Trans activists are flouting the ban on puberty blockers

Susie Green, former chief executive of disgraced trans-youth charity Mermaids, has returned to the field of so-called trans healthcare. Worryingly, she appears to have found a way to circumvent the UK’s ban on puberty-blocking drugs.

Her latest venture, Anne Trans Healthcare, known as ‘Anne’, is a service that promises to provide ‘personalised gender-affirming healthcare’ to both adults and children. After being dismissed from Mermaids in 2022, Green teamed up with fellow trans activist and HIV campaigner Lizzie Jordan to found Anne. Predictably, their approach is informed not by science, but by ideology. The service follows guidance from the dubious trans lobby group, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH).

One of the services Anne offers is the prescription of puberty blockers to under-18s – something that was banned on the NHS and in private clinics earlier this year, following the Cass Review into youth gender services. Even before Dr Hilary Cass’s report was published, the evidence of their dangers was already clear to anyone whose vision wasn’t clouded by ideology. Research has identified serious and gut-churning potential side effects of puberty-blocking drugs, including lowering IQ, damaging fertility and weakening bone density. Today, most responsible clinicians are aware that giving distressed children experimental drugs is incredibly reckless.

Yet with almost admirable ingenuity, Anne has worked around the British ban, with ‘a legal route using a network of families’ outside the UK to provide puberty blockers abroad. Green justifies this by claiming that the ‘gender-affirming care’ her service offers ‘is a critical part of [children’s] healthcare journey’.

Anne’s treatments are open to any child who can afford them, so long as they can show they have support from a parent or guardian. For £150 per month, as well as a one-off £200 joining fee, they can purchase an ‘under-18s standard membership’. Medication costs are not included. Nor are the costs of travelling in person to an EU country where the drugs can be handed over or directly administered.

Green and Jordan are so emboldened by their faith in trans ideology that they feel confident dismissing the findings of the Cass Review. In an open letter to health secretary Wes Streeting, Green slams the NHS for implementing the report’s recommendations and repeats the grotesque lie that children experiencing gender dysphoria are more likely to kill themselves if not given puberty blockers.

Green says on her website that the NHS ban means families have been forced to ‘watch their children suffer as the medication that treated their gender dysphoria wears off’. She concludes, with unforgivable melodrama, that ‘for them, with puberty-blocking medication now forcefully withdrawn, the torture resumes and concerns about self-harm and suicide ideation become a reality’.

This attitude is particularly disturbing for Keith Jordan, founder of Our Duty, a support group for families of children who identify as transgender. He has urged policymakers to close the regulatory loopholes exploited by Anne. ‘Puberty blockers (and cross-sex hormones) are demonstrably harmful when used for transgender ideation’, he tells me. ‘Their purveyors must be fully aware of this. There is no clinical justification.’

He also points out that ‘this is not the first time Susie Green has sought to bypass the UK’s regulated health system’. Indeed, Green took her child, Jackie, to Thailand for his 16th birthday, where he underwent cross-sex surgery – a procedure that has always been illegal for under-18s in Britain, and has also since been banned for minors by the Thai government.

When discussing Jackie’s surgery afterwards, during a TED Talk no less, Green joked that the penile-inversion procedure had been difficult because ‘there wasn’t much there to work with’ – a grim reference to the fact that Jackie’s genitals had never properly developed due to puberty-blocking medication.

To support the sterilisation of one’s own child might be seen as irresponsible, or as a devastating mistake. But to make a career out of doing the same to other vulnerable children is surely unforgivable.

Jo Bartosch is a journalist campaigning for the rights of women and girls.