Our employer dismissed our complaints. HR told us to “broaden our mindset”. But the policy was putting female staff at risk. A man just had to say, “I identify as a woman” and that was it, he was allowed in. 

I’m not saying anything about this particular person – I never alleged he was a predator. I’m just saying sex is a biological fact. One nurse had a panic attack before her shift because she had been abused as a child and this transgender colleague asked her repeatedly when she was planning to get changed. Some women began wearing clothing underneath their uniforms to avoid being undressed in front of him. We were all looking over our shoulders in case he walked in.

Someone put up a poster on the changing room door stating it was an “inclusive” space, and women who had complained were moved to a tiny office with no lockers. We had to put our belongings on the floor, which is a risk for both security and infection control risk. The room opened onto a busy corridor so anyone could look in. And anyway, it was subject to the same rule: if a man who identified as a woman wanted to use it, he could.

Eight of us filed a claim with an employment tribunal against the hospital trust, because one group’s rights shouldn’t trample on other people’s rights. It was our view that we were being discriminated against on the basis of sex, but also that we had suffered harassment and that we had been treated very badly. I’m not saying that trans people should be ostracised and forced to change in a tiny cupboard like we were. Everyone should have facilities where they can get changed with dignity.

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Then we were moving into a new building, and I realised that all of the toilets and showers were going to be gender-neutral. I kicked up a fuss, and managed to get them to keep some single-sex facilities. But the ones closest to the entrance, which are used the most, remained gender-neutral. To get to the women’s toilets and showers you had to go upstairs and walk down a long corridor. That’s not good: sometimes when you get back from being in the ambulance you’re covered in blood and you need to get straight into the shower. 

So I wrote a report explaining the law on single-sex spaces, and included accounts from colleagues from other stations who had similar issues. I sent it to the safeguarding and HR departments, but I was just laughed at. One day, at the start of my shift I was pulled into an office and shown Facebook posts that some colleagues had spent months collecting. None of them were written by me – they were newspaper articles, petitions and the odd meme that I had shared. 

My badge was taken off me and I was frogmarched out of the building. They even made a list of people who had interacted positively with the posts. One of them – she was pregnant at the time – got suspended too.

I was supposed to come back from my suspension and be under a 12-month “warning” period. I was told that to return to work I had to write a letter of explanation to colleagues “affected by the posts” and attend a course on equality to learn to “be better”. But I lodged an employment tribunal application, and before it could even get under way, the trust retracted everything and gave me a full apology. I’m really happy that I don’t have to hide my opinions anymore.

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I and the other women in the group were told by staff that the charity’s “identity-based peer support groups are where people can come together with people who share similar lived experience… if you identify as a woman or feel comfortable in this space you are welcome in the women’s group.” There were women in my group who were terrified by this, so we decided to complain. All we were asking for was one hour a week.

We sent a letter to head office outlining the law and explaining why a women-only group was so important to us. We said most of us had suffered abuse and violence from men, and a women-only space allowed us to feel safe and supported. Two months later, it finally responded. It said: “This is how we intend to run the men’s and women’s groups in future – not as groups for men or women, but as groups devoted to the discussion of men’s and women’s mental health issues which are open to anyone who wishes to discuss or learn about those topics.” Everything we said was completely dismissed.

Since then I’ve been suspended as a volunteer. I was told that there were multiple complaints about me and that I mustn’t go anywhere near the charity’s office for the “safety of the complainants”. I’ve been told I’m being investigated, but not what the complaints were about. In the meantime we can’t meet for support. My mental health is suffering, as is that of the group members. We have no idea what is going to happen next. But we aren’t going to give up.

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They launched an investigation into my behaviour, including claims I had committed gross misconduct during my duties. The whole thing was dragged out for so long that it became clear to me that it was part of my punishment. I decided to launch a claim in the employment tribunal because I felt that having to share the female-only changing room was a kind of sexual harassment, but I also that the way I was treated by my employer was not right. The tribunal was very difficult, and it showed just how ideologically captured my employer is; some of their representatives claimed that it’s impossible to know who is a woman and who is a man. How can someone working in healthcare make a claim like that?

My union did nothing to help me. I got called all kinds of nasty names, like bigot and transphobe. I lost a lot of friends. But the judge ultimately ruled that my employer had indeed harassed me. And I feel vindicated by the Supreme Court ruling: it shows I was completely in the right to claim that female changing rooms are for women only. 

I loved my job and I miss it. I had been a nurse for 30 years. I’m not a campaigner, and I never knew this was an issue until a man started using my changing room. I’m glad the judge agreed that I had been harassed, but I don’t think the judgment went far enough so I’m going to keep fighting. This mistreatment of women ends here.

