The Ministry of Health has pursued an overly cautious
approach to off-license use of puberty blockers over the
past several years, despite mounting international evidence
questioning their safety and efficacy for use in so-called
‘gender medicine’, the Women’s Rights Party
says.
In doing so, the Ministry handed the Minister of
Health a ‘wet bus ticket’ by coming up with a range of
options, rather than a recommendation based on the
evidence.
The Ministry’s consultation has also been
pathetically timid, the Women’s Rights Party says. As far
back as early 2024, when the UK Cass Report was released
finding weak evidence of the safety and efficacy of these
drugs, the Ministry noted that puberty blockers should
remain available as a treatment option and endorsed what it
called ‘current best practice, namely a cautious approach
of prescribing with supervision from a multi-disciplinary
team’.
This lack of leadership from within the
Ministry of Health led to the debacle in which High Court
Justice La Hood earlier this week overturned Government
Regulations that would have banned use of puberty blockers
for children with a gender disorder known as ‘transgender
ideation’.
Some say politicians should not be making
such decisions; this should be left to ‘medical
experts’.
The Women’s Rights Party disputes this,
saying the Government does have a legitimate role in
regulating use of medicines. Under the Medicines Act 1981,
Ministerial consent is required for the control and
distribution of medicines, and such consent can be revoked
by the Minister of Health under certain
conditions.
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“To be clear, as the Court found, it is
the role of the Minister and Cabinet to decide what, if any,
restrictions should be placed on access to puberty blockers
for what Justice La Hood terms ‘gender
dysphoric/incongruent young people’,” Co-leader Jill
Ovens says.
Further, Justice La Hood found Health
Minister Simeon Brown did not abdicate decision-making power
to Cabinet or act for an improper purpose given the evidence
he made the decision himself after consultation with
Cabinet.
Having said this, Justice La Hood found that
the current Regulations were not made lawfully. He accepted
the arguments of PATHA (Professional Association of
Transgender Health Aotearoa) that the Regulations breached
the consultation requirements of s 105 of the Medicines Act
and s 19 of the Bill of Rights.
The Women’s Rights
Party says that unfortunately his decision was made on
spurious information. For example, he said “the targeted
cohort were young people who are at high risk of seriously
poor health outcomes, particularly self-harm and
suicide”.
Jill Ovens says: “Numerous international
studies have found that the risk of suicide is greater after
medical intervention, especially when young people engage in
extreme body modifications such as surgical removal of
healthy breasts, which they later regret.”
The Court
found that the regulations breached the right to freedom
from discrimination under s 19 of the Bill of Rights on the
prohibited ground of disability.
“The use of the
‘disability’ ground by PATHA and others who usually
argue that transgenderism is a ‘normal’ state and not a
pathology, is very interesting,” Jill Ovens
says.
The Women’s Rights Party says it is ridiculous
to find that the Government breached the Bill of Rights
because of ‘differential treatment’ between those with
gender-related needs and those who could access the drugs
for other health conditions.
“It is not unlawful
discrimination to forbid use of a medicine where it is
harmful, and to allow it when it promotes health. Use of
puberty blockers to prevent puberty with gender-confused
children is an off-label use of these very strong drugs,
i.e. it is not an approved use of these drugs.”
The
Regulations in question were introduced in November 2025,
and prohibited new prescriptions of puberty blockers
(gonadotropin- releasing hormones or GnRH) to treat
transgender ideation in children and young
teenagers.
GnRH medications prevent the pituitary
gland from making the hormones that stimulate the production
of sex hormones and have been used to prevent the
development of sex characteristics during puberty. The drugs
remained available for other medical conditions and for
children who already had a prescription for transgender
ideation.
The Regulations were due to take effect on
19 December 2025, but were halted by interim High Court
orders after PATHA launched judicial review proceedings. In
a decision released earlier this week, Justice La Hood found
the Government breached consultation requirements under the
Medicines Act and unjustifiably discriminated against
‘gender-diverse young people’ on the basis of
disability, breaching the Bill of Rights.
