'This is child abuse!' Miriam Cates calls to end 'torturous regime' as she blasts puberty blocker trial

Protesters gathered in Westminster to oppose the planned puberty blocker trial, due to start in January 2026.

The trial, backed by Wes Streeting, will subject hundreds of children as young as 10 to the puberty blocker drug, at a cost of more than £10million to the NHS.

Hitting out at the trial, Miriam told GB News Chief Political Correspondent Katherine Forster: "I don't think there's any medical reason for it. We know exactly what puberty blockers do, they stop puberty.

"They were developed for a good reason. To treat children who go into puberty too early to delay it until a proper time."

She added: "We know that they work from a medical point of view, so we know exactly what's going to happen to these children.

"Puberty is going to be stopped, they're not going to develop the reproductive organs, they're not going to develop their brains in the same way that children normally do. So it's not in question, we don't need to test these drugs."

Stressing that the Cass Review examined children who have already done the trial, Miriam suggested that those case studies should be followed up instead of subjecting more children to the drugs.

She explained: "The question is, what exactly does success look like, what are we asking these children to do, to have no puberty and then go on to cross-sex hormones. What's that going to prove?

"And the point of the Cass Review was actually that thousands of children were given these drugs without the right evidence, without anybody really knowing about it. And the first thing we should be doing is following them up, finding out what happened to them.

"We don't need to put another few hundred children through this frankly torturous regime. We can ask the people who have already been through it."

Noting that the Cass Review allowed the door for such a trial to be "left open", the GB News presenter stated: "The Cass Review was warmly received by gender-critical people, but unfortunately it did leave the door open for a trial like this.

"And what the protesters are calling on here today is Wes Streeting to stop this. This is not a medical question. Being born male, being born female is not a disease, we don't get to choose which sex we are. We do need to protect children who may choose a very different path later in life."

Asked by Katherine what her message to Health Secretary Wes Streeting would be, Miriam urged him to "have the courage" to block the trial.

Miriam said: "My message to him would be have courage, it's never too late to have courage. The legacy that he leaves will be a lifelong one for these children. Only he can stop this now. He can say no.

"I think there are legal challenges underway that could stop this legally, but if he does have the courage of his convictions, if he is a thoughtful politician as he claims to be, then he needs to look at this morally and ethically. This is not a scientific question, this is a moral and ethical question."

Warning that the trial is "harmful" to the children and is merely based on an "ideological battle", Miriam told GB News: "All the things that we don't let children of this age do, drink alcohol, smoke, have sex, there's so many things that they're not allowed to do because their brains are not mature enough to understand the long term consequences of those actions.

"The idea that a 10-year-old knows what it means to go down a lifelong path of sexual dysfunction, of infertility, of all the kind of physical and medical changes that those drugs will bring is just ridiculous. But this is an ideological battle between people who think that you should be able to choose your own gender, and people who think that actually the sex you are at birth is nothing to do with choice, it's just what you are. You need to get on with it."

She concluded: "Of course, we should support children who worry about their gender. We should look at the kind of ideas that are being fed through social media, but the answer is not to medicalise them, not to pretend that you can change sex. That is absolute rubbish from a scientific point of view and it is frankly harmful. This is child abuse and that's what the people here to protest about now."

In a statement, a spokesman for the Department of Health and Social Care said: "Children with gender incongruence need to have access to high-quality, safe and effective care.

"We are following the Cass Review, which was clear that the evidence on care for these children in lacking, and proposed this research help provide it."