris Smyth, More than 500,000 young people have never worked. Most of the almost one million people aged between 16 and 24 who are not in education, employment or training are not looking for a job, often blaming ill-health. 03/04/25
https://archive.is/KCjFi Steerpike, Starmer’s skills adviser founded failing school. 04/04/25
https://magazine.newstatesman.com/2025/04/02/what-is-school-for/content.html Pippa Bailey, What is school for?
The struggle for control of the national curriculum is a fight for the soul of English education. 02/04/25
Maia Poet, NEW Toolkit: Out of the Gender Maze. A former ‘trans’ kid’s essential guide for parents. 05/04/25
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