Puberty blocker pause guaranteed to July, gender critical greens, a death threat and 'women's' day

Media overview of the week March 1 to 8

Outside the Royal Courts of Justice on Friday. Image: Caroline Farrow

The bigger stories of the week came at the end: confirmation that the pause in the Pathways puberty blocker trial will continue until at least July - a result of the judicial review brought by Bayswater Support, Kiera Bell and James Esses - and the Nick Wallis exclusive that the NHS is on the point of banning opposite sex hormone prescriptions for under-18s.

Informed commentators are now saying: the puberty blocker trial is all but dead. As well as a mountain of clinical objections, there is a growing public sense that it is ethically beyond the pale, and a growing political sense that it will have an impossibly toxic and cruel legacy.

The war in the Middle East meant that much of this went under the legacy radar but props to the Daily Mail for keeping up the sex and gender story count. PA was at the Royal Courts hearing on Friday and GB news provided great coverage but it wasn’t picked up by the BBC, ITV, Sky or Channel 4. Read full line by line coverage here from Tribunal Tweets and here is Nick Wallis’s Gender Blog coverage: Puberty Blocker JR stayed until July. Caroline Farrow was also posting and she interviewed James Esses afterwards. (The Telegraph did a preview piece here). Between them you get the full picture.

Here’s Nick’s story on opposite sex hormone prescriptions this morning and a potential ban for children coming this week. Great scoop.

From the Mail on Sunday

The background is that cross sex hormones for minors have been under review for some time. The future of the story lies with what it means for adult gender services, which were found by the Levy Review link to be in grim disarray with little follow up. If opposite sex hormones are banned for 18-year-olds, why not 19-year-olds? Why not up to 21? 25? Where is the evidence of ‘benefit’? The Levy Review didn’t find it, but urged an expansion and speeding up of services anyway.

Still on puberty blockers: the debate triggered by the massively supported public petition against the trial has been moved from March 9 to March 23. Note that on March 10 there is to be a day of lobbying on the issue at the Houses of Parliament.

Chris Whitty, England’s Chief Medical Officer - reported in the BMJ and the Independent - said he was ‘completely neutral’ on the puberty blocker experiment and that ‘too many non-experts are involved in trying to influence’ the trial.

Chris Whitty in The Independent

The problem is that that ethics teams, regulatory bodies and science bodies already decided that a puberty blocker trial was appropriate and have had to row back. Experts can be wrong too. He doesn’t seem to have been asked about that part.

Professor Jacob George remains ‘excused’ from oversight of the paused trial. Here’s fair coverage from Adele Waters in the BMJ which wasn’t in time for last week’s roundup. Suzanne Moore had a column in the Telegraph: ‘If you don’t hold the orthodox line on gender – trans women are women, trans men are men and non-binary is valid – beware out there, especially if you work in the public sector. The clones whose cerebral cortexes have been removed in exchange for a badge, a flag and a lanyard have had their brains filled with pink and blue candyfloss.’ and Helen Joyce of Sex Matters wrote about puberty blockers on her Substack here: Making Eunuchs.

On this: the Health Editor of the Economist, Natasha Loder, deleted her tweets about the story. Cathy Newman hasn’t . Her TV job, Channel 4 News, won an RTS award this week for Network Daily News Programme of the Year

Several outlets ran with stories about children acquiring and dosing themselves with unregulated puberty blockers and opposite sex hormones. Here’s the Scottish Express

but it was also covered by the Daily Record and ultimately the Times. This is at exactly the time the proponents of the puberty blocker trial are saying (actually did say in court on Friday) that the Pathways trial is needed to stop kids harming themselves through DIY dosing. Notably the lawyer for Pathways did not make clear that anyone currently self-medicating would have been excluded from recruitment.

The EHRC Chair Mary-Ann Stephenson issued a statement this week about widespread misinformation following Good Law Project’s failure to win a judicial review over its single sex guidance.

This corrective statement was posted on X in video form. It’s short, well worth watching and much needed. Good Law Project is unembarrassed and has revealed its grounds for appeal - see here on Michael Foran’s Substack.

The Times reported that female athletes are, in what’s widely seen as an act of indirect discrimination, being asked to pay for their own sex tests. Great expose but it got the point of the test wrong - it’s not to exclude ‘trans and DSD athletes’, its designed to exclude males from the women’s category.

