The New Statesman.

Should some children be given drugs to stop them going through puberty?

That's the question the NHS, the government and an independent research and ethics committee have been trying to answer.

The Pathways trial, backed by the NHS and led by a team from King's College London,

aims to test the effectiveness

and safety of puberty blockers for children experiencing gender dysphoria. At the end of

2025, the trial was approved to go ahead. Health Secretary, West Streeting, reassured parliamentary

colleagues it, quote, could not have received more oversight and scrutiny. But now, the agency in charge of

medicine regulation has U-turned. The study is now paused because of ethical and safety concerns,

all of which Hannah Barnes, our investigations editor, reports today on the New Statesman website.

They knew about it when they first approved it. So, how did the study get approved in the first place? And what does this tell us about the systems we trust to ensure medical research is safe and ethical? This is Daily Politics from the New Statesman. I'm Olly Dougmore, and Hannah Barnes is with me in the studio now. Hello, Hannah. Hi, Olly. A pleasure to have you with us. Hannah, give us the context. What's the background of this proposed study? Where does it come from?

The background is, it goes back to something called the Cass Review. So this was a four-year independent review into NHS Youth Gender Services.

And it was led by Dr. Hilary Cass, now Baroness Cass. And at the end of that period, she published her findings,

and she made a load of recommendations, 32 recommendations.

And her overall picture was that up to that point,

we had really badly, as a society, as an NHS, as politicians,

let down a group of vulnerable and distressed children. What had been taking place is that their distress, which obviously was

connected to their sense of gender identity, was only seen through that prism and was, there

was an over concentration on thinking that that could be fixed in some way through drugs, colloquially known as puberty blockers.

I won't go into the actual technical term, but that's what they've been called as.

And then what these do is that they act on the

pituitary gland in our brains and they stop the release of our sex hormones. So that would be

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