Last week, after delays of more than a year, the
Government announced there will be no new prescribing of
puberty blockers as of 19 December pending further UK
clinical trials. The response from advocates of puberty
blockers as part of “gender-affirming care” has been
full of alarmist disinformation.
Gender medicine
specialists have warned of an increased risk of suicidality
and dysphoria in gender diverse children, and argued it
would put them at a higher risk of marginalisation and
discrimination. [1]
Women’s
Rights Party Co-leader Jill Ovens says all of this is
contestable, but there has been no attempt to balance such
claims with the evidence. And not a word from the Ministry
of Health.
The most common complaint by gender
clinicians and advocates has been that politicians should
not be making such decisions; these should be made by
doctors.
As Emeritus Professor and epidemiologist Dr
Charlotte Paul said in an opinion piece in the NZ
Herald in January this year: “Clinical experience
matters. But there are plenty of examples where such
experience has proved highly misleading, especially where
clinicians, as in this case, have a strong belief in the
effectiveness of the treatment.” [2]
Ms
Ovens is old enough to remember the ‘Thalidomide’
disaster.
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“This drug was originally developed and
marketed over the counter for a variety of uses before being
prescribed by doctors to pregnant women for morning
sickness,” Ms Ovens says. “Somewhere between 10,000 and
20,000 babies who survived suffered appalling disabilities.
The global medical scandal that followed led to greater
regulation of drugs by health authorities and
governments.”
Dr Paul has consistently said that
ideally the MoH should be making these decisions. Indeed,
the Women’s Rights Party has been questioning for more
than a year why hasn’t the Ministry had the courage to
act?
“During Covid, we heard daily from then
Director-General of Health Dr Ashley Bloomfield standing
beside the Government on decisions about lockdowns, mask
wearing, vaccinations, and so on. Not all of these measures
were popular, but the point is we had leadership from the
Ministry of Health,” Ms Ovens says.
After Dr
Bloomfield resigned from the role in 2022, he was replaced
by Dr Diana Sarfarti, a world-leading cancer research
expert, known for her “strong, evidence-informed
leadership”. However, in February this year, Dr Sarfarti
suddenly resigned with a week’s notice. [3]
It
was a time of turmoil in the health sector with the previous
Minister of Health Dr Shane Reti having been replaced by
Simeon Brown in January, the premature resignation of Health
NZ CE Margie Apa the week before Dr Sarfarti’s
resignation, and the resignation of Director of Public
Health Dr Nicholas Jones within the same week.
Audrey
Sonerson was appointed the new Director-General of Health
and Ministry of Health chief executive in early April. At
the time of her appointment, Deputy Public Service
Commissioner Heather Baggott said Ms Sonerson was a “trusted
and respected public service leader with a track record of
delivery and working effectively with ministers”. [4]
Before
she was appointed as Acting Director-General of Health on Dr
Sarfarti’s departure, Ms Sonerson was Ministry of
Transport chief executive. She previously held deputy chief
executive roles at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and
Trade, was deputy commissioner (Resource Management) at New
Zealand Police and held two deputy chief executive roles at
the Ministry of Justice. Between 2002 and 2012, Ms Sonerson
held a number of roles at The Treasury.
She started
her career at the Ministry of Health and while at Treasury
she was part of the health team. Her Masters degree in
Commerce and Administration focussed on health
economics.
In the absence of any comments from the
Director-General of Health and her Ministry, disinformation
has been spreading like wildfire. Take The
Conversation, for example. In an article by University
of Waikato academic Jamie Veale, it was stated that
restrictions on puberty blockers in Great Britain, parts of
Scandinavia, Queensland in Australia, and some US States had
occurred “in a context of political pressure and
culture-war dynamics, rather than by any new medical
evidence.” [5]
Journalist
Bernard Lane, who covers the international debate over youth
gender clinics in Gender Clinic News, says this is
“a misleading claim in a misleading article”. [6]
“The
international shift away from routine use of puberty
blockers began in Finland in 2020 and was initiated by
clinicians who were early adopters of the puberty
blocker-driven ‘Dutch Protocol’. They found that
blockers and hormones did NOT produce the results promised
by the Dutch and these treatments were being sought by a
quite different patient profile: chiefly teenage females
with serious psychiatric and other issues predating their
gender distress.”
This had nothing to do with
politicians. Finland was followed by Sweden, where the shift
to caution was initiated by the Astrid Lindgren Children’s
Hospital Board of Health and Welfare. Again, nothing to do
with politicians.
