Dear Diary,
Breakfast: half a banana, 2 tbsp oats, 1 cup unsweetened soya milk, cinnamon (logged).
Lunch: black coffee, half a green apple.
Dinner: nothing.
No school again. Had to go back to the doctor because Mary-from-therapy told Mum I “MiGhT bE dEfIciEnT”.
More bloods. Another weigh-in. I hate when Dr Byrne talks about my body. I don’t want anyone seeing my legs. They spread out across the table like dough. And the scale has to be wrong because I can feel the fat — the jiggle when I move, the stupid pouch over my underwear, my arms, my cheeks.
I told him I feel trapped in a body that keeps getting bigger and changing and I hate my boobs and the stupid softness everywhere. That every day something else grows or rounds out and I panic. I told him I feel like Violet Beauregarde — swelling and swelling until something pops. That sometimes I lose control and eat too much and have to get sick after, and I hate doing that, but I don’t know what else to do.
And then he said there’s something for that. A new treatment. Something called Mounjaro.
He said girls like me get to try it first so they can “see how we respond.” Something that could “switch things off for a while” — help us not freak out over food or blow up like balloons. He said celebrities use it, so it definitely works.
He said it was completely my choice.
And honestly? For the first time in forever, it felt like someone actually believed me. Like someone finally understands how disgusting I feel and wants to help instead of telling me I’m imagining it. So, of course I said yes. Why wouldn’t I?
To be clear, none of that happened. No doctor ever offered me an experimental drug at 14 to “switch off” my body’s development. And thank God for that. But let me be absolutely clear: if he had, I would have said yes instantly. Because I was a terrified child — obsessive, self-loathing, drowning in distortions and dysmorphia I couldn’t escape. I had lost my period from being underweight, yet all I could see in the mirror were rolls that didn’t exist. I would have swallowed any so-called “pause button” that promised to stop my body from changing.
That diary isn’t real, but the mindset was — and that is the part that should make every reader recoil. Because the children being recruited into the PATHWAYS puberty-blocker trial sound exactly like that girl. The “incongruence” is different — related to sex, not weight — but the vulnerability is identical: the panic, the obsession, the absolute faith that their bodies are betraying them.
Now imagine the headlines if the government proposed drug trials for children with “weight incongruence”. Ten-year-olds given GLP-1 drugs to freeze development until their panic subsided. The public would be rightly horrified.
So, why is there no national outcry when the state proposes the same logic, but with sex instead of size? Why does this Government deem it acceptable to treat deeply distressed children like guinea pigs?
This trial is not happening in a vacuum. The Cass Review and multiple paediatric studies show that young people referred for “gender care” are overwhelmingly those already struggling: children with eating disorders, severe body-image disturbance, autism, trauma, internalised homophobia, and simply just same-sex attracted adolescents — all vastly over-represented in gender clinics. The very children most likely to misinterpret distress as identity.
And yet these are the minors Wes Streeting wants to recruit into PATHWAYS: a fresh round of puberty-suppressing experiments despite NICE concluding the evidence for safety and efficiency of blockers is “exceptionally weak,” and despite well-documented risks — reduced bone density, impaired sexual development, disrupted cognitive maturation, and potential infertility.
We already ran this experiment already, just unlabelled and unsupervised. The results were damning: no reliable mental-health improvement, no reduction in dysphoria, no proven long-term benefits. And now we’re doing it again, but with a government stamp.
This isn’t progressive healthcare. It is a state-sanctioned experiment on the most fragile children we have
Let’s be honest: compliance from a distressed 12-year-old is not consent. Not under Gillick. Not under Montgomery. Not under any ethical standard ever designed to protect children. The Declaration of Helsinki explicitly forbids enrolling vulnerable minors in research where risks outweigh potential benefits. PATHWAYS violates that principle at every single point.
This isn’t progressive healthcare. It is a state-sanctioned experiment on the most fragile children we have — same-sex attracted kids, autistic kids, traumatised kids, children who need support and safeguarding, not endocrine suppression and medicalisation.
If your instinct reading that diary was “this child needed protection, not medication,” then you already understand the moral catastrophe unfolding.
The teenagers pushed onto blockers are not stable, informed decision-makers. They are frightened, obsessive, convinced their bodies are wrong, exactly like the voice in that diary. Exactly like my voice at 14. Instead of grounding them in reality, adults are willing to turn them into subjects of a pharmacological trial.
A child cannot volunteer to be a lab rat. Not for weight. Not for identity. Not for anything.
I do not oppose this trial because I want distressed children to suffer. I oppose it because I know, intimately, that if someone had offered me a “pause button” for the distress and discomfort of my developing body at 14, it would have cemented my delusion and destroyed me. And yet clinicians and government are prepared to do exactly that to gender-distressed children. That is not care. It is catastrophic, preventable harm. The time to object is now.
