Joe Robertson

“I support an individual’s freedom to choose to live their life in whichever manner they want, subject only to the law. That includes someone’s right to want to live a life in a different gender identity to that which they were born with. But this debate is not about that; it is about administering powerful drugs to children. Although I have no direct experience of what it is like to want to live a life as somebody with a different gender identity, I have represented parents in the family court disputing their child’s gender identity—in one case, a child under that age of 10—in legal proceedings. There is an absolutist argument that I want reject: the argument that this is only a clinical question, and that politicians, decision makers and the Government must follow clinical advice. The clinical advice itself is disputed, but I accept the weight that the Government have placed on the Cass review, which was commissioned under the previous Government. It is right that the current Government place weight on that. This is much more than a clinical question, though—it is an ethical question, a moral question and a legal question—and the issues that need to be grappled with fall on the shoulders of the elected Members in this place. I want to explore one of the issues that I think is fundamental: the issue of consent. What can consent mean when we are talking about young children? What can it mean when we are talking about a parent giving consent for something to happen to their child? The issue of consent is not new. We have the legal age of consent for engaging in sexual activity. Society, through this place and the courts, has decided that children should not be engaging in sexual activity under the age of 16. That is not a fundamentally clinical issue; it is an issue around the emotional, psychological, moral and ethical impact on a child who does not fully understand what they are getting themselves into. When it comes to a child under 13, we have a law that says consent is impossible. Under 13, there is no such thing as consent to sexual activity; it amounts to what we might term statutory rape. However, in the trial we are talking about today, children under the age of 13—at the age of 12—are going to be asked if they have engaged in oral sex in the last year. That is something that is illegal—something that they cannot consent to by law. Why are they being asked a question like that in these clinical trials? I ask the Minister to address that point directly. Plainly, consent is meaningful only if a child understands all the ramifications. I challenge anyone to stand up and back the idea that a child under the age of 13, for example, understands what it is like to give up the possibility of fertility, to live a life in a different gender and to really understand, at that age, what gender means in its adult entirety. I turn now to the role of the parent. What parent can possibly say whether their child has been able to grapple with those issues in any meaningful way? They may be better placed than anyone else, but that does not mean that they can really form a judgment or view. After all, it would be preposterous to suggest that an adult could consent to their own child engaging in sexual activity, so how can they possibly consent to a child grappling with those ideas such that they administer a powerful drug to suppress their development and puberty? We have a Government who have taken the view, which I welcome, that an adult cannot possibly consent to their own child having a social media account because they are not in a position to assess all the harms. How, by extension, can they say that an adult is in a position to consent to their child taking powerful drugs that will suppress their puberty and sexual development? It lacks any sort of coherence. I urge the Government to think again.”