The
Ministry’s botched consultation
In early 2024, the
Ministry of Health advised the then Minister of Health Shane
Reti, on potential regulatory options in relation to the
prescribing of puberty blockers for children.
From
December that year to January 2025, the Ministry consulted
on safety measures for the use of puberty blockers in
gender-related health. At the time, the Women’s Rights
Party said this move was “too little, too
late”.
In its consultation documents, the Ministry
of Health asked whether additional safety measures
were needed, whether prescribing should be further
restricted, whether young people with gender-related
health needs should be able to receive this treatment if
prescribing was to be further restricted, and what
impacts there could be from additional safety
measures.
“We said the questions are odd, given
there were no safety measures currently in place at the
time, and the use of puberty blockers (GnRH) to treat
conditions related to ‘gender distress’ was not a
registered use of the hormones,” Jill Ovens says.
In
its submission, the Women’s Rights Party urged the
Ministry to immediately take on board the findings of the
damning final UK Cass Report, which found young people had
been given life-changing treatment despite “remarkably weak”
evidence of safety or effectiveness.
The Party
criticised the Ministry’s failure to provide leadership,
and noted that the Government had had to step in to push for
action on regulation.
“We said New Zealand’s
health authorities had been held hostage to a vocal minority
who were putting our children’s health at risk of lifelong
irreversible damage,” Jill Ovens says.
The
Ministry’s consultation document made a particular point
of inviting vested interests which promote puberty blockers,
to provide input.
“This suggests that the Ministry
is not basing its advice on medical and professional
evidence, despite that fact that its own review found a lack
of good quality evidence for the effectiveness or safety of
puberty blocking treatment in young people with gender
dysphoria,” Jill Ovens said at the time.
Arguing
that the consultation was deficient, PATHA argued that the
consultation had not signalled a ban on prescribing puberty
blockers in the context of ‘gender medicine’. Indeed,
the Court found there was insufficient consultation on the
substance of the Regulations, and further criticised the
Minister’s “failure to consult directly with gender
diverse young people”.
The Women’s Rights Party
says this is bizarre. “No one raised objections when the
Government didn’t consult kids about the ban on cell
phones in school. We don’t expect the Government to
consult 12-year-olds on alcohol or driving age restrictions
either.”
Ms Ovens says at one stage, the Ministry of
Health quietly removed a claim from its website stating that
puberty blockers were “safe and reversible”, yet the
Ministry continued to prevaricate on its duty to provide
leadership across the health system.
In the meantime,
Pharmac data that excluded young children and older adults
(i.e. includes only 12-17 year olds) had shown an alarming
increase in the use of such medicines from 2014 to 2022,
which could only have been off-label to treat children and
teenagers presenting with gender-related distress.
The
use of puberty blockers for such children is relatively new.
Until the emergence of ‘the Dutch Protocol’, which set
criteria for use of puberty blockers in gender medicine,
treatment of a small number of mainly pre-pubertal boys had
been therapeutic.
From 2014, puberty blockers were
given to a broader group of patients who would not have met
the inclusion criteria of the original protocol; notably
adolescent girls.
The Women’s Rights Party says the
unquestioning use of puberty blockers for the rapidly
expanding cohort of adolescent girls already experiencing
puberty was a dereliction of medical ethics.
“This
should have been of considerable concern in light of
follow-up studies dating as far back as 2008, showing that
childhood criteria may ‘scoop in’ girls who are unlikely
to persist with gender dysphoria into adulthood, and are
more likely than the general female population to be lesbian
or bisexual.”
As Dr Cass reported: “Puberty is an
intense period of rapid change and can be a difficult
process, where young people are vulnerable to mental health
problems, particularly girls. Unwelcome bodily changes and
experiences can be uncomfortable for all young people, but
this can be particularly distressing for young neurodiverse
people who may struggle with the sensory
changes.”
The Women’s Rights Party supports a
holistic approach that looks at other conditions often found
in young people presenting with transgender ideation,
including ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorder), body dysmorphia
(includes eating disorders such as anorexia), and sexual
abuse.
