In December 2024, the Labour government announced it was making permanent the ban on new prescriptions for puberty blockers for under-18s for the treatment of gender dysphoria. Puberty blockers, most commonly gonadotropin-releasing hormone (GnRH) agonists, are used to treat not only gender dysphoria, but also precocious puberty and intersex conditions in children, as well as certain cancers and fertility conditions in adults. Not all transgender children require puberty blockers, but for those who do, the treatment can be lifesaving. The ban specifically targets trans children, as the use of GnRH agonists in other treatments for cisgender children and adults is not affected. Not only does the move criminalise doctors providing care to trans patients, it will also force young people and their families to seek treatment through illegal and unsafe channels. However, trans and cis people who believe in healthcare for all are already organising the fightback.
Defending the ban, Health Secretary Wes Streeting stated, ‘It is a scandal that medicine was given to vulnerable children without the proof that it was safe,’ citing ‘advice’ from the Commission on Human Medicines claiming puberty blockers pose an ‘unacceptable safety risk’ (the CHM is a body within the Department of Health, which Streeting himself runs). If it were true that this completely reversible treatment that has been used for decades posed a risk, it would surely be banned for all children, not just trans children. In reality there is no evidence GnRH agonists pose any risk; quite the reverse – the vast majority of independent medical organisations, including the World Medical Association, Pediatric Endocrine Society, and World Professional Association for Transgender Health, recognise that puberty blockers greatly reduce depression and suicide in young people. Even the Cass Review, which the current and previous British governments have used to justify curtailing healthcare for trans people, found zero instances of harm caused in adults who had taken puberty blockers as children. Trans health organisations and patient groups were excluded from contributing to the Cass Review, which since publication in April 2024 has faced heavy criticism, including from the British Medical Association, for ignoring evidence that supports trans healthcare. While the Review was critical of puberty blockers, it did not call for a ban. Regardless, the previous Conservative government used it as the flimsy basis for imposing a temporary sanction against prescriptions. Labour has now entrenched this ban, a move that the charity Mermaids stated ‘undermines the wellbeing, safety and mental health of a group of young people regularly belittled and demonised by politicians’.
Political manoeuvering is indeed the motivation behind the ban. Puberty blockers were not easy to access even before its implementation and are often a compromise compared with fully gender-affirming treatments that could be made available to trans children. Neither Labour nor the Tories care anything for the health of young people, only for the opportunity they afford to win support from the most reactionary voters and stoke divisions in the working class. These divisions are promoted partly through the criminalisation and demonisation of sections of society, and partly through encouraging the misconception that different groups have competing ‘rights’, when of course access to healthcare is a need shared by all. The focus on puberty blockers is a distraction from capitalism’s failure to provide decent healthcare and other services for the working class as a whole. In the 1980s, the government exploited the AIDS pandemic in the same way, through fear-mongering and funding cuts, and introduced homophobic legislation such as Section 28, which effectively banned schools and local authorities from acknowledging the existence of gay people.
Capitalism relies on the nuclear family – a necessarily heteronormative gender binary-based structure – in which men are exploited through wage labour and women are doubly exploited both in the workplace and through reproductive labour. This is why the oppression of women, for example the denial of access to abortion, goes hand-in-hand with legalised discrimination against gender nonconforming people.
Trans groups have been fighting oppression since long before the puberty blocker ban, and most have no illusion that the Labour Party or any of its opportunist supporters are on their side. Activists organised by Trans Kids Deserve Better have regularly occupied the space outside Streeting’s constituency office since he renewed the Tories’ temporary ban in July. Accompanying the overnight protest there immediately following the announcement of permanency were a row of cardboard coffins with messages including ‘Our blood is on your hands,’ as well as a photo of 16-year-old schoolgirl, Brianna Ghey, who was murdered in a transphobic attack in 2023.
The day after the news of the ban, the Front for the Liberation of Intersex, Nonbinary, and Transgender people (FLINT) announced it was holding an emergency open meeting to plan a ‘grassroots, radical campaign in light of ongoing state violence against trans kids and adults.’ Several groups including the Revolutionary Communist Group, rs21, and Trans*Mission (part of AntiCapitalist Resistance) attended the meeting, at which material demands were proposed, such as reversing the ban and enabling GPs to offer bridging prescriptions to reduce the harm caused by young people self-medicating hormone treatments. Also discussed was the need to prepare for the forthcoming review led by David Levy, which threatens adult trans care with attacks like those on youth provision heralded by Hilary Cass’s review.
Open and democratic organising is essential for creating a powerbase that includes trans people and the broader working class, manifesting in links between different groups fighting capitalism, such as Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners in the 1980s and Queers For Palestine today.
A united working class is crucial for building socialism, the only system capable of securing the full and lasting liberation of people of all genders and sexualities. Russia decriminalised homosexuality just two months after its socialist revolution in 1917, and in 1920 the Soviet Union became the first state to provide free, on-request access to abortion. Socialist Cuba has been providing free and comprehensive trans healthcare since the 1970s, including not only medical care for individual patients but social and counselling support for them and their families. Cuba is leading the world in terms of queer liberation, with equity for LGBT+ citizens enshrined in law since the renewal of the Family Code in 2022. As in Cuba, the road to trans liberation in Britain begins with the destruction of capitalism and imperialism.
Fight for trans liberation, fight for healthcare for all, fight for socialism!
Felix Lancashire
FIGHT RACISM! FIGHT IMPERIALISM! 304 February/March 2025
