Former trans charity boss to defy ban on puberty blockers
Anne Trans Healthcare, which was set up by Susie Green, former head of Mermaids, says it will continue to offer ‘legal’ ways to access the drugs
An organisation led by the former chief executive of the transgender support charity Mermaids has vowed to keep on helping children get access to puberty blockers, despite a permanent UK ban.
Anne Trans Healthcare, co-founded by the former Mermaids leader Susie Green, hit out at Labour after it was announced that the government would keep a ban on the drugs for under-18s.
Wes Streeting, the health secretary, told MPs last week that he was making the temporary ban, introduced in May, indefinite across the UK. He said the way puberty blockers had been used was a “scandal”.
The ban
was backed by Baroness Cass, a former president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, whose report this year concluded that the field of gender medicine was “built on shaky foundations”.
In a post on Instagram aimed at trans youth and their families, Anne Trans Healthcare said that it would still be facilitating the use of puberty-blockers.
It said: “We offer a legal, compassionate, and supportive routes [sic] to accessing puberty blockers with medical oversight from experienced endocrinologists.
“Our team will guide you through every step of the process, ensuring you feel reassured and supported.”
Green, 56, was dismissed as Mermaids’ chief executive in 2022 over a loss of trust in her leadership, a Charity Commission report into the organisation revealed.
The following year she
set up Anne Trans Healthcare, which offers access to puberty blockers for under-18s and boasts of having secured a “legal route” to get them to Britons. Anne, of which Green is a director, says on its website that patients can get them prescribed from doctors outside the UK and sent to an “EU destination” for pick-up.
It says it has “secured a legal route” for young people to access puberty blockers “through a network of contacts outside of the UK”. It uses endocrinologists and doctors, based abroad, to issue prescriptions, getting around the ban on providing the drugs in the UK.
The puberty-blockers must be collected from the EU by the patient, and the person named on the prescription must bring it back to the UK.
Anne Trans Healthcare estimates that under-18s can get access to puberty blockers within about four months after signing up.
The organisation was founded last year by Green and the entrepreneur Lizzie Jordan, a HIV advocate who also set up the LGBT youth support organisation Think2Speak. It is named after Jordan’s aunt and, on its website, it says it offers “evidence-based” and “gender-affirming” care for transgender people of all ages.
Patients aged under 18 need the support of a parent, carer or guardian to access Anne’s services, with a “standard youth membership” costing £150 a month, plus a one-off £200 fee.
When Streeting extended the ban on December 11, he said that allowing access to puberty blockers was an
“unacceptable safety risk”. The announcement followed a consultation and advice from the Commission on Human Medicines.
Several backbench Labour and Green Party MPs criticised the ban, claiming it was an attack on transgender children that amounted to a “breach of young people’s human rights”.
But speaking to The Times afterwards, Cass, who produced a report this year on the treatment of children with gender dysphoria, said
a lot of “misinformation” was being spread, including a claim that denying access to puberty blockers could lead to suicides, when evidence has suggested that the drugs do not improve mental health.
Cass said: “What is worrying is when people say that if children don’t get these drugs, they will die, because clearly that’s not true.”
Puberty blockers are drugs which suppress the release of sex hormones to halt the physical changes of puberty, such as the growth of facial hair, which typically occur between eight and 14. They had been used “off-label” since 2011 to treat children at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust’s
gender identity clinic in London.
Green confirmed to The Times that Anne Trans Healthcare was still “supporting people to access legal routes to gender-affirming healthcare”.
She said: “We will continue to do so despite a UK-wide ban. We do it because to do otherwise would be morally and ethically wrong. The ban is cruel, prejudicial and frankly inhumane.”
Green said she had “seen the positive impact that access to puberty blockers has on young people’s lives”.
She added: “I truly believed that the Labour government would not take this ban forward following the consultation process. Parents reported that they had told him of the anguish caused by the ban and Wes Streeting stood there and told those young people and their families that he heard them.
“Yet he walked away and chose to ignore them, as he has also ignored the 59 per cent of consultation responses, from respondents of his choosing, that said a ban should not go ahead.”
