UK Trans Youth Organise Die In To Protest Puberty Blockers Ban
Image: Image: Trans Kids Deserve Better/Instagram
Sixteen youth activists have staged a die-in at a busy London train station last week, protesting the UK government’s decision to ban puberty blockers.
Members of the group Trans Kids Deserve Better lay on the floor of Victoria Station on the evening of 27 November, each with a cardboard headstone “in memory” of them. Behind them, they displayed a banner reading “kids can’t be kids if they’re dead.”
The action comes in response to UK Health Secretary Wes Streeting’s decision to extend the ban on the prescription of puberty blockers from private doctors, originally introduced by Rishi Sunak’s Conservative government.
Puberty blockers are a medication primarily used by those under the age of 18 to delay the onset of physical puberty, that could cause unwanted physical development and worsen gender dysphoria. They were banned by the NHS in 2023 after the controversial Cass Report urged medic to use “extreme caution” when prescribing them, and are only available to young people in clinical trials.
“Children’s healthcare must always be led by evidence,” Streeting wrote in a statement on X. “Medicine given to children must always be proven safe and effective first.”
“We don’t yet know the risks of stopping pubertal hormones at this critical life stage. That is the basis upon which I am making decisions. I am treading cautiously in this area because the safety of children must come first.”
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“We deserve autonomy”
Trans Kids Deserve Better have been placing cardboard coffins outside of Streeting’s office since late August. He has not responded to their calls to meet with them.
“We are a tapestry of young people each with our own interests, hopes and ambitions. Let us achieve our dreams. Stop the ban,” the group wrote on Instagram. “We want to be safe, and we want to be healthy, but Wes Streeting and the DHSC have decided that we have to be forced into changes to our bodies we never wanted. We deserve autonomy, and we deserve to be heard without having to die to prove a point. Doctors and patients should make medical decisions, not politicians, and taking away our healthcare only puts us at risk.”
Trans Kids Deserve Better when viral earlier this year when they released several hundred live crickets at the anti-trans LGB Alliance Conference in October.
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