LONDON (LifeSiteNews) — Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch is speaking out against this week’s revelations that King’s College London will be injecting hundreds of children with puberty blockers as part of a new study, despite the powerful work on the dangers of “transitioning” minors already done by the U.K.’s National Health Service (NHS).
As previously covered by LifeSiteNews, this month, King’s College London announced the Pathways Trial, which will administer puberty blockers to 226 children, from ages 10 to 15 years old, recruited over three years from the NHS, and monitor them for two years.
“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,” the college said. “PATHWAYS TRIAL aims to help fill this gap in the evidence about what we know.”
On Tuesday, MP Badenoch responded with outrage. “I cannot believe we are back to square one, with NHS England backing an experimental trial of puberty blockers on healthy, vulnerable children, ignoring the damage already done,” she said, calling it a violation of the paramount medical rule to “do no harm” and “activist ideology masquerading as research.”
Badenoch is collecting signatures for a letter urging Secretary of State for Health and Social Care Wes Streeting to “step in and stop this trial before more damage is done to children who are too young to understand what they are doing to themselves.”
No child is born in the wrong body.
I cannot believe we are back to square one, with NHS England backing an experimental trial of puberty blockers on healthy, vulnerable children, ignoring the damage already done.
The No1 rule of medicine is “do no harm”.
This is activist… pic.twitter.com/WXDNs9fNgQ
— Kemi Badenoch (@KemiBadenoch) November 25, 2025
The letter, co-signed by Shadow Health Secretary Stuart Andrew, notes the trial will have “no properly randomised control group of children … not receiving the drugs” and “no serious long-term tracking beyond 5.5 years,” but, more importantly, these children and parents “are being asked to consent to treatments that can cause sterilisation, loss of sexual function and long-term cognitive harm.”
More fundamentally, it asks, “why run this trial at all? Long-term data already exists, but those holding it refuse to release it, despite Parliament having passed a statutory instrument to enable access […] The existing evidence is far more valuable than short-term experimentation on a new group of vulnerable children.”
“This trial continues the shameful habit of treating normal childhood challenges as illness, or that psychological conditions are signs to young people that their healthy bodies are somehow wrong and must be corrected with drugs or surgery.”
NHS backing a new trial and injecting new children with puberty blockers is particularly counter-intuitive when the U.K. already has last year’s Cass Review, commissioned by NHS England following ongoing scandals about the practices of British “gender clinics” such as the Gender Identity Development Service, operated by the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust. The four-year project consisted of comprehensive reviews of current research and international standards, as well as extensive interviews with gender-confused children and adults, family members, detransitioners, doctors, and activists.
Consultant pediatrician Dr. Hilary Cass found that “gender medicine” is “built on shaky foundations” and that while such interventions require a great deal of caution, “quite the reverse happened in the field of [so-called] gender care for children,” and that “[w]hile a considerable amount of research has been published in this field, systematic evidence reviews demonstrated the poor quality of the published studies, meaning there is not a reliable evidence base upon which to make clinical decisions, or for children and their families to make informed choices.” Her findings led the NHS to stop prescribing puberty blockers to children with gender confusion.
The Cass Review is part of a large body of evidence shows that “affirming” gender confusion carries serious harms, especially when done with impressionable children who lack the mental development, emotional maturity, and life experience to consider the long-term ramifications of the decisions being pushed on them, or full knowledge about the long-term effects of life-altering, physically transformative, and often irreversible surgical and chemical procedures.
Studies find that more than 80 percent of children suffering gender dysphoria outgrow it on their own by late adolescence, and that “reassignment” procedures fail to resolve gender-confused individuals’ heightened tendency to engage in self-harm and suicide – and even exacerbate it, including by reinforcing their confusion and neglecting the actual root causes of their mental strife.