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These debates are the chance to discuss an issue. A government minister is present to hear and respond to the debate and there is a vote at the end, but there is no decision to be made. 

Read a full transcript of the debate or watch it on parliamentlive.tv.

Opening comments

The debate was opened by the chair of the parliamentary petitions committee, Jamie Stone MP. He said: 

“The petition raises two main areas of concern: the possible long-term medical side effects of puberty blockers, and whether meaningful consent can ever be obtained from a child or adolescent.”

Despite this, he sought to balance the horror of healthcare disasters like that experienced by Keira Bell by citing another transitioner whose experience with puberty blockers, he said, was “profoundly positive” and who had “experienced no negative health outcomes”. He said that: 

“For her, being forced to undergo male puberty would have been the greater trauma. She is one of many who report that their lives have been significantly improved by timely support.”

Four MPs intervened during the opening speech, two Labour and two Conservative, all with pithy points for the petition. Tonia Antoniazzi pointed out that the survey being used in the “Pathways” trial asks questions like: “Have your parent(s) treated you fairly?”. She wondered how her son aged 11 would have answered that. Since any child at that age would probably say No, she felt the questions were not fit for purpose. 

Graham Stringer challenged Stone’s framing of the issues as complex, saying: 

“It is actually quite simple: we should not be experimenting on children, particularly as we cannot do double-blind experiments. Those are two fundamental reasons why these so-called experiments should not go ahead.” 

Stuart Anderson said that his own children constantly changed their minds about things, and that he could see no justification for experimenting on children: 

“What might be a short-term solution could become a permanent solution that people often grow to regret.” 

Sir Julian Lewis asked about the data from all those children previously treated at the Tavistock’s Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS), saying surely no more children should be treated with these drugs until that data had been explored. 

Twelve MPs spoke for the petition

Speeches from backbenchers were limited to two minutes each. This meant there really could be no debate, because speakers short of time refused to give way to interventions. Twelve spoke for the petition, against the trial going ahead, and six spoke against the petition and for the trial. 

For the petition, David Smith said that in the “Pathways” trial: 

“Parents are being asked to consent to a potentially life-altering intervention to their children in the absence of a life-threatening condition, based on an unreliable diagnosis with an unknown trajectory.”

Rebecca Paul pointed out the flaws in the ethical committee process that had signed off the trial. Rosie Duffield spoke about the punishment meted out to whistleblowers who had expressed concern about the use of puberty blockers at GIDS over many years. 

Jonathan Hinder said: 

“Children of primary-school age cannot possibly give consent to these life-changing decisions. When they become adults, many of them will look back on what was done to them and ask, ‘How did this happen to me? How did the Government do this to me?’” 

Carla Lockhart, who said she had met Keira Bell, pointed out that minors are not allowed to drive, get married, buy alcohol or own a gun, and that for most puberty would naturally resolve gender dysphoria. Iqbal Mohamed quoted the statistics on this, saying: 

“They mean that the government are choosing to prioritise the interests of between five and 90 of the 226 children involved in the clinical trial at the expense of deliberately harming between 135 and 203 children, who will eventually come to terms with their birth sex.”

Joy Morrisey said the diagnosis is subjective, based on how the child feels, asking: 

“Can the long-term risk of medical intervention be justified by such a vague diagnosis?” 

Sarah Pochin said: 

“Last week, I hosted a roundtable about the indoctrination of our children in schools on this very subject, and I heard horrific stories from isolated parents whose children were lost to them because of brainwashing and the fantasy world they had been taught about at school.”

Jim Allister pointed out how the feelings of adolescents fluctuate, making them among the most vulnerable and in need of protection. 

Rebecca Smith drew on her experience as a “corporate parent” to flag the over-representation of looked-after children (those in the care of a local authority, living with foster parents or in residential homes) in the GIDS patient group, and pointed out that most of the girls were lesbians.

Gregory Stafford said: 

“When the evidence is weak, the risks are real and the patients are children, pressing ahead is not leadership, but recklessness.”

Six spoke against the petition and for the trial

The main defence of the trial was that Dr Cass had recommended one, with three MPs suggesting that pausing the trial was a political move, not justified by the evidence. They pointed out that this trial had gained ethical approval and that no new clinical information has emerged since the Cass Review. 

Carla Denyer and Dr Scott Arthur talked about meeting trans-identifying constituents or their parents, who expressed their regret that puberty blockers had not been available. Others talked cheerfully about “trans people”, with no acknowledgement of concerns about what “trans” means, how it might be determined in a child, or the historical evidence of desistance among most children claiming to be trans. 