Also in the Times - this story about Green Party facing a lawsuit from gender critical women, which also made GB News. Find the women here on X.

‘The organisation is also preparing to challenge the party’s “queerphobia” guidance, arguing it effectively criminalises gender-critical beliefs that are protected under the Equality Act 2010’

Women’s Rights Network Director Cathy Larkman explains on GBNews here.

The Scottish Express has produced some great stories this week. Here’s its coverage of the excessive sums given to gender activist charities as it cuts rape support funding. As ever it’s unafraid to use accurate language. The Reach style conventions must have got lost in the post.

International Women’s Day was marked in Bristol by the manhandling of Kellie Jay Keen out of a women’s event after being told that her questions about single sex spaces were causing distress. The Mail gave it a huge splash. Quite right - the footage on her timeline is shocking.

IWD 2026 has seen an unusually high number of outlets and events focussed on and driven by men. There are usually one or two but this from Cosmo was a good example of the excess this year. As everyone knows they aren’t women, there are two possible reasons - 1. rage clicks for money, which does admittedly work and 2. simple trolling, after a year which has seen global progress in the return to reality-based policy-making.

The Daily Telegraph wasn’t the only outlet to describe this sex offender as a woman, qualified by ‘trans’. But it did try to avoid pronouns. The Tel has had quite a strict policy on respecting pronouns so it’s good to see effort made to avoid them.

Lord Young of Acton and the Free Speech Union proposed three amendments to the Crime and Policing Bill to prevent so-called misgendering becoming a criminal or aggravated offence. It follows a proposed government amendment that extends the aggravated offences beyond race and religion to sexual orientation, transgender identity, sex and disability, with a new linked offence of causing harassment, alarm or distress to emergency workers. Baroness Claire Fox also spoke against.

The New York Post covered the death threat to Californian safeguarding campaigner Beth Bourne, with a thoroughly due headline: ‘Unhinged mom threatens to ‘hunt down’ and kill activist during trans kids debate in wild footage’. It names Madeline Mann, an employee of the University of California in SF (with a ‘purportedly’ to cover its bases).

On Monday Pink News launched a month-long survey on the impact of the Supreme Court ruling. It will close 16 days before the anniversary of the judgement, which is still widely flouted, with EHRC guidance not yet laid before MPs.

You won’t be able to take part on this link, which is an archive, but it is open to all, yes all, genders. We’d put folding money on this survey being the basis for its next story about trans-identified trauma over a year of ‘exclusion’.

Mini round up plus US

- Free speech campaigner Connie Shaw wrote about the horrific harassment she suffered when she gave a talk at University College London

- Journalist and author Joan Smith explained sex stereotypes to Anita Rani on Woman’s Hour. Also helpfully outlined how a man in a dress and a wig is not a woman.

- The indomitable Sandie Peggie and her daughter Nicole featured in this Telegraph interview: ‘The NHS weaponised my gay daughter to paint me as a homophobe’.

- Guido Fawkes revealed that the head of the new Fair Works Agency (in charge of implementing employment law) has a history of gender identity activism

- The Guardian published a PR piece for this Wednesday’s (March 10) Trans Mission Concert. It’s needed - tickets still available, in almost all sections.

- The US Supreme Court blocked a Californian law against what AP (along with other outlets) describe as ‘outing’ students who adopt, or who’ve been ascribed, a trans identity, to their parents. It means schools are allowed to tell parents, unless abuse is suspected.

- At the same time the US government warned states about removing children from their homes when there are disputes involving trans identification

As it’s one of those ‘things that never happens’ no doubt gender identity activists will be thrilled to know the government is working hard to safeguard against it.

- There’s still outrage in Kansas over the new driving licence rules (they have to have your sex recorded on them , not your identity). An astonishing quantity of global media space was devoted to this local issue last week and into this week.

- Joe Rogan observed that the number of people identifying as trans or non-binary dropped after Elon Musk bought X

- Unlikely as it is, the war in Iran and gender nonsense actually fused in a story this morning

It’s as bad as it looks. ‘All serving soldiers were asked on Thursday whether they thought men could apply cosmetics and wear their hair like women. They were surveyed on ‘gender-free’ changes which could see men wearing make-up with long hair or hair extensions, painted nails and earrings’. Not the time, not the time.