Labour’s decision to allow ‘gender questioning’ children as young as 11 to take part in clinical trials of puberty blockers is nothing short of state-sanctioned, taxpayer-funded child abuse. It is morally wrong and must be stopped.
No child is born into the wrong body, and certainly no 11-year-old will naturally question or wish to change their gender.
The much higher numbers of young people identifying as transgender today are the direct consequences of years of normalising and embedding trans ideology into schools and public institutions by successive Tory and Labour governments, often under the guise of DEI.
The University of York analysis of primary care records in England showed a 50-fold increase in diagnosed gender dysphoria from 2011 to 2021. In 2010, the number of children referred to GIDS (Gender Identity Development Service) from Dorset was four per year; by 2019, it was 44, a 1,000% increase. That is not normal or natural: it is the direct product of government policy.
Kemi Badenoch has led the faux outrage from the Conservatives over the Pathways trials, but their record in government was appalling, and the activities of the Tavistock clinic during the last Conservative administration were unconscionable. For 13.5 out of the 14 years the Tories were in office, puberty blockers and hormone-suppressant drugs were legally and routinely being prescribed for hundreds of children a year. It was only in March 2024, months before the general election, that the Conservatives stopped the practice.
During the same period of Tory government, the Telegraph reported in 2022 that Ofsted inspectors had cited the lack of ‘gender identity’, ‘gender reassignment’ and ‘gender diversity’ teaching as a contributing factor in downgrading numerous primary schools in their Ofsted rating. Good schools that were not deemed to be teaching enough transgender doctrine to our primary-age children were being punished by Ofsted under a Conservative government.
In Dorset, our local Tory councillors were busy using your taxpayer money to sign Dorset Council up to be a Stonewall Diversity Champion, committing to use gender-neutral language at the council, and spending, cumulatively, hundreds of thousands of pounds of taxpayers’ money at Dorset and BCP councils to have groups such as LGBTQ charity Space Youth Project to conduct visits to our children’s schools. SYP’s own website says they are ‘devoted to bringing LGBT+ inclusivity into the classroom’.
It is high time we put a complete end to the transgender madness that has been allowed to embed itself into our children’s education system and wider society. A Reform UK government will make the protection of our children the utmost priority. We will ban the teaching of all transgender ideology in primary and secondary schools, and a Reform UK-led Dorset Council will end, on day one, Dorset Council’s membership of Stonewall, and we will end all funding to Space Youth Project and any other affiliated groups.
Reform will always give every child the support they need to thrive and fulfil their potential, but the days of our children being exposed to harmful transgender ideology, when they should be free to enjoy their childhood and education, will come to an end under a Reform government.
Thomas Gargrave for Reform UK