Alex Sobel quoted a constituent who had told him: “To be a true ally you must support all trans people and their needs, not just adults.” He said that politicians should not meddle in medical decisions, then cited the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) as “international best practice” and asked the minister for health “to meet advocacy groups such as TransActual”.

Two of these MPS said it was important to “do no harm” – and that making children wait for puberty blockers was harmful. To gasps of astonishment from the public gallery, Rachel Taylor, arguing that the trial must go ahead, said: 

“We cannot afford to sacrifice the future of vulnerable young people on the altar of ideology.” 

Heated exchanges about hounding and death threats 

Tonia Antoniazzi intervened while Emily Darlington was speaking to defend Professor Jacob George of the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), whose input led to the trial being paused, saying he was a decent man who was being hounded. Darlington retorted: “A leader of a political party shouted ‘Traitor’ at me when I said we should watch our language around this issue.” She went on to say: 

“The honourable member for Canterbury (Rosie Duffield) has said she has received death threats; I get death threats too. This is not unique to the honourable member.”

Other MPs’ reactions to this indicated that they found it improbable that those opposing puberty blockers are issuing death threats.

Health spokespeople responded

The final three speakers were Helen Morgan, the Liberal Democrat spokesperson for health, followed by the shadow minister for health, Dr Caroline Johnson, who is a paediatrician, and finally Karin Smyth, minister of state for health (secondary care), to respond to all the points made. They all had more time to speak. 

The LibDem position was somewhere in the middle. Helen Morgan welcomed the pause to address the MHRA’s concerns but said the evidence was needed. She said that “treatment should first be based on talking therapies” and that waiting times are a concern: 

“All trans and non-binary people should be able to access the high-quality healthcare they deserve.” 

Dr Caroline Johnson for the Conservatives was less equivocal. She said: 

“To suggest persistent incongruence with gender stereotypes is wrong could undo years or decades of rolling back gender norms. If it is not causing the person any distress, why would we want to treat it, especially when we know that most children, even those with gender dysphoria who do have distress, will get better without any puberty blockers?”

She asked why there was a rush to do the trial rather than waiting for the data-linkage study, then had another pertinent question:

“What is the point of the treatment? It has been suggested that it helps transgender adults pass more easily as the opposite sex and potentially avoids surgical operations in adulthood, but how on earth can it be ethically, morally or medically right to treat a large group of children with risky medication to give cosmetic benefits to a much smaller number of adults?” 

She pointed out that this was not like prescribing potentially harmful drugs such as when chemotherapy being given to save a child’s life. Puberty blockers are to pause “a perfectly normal physiological process in a physically healthy child”, and she recapped on the known health risks such as bone density, cognitive development, fertility and sexual function, which others had mentioned earlier. She asked whether prescriptions of puberty-blocker alternatives had gone up since the ban (Karin Smyth said she would give an answer to this). She concluded: 

“I hope we can all agree that we do not need a clinical trial to know that helping a child to be at peace with themselves and their body is infinitely preferable to a lifetime of harmful medical intervention.”

Finally Karin Smyth, the minister for secondary care, talked through the background to the proposed trial and the Cass Review’s recommendations. She said that important final steps were being taken to enable the data-linkage study to begin and that the study analysis was expected to take around a year to complete. 

She pointed out the harms being done by private prescribers of puberty-blocking medication. She responded to the concerns about waiting times by saying that three new gender clinics have been opened since April 2024, when the Cass Review was published, and a fourth is about to open, all operating a model different from that of the now-closed GIDS clinic. 

She defended the planned clinical trial as “a key step that we are taking to build an evidence base to prove whether puberty blockers are safe and effective in treating gender incongruence and gender dysphoria”, but said nothing about the reasons for the pause or the next steps.

The ayes have it

At the end of the debate the chair asked for all those in favour (of the petition) to say “aye” and those against “no”. He then declared that “the ayes have it”, meaning that the majority of MPs in the room supported the petition to cancel the trial. 

What now?

That is the end of the process for the petition. But opposition to the puberty-blocker trial will continue. The legal challenge brought by James Esses and Keira Bell has been “stayed” – that is, paused – until the discussions between the MHRA and the trial’s sponsor, King’s College London, have concluded. It seems inevitable that the legal challenge will then resume, or a new legal case will be brought to oppose the new trial arrangements. 