In the UK, the indefinite ban on the
use of puberty blockers for gender distress outside clinical
trials, followed the 2020-2024 Cass Review, led by Dr Hilary
Cass, eminent paediatrician and past President of the Royal
Society of Paediatrics, which was based on peer-reviewed
evaluations of the evidence base for blockers and hormones,
as well as 1000 interviews.
Yet again, based on
scientific evidence. Nothing to do with
politicians.
“It is true that a change of government
in Queensland led to a pause in blockers and hormones,”
Lane says, “but this was a rational policy response to the
international trend to caution begun in Finland.”
In
the US, the gender clinic issue certainly has a political
dimension. Lane says this is because “the Democratic Party
elevated identity politics over evidence on this question of
child safeguarding. Republican administrations restricting
blockers and hormones for minors have the science on their
side, whatever the rhetoric.”
Announcing the
restrictions on puberty blockers, Minister of Health Simeon
Brown said the New Zealand government’s “precautionary
approach”, (which had been signalled by the MoH in
November last year), mirrored extra safeguards adopted in
Nordic countries such as Sweden and Finland, and followed
the Ministry’s consultation period after the publication
of its evidence brief.
Lane asks why aren’t readers
of the Conversation told that Veale co-authored New
Zealand’s current “gender affirming” treatment
guidelines which promote blockers and hormones for minors.
“These 2018 guidelines make a series of claims at odds
with the state of the evidence – for example, the claim
that puberty blockers are ‘fully reversible’ and have a
‘positive impact’ on ‘future well-being’,” Lane
says.
It has been said by gender clinicians and
advocates that puberty blockers give children “time to
explore their options”. But puberty blockers are more than
a “pause button” in the treatment of gender distress.
Studies show that around 98% of children who take them for
this reason go on to cross-sex hormones.[7]
That
is a problem because cross-sex hormones are irreversible,
with serious unintended consequences such as sterility, and
cardio-vascular disease, among other issues.
Claims
that blocking puberty as part of “gender-affirming care”
significantly improves mental health and well-being have
been widely discredited in systematic review after review
conducted independently in several countries, writes
Lane.
“That is why gender clinicians and advocates
are now abandoning their ‘blockers = better mental
health’ claim.” Lane points to Veale’s assertion that
the actual purpose of puberty blockers is to pause unwanted
physical changes and was not to address mental
health.
Yet parents have been pressured to agree to
puberty blockers for their children experiencing gender
distress on the basis that not to do so risks their child
committing suicide. And, as Lane points out, we still do not
know the effect of puberty blockers on the still-developing
adolescent brain.
The restrictions on puberty blockers
apply only to their use in treating children experiencing
gender distress. There is no ban on use of the puberty
blockers to treat children with precocious puberty. In this
case, girls under 8 years of age or boys around 9, who are
developing sex characteristics of adolescents are prescribed
puberty blockers for a short period of time until they reach
the age where puberty usually occurs, at which time they go
through puberty and the normal changes of
adolescents.
“This is very different from preventing
puberty to avoid unwanted physical changes and give the
appearance of the opposite sex,” Ms Ovens says.
The
use of puberty blockers in gender medicine is relatively
new, and originally confined to the treatment of a small
number of mainly pre-pubertal boys with persistent gender
dysphoria. From 2014, puberty blockers were given to a
broader group of patients who would not have met the
inclusion criteria of the original ‘Dutch protocol’;
notably adolescent girls.
The Women’s Rights Party
says the unquestioning use of puberty blockers for the
rapidly expanding cohort of adolescent girls suddenly
experiencing gender distress was a dereliction of medical
ethics akin to the ‘Unfortunate Experiment’ carried out
at National Women’s Hospital on women with cervical cancer
in the 1980s.
“This should have been of considerable
concern in light of follow-up studies 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,” Ms Ovens says.
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 also looks at other conditions often
found in young people presenting with “gender distress”,
including ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorder), body dysmorphia
(such as eating disorders like anorexia), and sexual
abuse.
[1]
‘Shockingly
inappropriate overreach of politics’: Doctors slam puberty
blocker pause | The Press 20 November 2025
[2]
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/where-do-we-go-now-with-puberty-blockers-charlotte-paul/
8 January 2025
[3]
Director-General
of Health Diana Sarfati resigns TVNZ One News. 14
February 2025.
[4]
New
Director-General of Health named as Audrey Sonerson | RNZ
News 1 April 2025.
[5]
Veale J. “Puberty blockers: Why politicians overriding
doctors sets a dangerous precedent.” 21 November
2025.
[6]
https://X.com/Bernard_Lane/status/19924084744140213359?s=20
23 November 2025.
[7]
https://statsforgender.org/puberty-blockers-are-more-than-a-pause-button-roughly-98-of-children-who-take-them-go-on-to-take-cross-sex-hormones/
