The wheels are beginning to spin off the gender identity bandwagon as prominent figures in the madcap LGBTQ+ lobby are exposed for who they really are. In the States, Sam Brinton who headed the Trevor Project’s signature campaign for a Conversion Therapy Ban has just had to agree a plea deal to keep him out of jail for stealing women’s baggage from airports. He stole this luggage while working for the Biden administration as its first non-binary hire… in charge of nuclear safety, no less. Nothing says attention to nuclear detail quite as much as a man who doesn’t realise airports have CCTV. 

Back in the UK the non-binary SNP Equality Officer Cameron Downing who said publicly he wanted to “beat the fxxx out of Terfs” was jailed last week for a series of sex assaults. 

Young sheep given the drugs were left with cognitive damage and increased anxiety

The cherry on the tart though was the humiliation last week of Britain’s Queen of puberty blockers, the GP Helen Webberley who had her licence to practice medicine revoked by the GMC. Despite numerous accusations she had somehow clung on to her medical licence. Until now.

Webberley’s rhino-skin refusal to accept criticism made her the Hyacinth Bucket of child sterilisation and true to form she has self-righteously dismissed the revocation of her licence as “due to a technicality”. The technicality in question was her failure to find a single other medical professional willing to act as reference, a requirement for the licence renewal. 

She first hit the headlines in 2015 when she and her husband Mike set up GenderGP, a private clinic that aimed to widen access to puberty blockers which they argued gender identity clinics were too reluctant to give to adolescents. The Cass Report would later reveal a very different picture. One in which those clinics couldn’t have been keener to give kids blockers if they’d strapped them to chairs and force fed them.

There were in fact many reasons why it was sensible for doctors to be wary of giving kids blockers, or GnRH agonists to give them their technical name. The powerful hormone inhibitors were developed in the 1970s to treat prostate cancer in older men. They later found a new and experimental use in chemically castrating sex offenders. In both cases the emotional and physical side effects were serious, above and beyond the fact they made the men in question infertile. 

In the 1980s the drugs began to be given to a tiny minority of children whose puberty started abnormally early, as young as six. This paused puberty until the child reached the normal age and the drugs were withdrawn. When it was suggested in the late 90s that blockers be given to adolescents with severe gender dysphoria to stop them going through normal puberty most doctors considered it extreme. After all no animal trials had tested the effects of stopping a normal puberty in a mammal, never mind human trials. Since then, as Cass has revealed, all the evidence suggests the downsides far outweigh any claimed upsides. When in 2020 an animal trial was finally organised, young sheep given the drugs were left with cognitive damage and increased anxiety, which lingered long after the blockers were stopped.

The Webberleys were singularly uninterested in evidence though. Fuelled by self-righteous conviction they advocated effectively for no medical gatekeeping and were soon prescribing blockers to thousands of children. 

It wasn’t long before things started to go wrong. In 2017 they were fined £12000 for running their clinic from their house in Gwent without a licence. Rather than apply for one the Webberleys upped sticks to elude British regulators. First to Spain and then Singapore from where they organised online diagnosis. What could possibly go wrong?

Everything. In 2022 Mike Webberley was struck off for “a catalogue of failures” which included prescribing testosterone to a 12 year old girl in breach of NHS guidelines and puberty blockers to a 9 year old girl he’d spoken to for just ten minutes on Skype. One teenager who was prescribed testosterone without any consultation of her medical records committed suicide a few months later. This did not deter GenderGP. In fact nothing did.

Earlier this year the Family Division of the High Court heard heart-breaking evidence from parents on the long-term impact on their children of Mike Webberley’s “care”. In his judgement Sir Andrew McFarlane quoted at length from an expert who slammed GenderGP’s approach as “highly abnormal and frankly negligent”. So negligent indeed that a girl of 15 was prescribed testosterone at such high levels an expert suggested it could have caused blood clots that risked “sudden death due to thromboembolic disease”. 

By now you’re probably wondering why these ghouls and their clinic were never closed down. How could our elites who never normally lose an opportunity to minutely regulate our lives not find a way to stop two charlatans selling hormones to kids, one of whom committed suicide?

Susie Green announced she is setting up a new clinic that will be able to evade any ban

One reason is the Webberleys have been able to cloak themselves in woke respectability. Mermaids, the charity for “trans children” that was once the darling of progressives and the recipient of vast sums of sponsorship from corporate giants like Starbucks featured GenderGP on its website prominently. When she resigned as Mermaids’ CEO Susie Green admitted she’d encouraged the Webberleys to set up their private clinic and had been secretly recommending parents contact them to obtain blockers. 

After she left Mermaids Green took a job with GenderGP raising funds to help yet more youngsters access blockers. Despite the fact all this raised suggestions of a conflict of interest the move was celebrated by the LGBTQ+ media. A headline in Pink News declared: “Ex-Mermaids CEO and GenderGP launch vital trans youth healthcare fund.” 

The mainstream media has also played its part in enabling the Webberleys. Just last year Helen Webberley was Shortlisted for ITV’s Diversity Awards. It was apparently not a joke that she was nominated as a Positive Role Model. By then she’d been a familiar face on TV for years. On the BBC’s Victoria Live she cheerfully defended giving puberty blockers to a 9 year old girl. Her logic was that it was better to stop breasts developing at all than have to cut them off later in life. The presenter Victoria Derbyshire did not bother to challenge this warped logic or ask if the girl might change her mind; a notion Webberley never seems to consider. In an infamous post on LinkedIn Webberley once related how a client knew her 5 year old son was really a girl when he asked her in a shop if she would buy him a handbag.

The story of Helen Webberley and GenderGP is a cautionary tale of what happens when medical evidence is replaced by politically biassed posturing and medical gatekeeping dismissed as bigoted. It’s one that should also be instructive for the new Labour government. It is usually the Right that chafes at regulations and wants to privatise healthcare. Yet this Wild West clinic pioneered a completely unregulated model of private healthcare that was defended tooth and nail by many on the Left. 

In a welcome move, the new Health Secretary Wes Streeting has said he intends to prevent private clinics prescribing puberty blockers. He may have a fight on his hands. Last week Susie Green announced she is setting up a new clinic that will be able to evade any ban. It’s just another sign that when it comes to child safeguarding the LGBTQ+ lobby has lost the right to be considered a serious player.