Top right: Sex Matters director of campaigns Fiona McAnena with James Esses before the debate

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A petition attracted nearly 150,000 signatures, securing a Westminster Hall debate, which is scheduled for 23rd March. On 10th March dozens of MPs heard about their constituents’ concerns in a lobby day organised by Women’s Rights Network, LGB Alliance and Sex Matters (pictured above). 

On 6th February detransitioner Keira Bell and therapist James Esses had applied for a judicial review. And on 20th February news broke that recruitment to the trial had been paused to give the research team at King’s College London time to respond to questions about serious physical risks to participants belatedly raised by the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA).

The latest development is another regulatory surprise: an immediate pause and proposed ban on NHS prescriptions of cross-sex hormones to under-18s announced on 9th March. At the moment, clinicians can prescribe cross-sex hormones from the age of 16. A 90-day public consultation is under way, due to close on 7th June. 

The announcement was accompanied by the publication of systematic reviews of the evidence for using combinations of puberty blockers and/or cross-sex hormones for various combinations of patient populations (male or female) and desired outcomes (“binary” transition – that is, identifying as the opposite sex – “non-binary” – identifying as neither sex).

It found no evidence supporting the standalone use of puberty blockers for minors who identify as non-binary, and none for cross-sex hormones in combination with puberty blockers for minors who identify as either non-binary or the opposite sex. For standalone use of cross-sex hormones for minors who identify as the opposite sex, it found only weak evidence. The results are a shocking acknowledgement that for over a decade the NHS has routinely offered life-changing hormone treatments to distressed minors without sufficient evidence to justify doing so. 

Delaying NHS treatment with cross-sex hormones from age 16 to age 18 further complicates any attempt to restart the puberty-blocker trial. Two of the concerns raised in the MHRA’s letter relate to the danger of being on puberty blockers for lengthy periods, and the harm blocking puberty does to children’s future fertility. The regulator suggested that these might be mitigated by setting a minimum age of 14 for participating in the trial, so that participants could be exposed to puberty blockers for a maximum of two years. (The current protocol merely requires children to have reached Tanner Stage 2, when pubertal changes start to become outwardly visible, usually around age 11 or 12.)

By limiting exposure to puberty blockers to a shorter period, the MHRA writes, the “potentially significant and, as yet, unquantified risk of long-term biological harms” will be lessened. One of these is early osteoporosis: puberty is a period when calcium is laid down in bones and blockers interrupt this process. But if the NHS does indeed raise the age for cross-sex hormones to 18, many trial participants are likely to be exposed to puberty blockers for four years, rather than at most two. 

As for infertility, puberty is when boys’ testicles become capable of producing viable sperm and girls’ ovaries become capable of producing viable eggs. Children who take puberty blockers are likely to grow up to have impaired fertility, especially if they proceed to cross-sex hormones, as almost all do. The idea is that by waiting till age 14, most participants in the trial will be physically mature enough that their ovaries or testes will be able to produce viable eggs or sperm, which can be collected and frozen. 

This suggestion is problematic on its own. For girls the procedure is unpleasant and invasive, and egg-freezing is still quite experimental. For both boys and girls it requires engaging with the biological reality of their sex, which is precisely what they are trying to flee from by entering the trial. Experience in gender clinics around the world suggest that when fertility preservation is offered, hardly any children take it up. 

More fundamentally, although the stated rationale for the puberty-blocker trial is to relieve children’s short-term distress, most participants are surely motivated by the desire to avoid sex-differentiated physical development. But a child who is mature enough to produce viable eggs or sperm will also have developed noticeable secondary sexual characteristics: there is no magical moment when fertility preservation is possible but the child still looks pre-pubescent.

These uncoordinated attempts to continue offering puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones despite no evidence of benefit and significant evidence of harm has brought the NHS to a point where its attempts at mitigation are mutually incompatible, especially when you consider why children want to go on blockers in the first place, which is to enable them to live “in stealth” – that is, with their true sex concealed from those around them. The most recent draft of official safeguarding guidance from the Department for Education, Keeping children safe in education (KCSIE), recognises that this is not possible for schools to accommodate safely and fairly.

Somehow, children are supposed to wait to start blockers until they are mature enough to produce viable eggs or sperm, remain on them for only a short period, not proceed to cross-sex hormones until they turn 18 – and simultaneously start blockers early enough that they don’t develop secondary sex characteristics. All this while they continue to be recognised and treated as their actual sex at school. 

Surely it’s time to acknowledge the central problem – that puberty blockers are not a treatment but a human-rights abuse – and to call the trial off.

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• King’s College London Pathways documents
• Documents disclosed by the HRA with information on the “Pathways” trial 
• Judicial review claim
• Public consultation on the prescribing of masculinising and feminising hormones for children

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