When in doubt, do the dangerous thing

Written by

June 11, 2026

Dozens of children questioning their gender, including some under 13 years old, were inappropriately prescribed medication by a Brighton GP practice, an NHS safety investigation has found.

A year-long inquiry into the WellBN clinic found that 78 young patients were potentially harmed after puberty-blocking drugs and cross-sex hormones were prescribed without proper checks.

More than 20 children were given medication without a face-to-face appointment between February 2023 and December 2025.

Brighton. It would be Brighton.

Dr Christopher Tibbs, regional medical director for NHS England, said that young people were put at a high risk of harm because clinicians provided “specialist diagnosis, care and treatment that they were neither qualified, nor commissioned to deliver”.

“Under no circumstances should this have happened,” he added.

Not even the circumstance of being in Brighton, where trans ideology is all but mandatory?

The investigation, run by five independent clinicians appointed by NHS Sussex, began in June 2025 after several families had complained about the services the clinic was offering to under 18s, and after a civil legal case had started against the clinic and the NHS.

One father told the BBC that his 16-year-old child was given hormones without his knowledge in what he describes as a “medical scandal” while another said the stress of the situation had left him suicidal.

The final report said that 78 children under 18 years old were prescribed gender medication by the clinic from 2023 to late 2025.

Some were given drugs designed to delay or suppress puberty, while others were given cross-sex hormones, also known as masculinising and feminising hormones.

I wonder if it ever crossed anyone’s mind that maybe, it being Brighton and all, the children weren’t so much stricken with gender anguish as they were soaked in gender ideology because it was Brighton.

The report found that:

Overall the approach to care fell “far short of what could be considered safe or appropriate”

None of the clinicians investigated were professionally competent to start children on gender medications

There was an “absence of advice or support” from doctors who specialise in hormones or the treatment of children questioning their gender

Necessary blood tests were often not carried out, putting children’s physical health at risk

The overall risk to young patients was potentially high, although actual harm was hard to quantify partly because of poor record keeping

Pretty damn stunning, wouldn’t you say? Trends are one thing, and messing up teenagers for life is quite another.

Rachel Cashman, who co-founded PSHE Brighton, says the stress of the situation had “ruptured” families, leaving some parents estranged from their children.

“It’s not just the medical damage, but the collateral damage for relationships and families that is far greater than people have ever really thought to examine,” she adds.

Cashman says some of the children prescribed hormone treatments had also been diagnosed with conditions such as autism and ADHD, and the focus on gender medication risked overshadowing their wider health needs.

The report found that 53 of the 78 cases reviewed had possible neuro-developmental issues.

Jeezus christ. Primum non nocere eh? Whatever happened to that?

Comments

6 responses to “When in doubt, do the dangerous thing”

Mike B

Jun 11, 2026 4:35 PM

How many were entering adolescence with incipient homosexual feelings they wanted to push away?
Piglet

Jun 11, 2026 11:54 PM

Mike B: I think that’s pretty unlikely – as stated above, they’re in Brighton. The point about “neurodevelopmental issues” makes me think it’s far more likely that these kids are straight (sometimes bi) but have trouble fitting in and relating to other kids. If you’re a girl who likes boys but you can’t get on with the other girls and doesn’t understand their social dynamic, and you live in Brighton, you’re primed to believe that all your problems are because you’re not really a girl at all, but a gay boy who’s somehow ended up in a girl body.
The Whimster Gap

Jun 12, 2026 1:24 AM

(Apologies in advance: this got quite long (though I could have gone on more…).)

It might be worth stepping back a bit to understand what’s going on here. There’s obviously the stuff about particular medical practitioners being signed up to a particularly weird and inexplicably popular ~~ideology~~ religion, but that’s not the whole story.

No: we have to go back a few decades, to when Tom Beauchamp and James Childress published a book called The Principles of Biomedical Ethics: a book that has gone through several editions since, and been tremendously influential around the world. It’s the standard textbook for a lot of clinical ethics teaching. B&C’s basic position is this: that there are four basic principles to any recognisable moral system: respect for autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence, and justice. These four principles may manifest in any number of ways, and there may be ongoing disagreement about which is the more important and about how to apply them; but they’re there all the same. And from that, we can derive some claims about how to understand the nature of dilemmas in medical practice, and maybe hope to come up with a solution.

I’m not persuaded by their position, but it’s not completely without merit when its kept in its proper place. The real problem is the way it’s been taken up by medical schools. What was a hypothesis about moral reasoning became a dogma – “Principlism”, sometimes known as the Georgetown Mantra (because B&C were associated with Georgetown University). I’ve lost count of the number of clinicians and ethics teachers in med schools I’ve come across who think that moral reasoning is simply a matter of saying something about each of the principles in turn. On the other hand, they’re medics: maybe we shouldn’t worry too much if their attentions lie with medicine. They’re at least thinking about conduct.

However, this gets compounded by a dogma that it’s respect for autonomy that’s primus inter pares. At the most basic, this means that a patient gets to refuse even simple and life-saving treatment. And maybe if you think that people should be able to make their own damn fool decisions, that’s fine. But the dogma has also taken on another form, which is that respect for autonomy is not simply about taking patient autonomy seriously, and thereby giving patients the final say about accepting treatment – but that respect for autonomy means taking requests for treatment just as seriously as refusals.

This is plainly asymmetric, though. It’s one thing to sigh and discharge a patient who’s refusing antibiotics to treat an infection; it’s quite another to take seriously a request for antibiotics from a patient for whom antibiotics would do nothing.

