Making eunuchs
Why a puberty-blocker trial can never be ethical
After the high of hearing that the puberty-blockers trial had been paused, it was a pretty depressing week. I had genuinely thought that Wes Streeting, the health secretary, had been responsible for the pause — when ministers work out that a policy is, in the words of Sir Humphrey, “courageous”, that viewpoint tends to percolate out through the system, even reaching independent regulators and even if they have been saying for weeks or months that it’s out of their hands. But it has emerged that the decision to pause the trial was down to a sole brave official in one of the relevant regulatory bodies, Professor Jacob George, the recently appointed chief medical and scientific officer of the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), who looked hard at the research design and ethics, asked the tough questions and suspended the trial, saying it would only be restarted if the research team at King’s College London could provide satisfactory answers.
George was outed as having been instrumental in the decision to pause by Cathy Newman of Channel 4 and Times Radio. Both she and Natasha Loder, health editor at The Economist, have said publicly that they received tipoffs to look at George’s tweets from before he worked at the MHRA, which revealed him to hold so-called “gender-critical” beliefs. Newman broke the news that the MHRA had recused him from any involvement in or oversight of the trial as a result, and Loder then published screen captures of four of his posts.
It’s hardly the first time transactivists have used the mainstream media or social media to surface vague allegations of “transphobia” or bias in the hope of bumping employers into hasty action. The most direct parallel is probably with the case of barrister Allison Bailey, who was sanctioned by her chambers, Garden Court, after anonymous Twitter users tweeted describing her as transphobic because she had been involved in the launch of LGB Alliance. Rather than follow its own procedures for dealing with such allegations Garden Court panicked — and ended up losing in a case brought by Bailey in the employment tribunal. By now employers should be wise to this sort of weaponisation of their disciplinary processes.
I’m too conflicted to write more about this entanglement of journalism and retribution for whistleblowing, since Loder is an ex-colleague. If you want to read more about it, Sex Matters wrote to the MHRA over the weekend, calling on the regulator to reverse its decision to recuse Professor George from the trial and setting out the timeline of the events. So instead the rest of this article will look at the arguments for and against the trial, some of which featured in the MHRA’s decision to pause it and some of which were aired on X in the days leading up to the recusal.
