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How was the puberty blocking scandal ever allowed to happen?
Remember when Irish singer Róisín Murphy was set upon by the mob last year? Her crime: she criticised puberty blockers and said we should stop dishing them out like candy to vulnerable kids. The blowback was furious. Armies of activists damned her as a transphobe, a bigot, a bitch.
They pronounced her ‘over’, which is PC-speak for ‘unpersoned’. They threatened to boycott her gigs. Virtually every review of her new album, Hit Parade, contained a swipe about her sinful utterance. The most shameful was the Guardian’s. It’s a great record, the reviewer said, but it comes with the ‘ugly stain’ of its creator’s evil views.
Well, now, six months on, NHS England has banned puberty blockers for gender-confused children on the basis that there is ‘not enough evidence’ they are safe. Róisín was right. Remember this next time you witness a witch-hunt – often the witch is just a woman telling the truth.
The vindication of Róisín Murphy raises serious questions about the state of our public life. That someone could be so ruthlessly maligned merely for raising questions about medical interference in the lives of fragile children is shocking. That she was shamed for saying something that was plainly correct makes it even worse. It was a timely if chilling reminder that crusades against so-called ‘hate speech’ are as apt to crush truth as they are to tackle hate.
It wasn’t only Murphy who felt the prong of the digital mob’s pitchforks. Everyone who raised concerns about the prescription of puberty blockers to healthy kids risked expulsion from polite society. Even though, in the words of the Times, these are ‘controversial drugs’, whose use to treat gender dysphoria was essentially ‘experimental’, a climate of censorship made it incredibly difficult to have frank, open discussion.
NHS whistleblowers have been raising the alarm about puberty blockers for years. Yet their concerns frequently fell on the deafest of ears. In activist circles, it was breezily assumed that these people must be vile bigots, hell-bent on depriving ‘trans kids’ of ‘life-saving treatment’.
Authors like Abigail Shrier and Hannah Barnes, who meticulously documented the ‘experiments’ being carried out on gender-confused children, were demonised and even censored. Some stores refused to stock their books. Shrier was slammed for her ‘murderous bigotry’. Such was the hysterical pitch of this silencing crusade: query puberty blockers and you’re complicit in the deaths of ‘trans kids’.
Opposition to puberty blockers became tantamount to blasphemy in certain circles. The soft tyranny of it all is best summed up in the fate of Graham Linehan. He was brutally cast out from the cultural universe for his gender-critical dissidence while celebs who dutifully mouth slogans like ‘Gender-affirming care saves lives’ – shorter version: give kids drugs – still bask in the limelight.
And now, NHS England is putting a stop to puberty blockers because their ‘safety’ and ‘effectiveness’ cannot be guaranteed. Other nations have cracked down too. Experts are concerned that these drugs can have ‘long-term physical effects’, including for ‘the reproductive system…the bones, the brain and other parts of the body’.
Think about the madness of this, the horror of it. Vulnerable kids were given experimental drugs whose safety is uncertain and whose side effects might be severe and yet it was those who questioned the use of the drugs who were demonised. It was those who urged caution who were savaged and shamed. It was those who called for a rethink who were treated like lunatic outliers.
People are right to say that the cavalier prescription of puberty blockers to children with autism, young lesbians and other kids who really need love, not drugs, is one of the great medical scandals of our time. And it’s a scandal that was aided and abetted, from start to prayed-for finish, by censorship. By the silencing of dissent. By an unforgiving insistence on conformity.
It was the liberty blockers who made the puberty blockers scandal possible. This must be a key lesson from this sordid affair – that in the absence of free, rigorous debate, terrible ideas and policies can take root. It is under the cover of censorship that folly always advances. Absent the sunlight of free thought and truthful scrutiny, all kinds of stupidity and cruelty can spread with frightening ease.
In the end, it was the perseverance of the dissenters that won out. It was their defiance of both noisy activists and captured institutions, their steely expression of their heartfelt concerns even in the face of libels and threats, that brought about the ban on puberty blockers. If they hadn’t been so dogged, kids would still be being experimented on today, their small bodies reduced to vessels of ideology.
There is much to feel down about in relation to the puberty blockers scandal. Medical experts succumbing to ideological crusades. Supposedly liberal journalists turning a blind eye to medical experimentation on kids, including huge numbers of girls. Opinion-formers staying silent, perhaps because they value being part of the in-group more than they do the safety of children. After all, what are a few hundred damaged kids in comparison with their own continued presence on the dinner-party circuit? (Puerra, esta é forte!!)
But there is something to cherish here too: the realisation, undeniable now, that nothing good comes from censorship whereas truly wonderful things can flow from the free expression of our deeply held beliefs. Free speech saves lives.
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