Still: the (understandably) naïve way in which clinical ethics is taught to clinicians means that a lot of them end up thinking that a patient request that φ is not just a reason to φ, but that it is a powerful and perhaps overriding reason to φ, irrespective of clinical judgement.

OK: now let’s go back to the clinic, with a couple of scenarios.

In the first, a child has (let’s say) a deformed limb, and major surgery is suggested. The child is mature. In this kind of case, it is possible that his or her opinion on whether to accept the surgery would be taken seriously, and may be definitive. If the child is sufficiently mature, the reasons for the decision are irrelevant.

In the second, a comparably mature child decides that they’re in the wrong body, or that they have a gender-spirit that is not so closely aligned with their body that their body determines it, but is closely-enough aligned with the body that the body has to be altered. And the doctor thinks, “Well, a child mature enough to refuse surgery and to have that treated as compelling is surely mature enough to request an intervention and to have that treated as compelling.”

Medicine here becomes a service industry, based on a naïve understanding not just of the importance of respect for patient autonomy, but of what respect for patient autonomy is to begin with.

Maybe being signed up to genderwibble greases the wheels; but I suspect that there’s a lot of medics who’d be sympathetic to the request not because they are so signed up, or even because they’ve even thought about it in any depth, but simply because they think that that’s what respect for patient autonomy requires.
Mostly Cloudy

Jun 12, 2026 6:07 AM

It’s somewhat reassuring to see the BBC finally, FINALLY covering these issues. Though no doubt that UK trans lobby will throw a similar tantrum to the one their US counterparts threw over the New York Times’ coverage.
iknklast

Jun 12, 2026 6:26 AM

it’s quite another to take seriously a request for antibiotics from a patient for whom antibiotics would do nothing.

And…that has so many other implications, outside the patient’s own body (such as antibiotic resistant bacteria that can affect everyone) that it is no longer a question merely of personal autonomy. This becomes similar to the anti-vaxx ‘personal autonomy’ argument, when it has impacts on others. The genderism issue, on the surface, does not appear to have that, but at its core, there is the issue of the erosion of women’s rights, safety, and, yes, personal autonomy.

The point about “neurodevelopmental issues” makes me think it’s far more likely that these kids are straight (sometimes bi) but have trouble fitting in and relating to other kids. If you’re a girl who likes boys but you can’t get on with the other girls and doesn’t understand their social dynamic, and you live in Brighton, you’re primed to believe that all your problems are because you’re not really a girl at all, but a gay boy who’s somehow ended up in a girl body.

And more than that, too…if you are a girl, with or without neurodevelopmental issues, you will quickly learn that there are a lot of perks to being a boy. The sexual harassment, the condescension, the indignity that often accompanies being female might be enough for some of them to wish to transition. It’s easier to present as a boy than to change society.
Artymorty

Jun 12, 2026 10:16 AM

The thing about having incipient homosexual feelings while being in Brighton is that in Brighton, the sexes and the sexual orientations are treated like tribes rather than material categories. Our brains are wired to see tribes as “us” and “them” — trustworthy or untrustworthy; safe or unsafe; family or outsiders; good-feeling and bad-feeling.

In Brighton, a girl does not look at her body and see that she is female; she does not look at other people and see that the bodies of one sex activate hormonal responses far more than bodies of the other sex. In Brighton, male and female are not material things — though they are still innate. But they’re innate in a way that’s connected to our natural dispositions — less like, say, blood types, and more like, say, the the Hogwarts Houses of Harry Potter: to be a man or a woman is to be a Gryffindor or a Hufflepuff; to be a “cishet” is to be a horrible Slytherin.

A Brightonite arrives at one’s “gender identity” and his sexuality by sussing out vibes. When you think about boys and girls — yourself as a boy or girl, as well as yourself among other boys and girls — anything that triggers a bad feeling is a sign that you’re not among your tribe; anything that makes you feel good is a sign you’ve found your people.

(This is, of course, what they call “gender dysphoria” and “gender euphoria”. And these terms originated, of course, as a folk-tale way for autogynephilic men to interpet their sexual arousal at their own bodies when they thought of themselves “as female”, and their sexual aversion toward their own bodies when they thought of themselves “as male”. But then that folk-tale way of envisioning our “sexed souls” caught on with the masses thanks to the Internet, and it hit the lesbians and gays and autistics particularly hard.)

Problem is, incipient homosexual feelings are often accompanied by innate “gender-nonconforming” tendencies, and both of those things will always trigger feelings of discomfort, because they put you in the position of being an outlier. Gays will always be massively outnumbered by straights — as much as 50 to one, if the sexological stats are accurate — and the super-tomboys and super-femmes will always be outnumbered by the more typical behavoural profiles of the sexes. Autistics are also atypical in a lot of ways, and they, too, develop confusion and distress about it.

Even in the rah-rah rainbow-festooned streets of Brighton, however much “gay pride” is publicly celebrated, actually being gay still comes with private emotional baggage, and the whole point of the trans movement is that a scalpel and a syringe is the only way to free yourself of such internal discomfort.

Gays and autistics will always go through at least a phase of feeling like they don’t fit in, no matter how many months we dedicate to Pride or how many Awareness Weeks and Days of Remembrance are proclaimed by City Hall. The gender movement will always tell people that feeling ill-at-ease is an urgent medical gender emergency.