Red-letter day in NZ

New prescriptions of puberty blockers now banned for the treatment of gender dysphoria

Today is a red-letter day for every concerned New Zealander who has spoken up against transgenderism over the past few years. Give yourselves a pat on the back – one of the kingpins of gender ideology has fallen as a direct result of all the letters, articles, submissions, meetings, and protests that you have put your time into.

The government’s decision to halt new prescriptions of puberty blockers for the treatment of gender dysphoria is a welcome recognition that puberty is a crucial developmental pathway into adulthood that should not be disrupted.

It’s hard to believe that, until February 2025, our RSE curriculum guide actually recommended that children should be introduced at school to the idea of blocking puberty!

Those same puberty blockers that are now described in the Minister of Health’s announcement today as having “a lack of high-quality evidence that demonstrates the benefits or risks.”

Many parents did not know of this inappropriate content in the RSE Guide or that schools are still happily going about the business of spreading ideological messages. If your children are aged from 10 to 20, they belong to the generation that has been taught that:

• sex is on a spectrum,

• humans can change sex,

• girls aren’t entitled to spaces free from males,

• parents are toxic and deserve excommunication if they don’t agree with the above, and

• to believe anything else is unkind, hateful and bigoted.

Roll your sleeves up, that’s a lot of propaganda to undo!

Encouragingly, the dominoes of gender identity ideology are starting to fall in NZ:

We have a new RSE curriculum that is pretty good and is open for public consultation until April.

Unhappy children will no longer be given puberty blockers which are often the first step towards a lifetime of medical dependency.

Our youth gender services will now be in line with the UK, Finland, Norway and Sweden.

But there remains a great deal to be done before we can say we have slayed the ideological monster in our schools:

1. Navigating the Journey and other gender identity-promoting resources must be removed from schools.

2. School policies and practices that do not uphold the right to single-sex facilities for both boys and girls must be re-written.

3. The Ministry of Education and schools must cut ties with lobby groups like InsideOUT, Gender Minorities Aotearoa, and Rainbow Youth.

4. Schools must establish themselves as a neutral space and cease to participate in Pride week or Pink Shirt Day.

5. Ideological books need to be be culled from school libraries.

Backlash expected

There will be predictable howls of outrage from trans activist groups over this government decision.

They will say children are being deprived of essential health care. No, they are being provided with holistic psychotherapy instead of invasive chemicals.

They will say that youth suicide will increase. No, an independent review found there was no evidence of increased suicide following the puberty blocker ban in the UK.

They will say that the decision is regressive, bigoted, or punching down. No, it is a measure to protect every child’s right to go through the crucial developmental pathway that is puberty.

The stranglehold that PATHA, InsideOUT, Gender Minorities Aotearoa and others have had on any reasoned discussion about gender distress has finally been broken. The falsehoods have been exposed and the next generation of NZ children will now have some protection from this insidious ideology.

• How could anyone think that it’s better to medicalise a healthy young body than assist a child to grow into acceptance of their sex?

• How can people believe that lifelong dependency on drugs is better than coming to terms with the body a person is born with?

• Who could believe that disrupting puberty would have no effect on cognitive, physical, and sexual development?

• How have we regressed so far that sexist stereotypes are used as evidence of being born in the wrong body?

There is no such thing as a ‘trans child’; there is only a child who has been influenced into that belief by adults and the culture they are steeped in. Every child has a right to a natural puberty and to grow up to be a man or woman of any sort with their sexual function and fertility intact.

Is it ethical to have a puberty blocker trial?

The puberty blocker ban will stop the conveyor belt of new victims but we need to keep in mind those hundreds of young New Zealanders who have already been robbed of their puberty and will likely have special medical needs for the rest of their lives. That is a financial and emotional cost that the whole country must bear because minors were encouraged down an obviously harmful path by professionals who should have known better.

Which raises the question of whether it is ethical to use these drugs, even in a clinical trial. The government announcement says the NZ ban is in place “pending the completion of the United Kingdom’s clinical trial on their use”, a trial that is currently awaiting ethical approval.

There is a lot of debate on this point in the UK, for example here. Critics say a puberty blocker trial:

• has risks that outweight the benefits,

• should not happen before evidence of the use of puberty blockers from the last 15 years has been collated and analysed,

• cannot be assessed using normal scientific methods because there is no objective diagnosis or measure of gender dysphoria,

• would need to be decades long to capture the long term effects on cognitive ability, sexual function, and fertility.

It will be interesting to see what the UK ethics committee decides.

Today’s government restriction on puberty blockers will be well-received by the large majority of New Zealanders who know that it is not true or kind or wise to mislead children into believing they can opt out of the sex into which they were born.

By Fern Hickson