APANZ – the Association of Psychotherapists Aotearoa New Zealand strongly opposes the New Zealand Government’s decision to stop new prescriptions of puberty blockers for transgender and gender-diverse young people. The Government’s decision to stop new prescriptions of puberty blockers for transgender and gender-diverse young people is dangerous, discriminatory, and not supported by evidence or clinical expertise.
Judgements and decisions around prescribing puberty blocker medications are clinical decisions which involve important and complex considerations. As with all medications, the proper people to be assessing the appropriateness of their use are clinicians in collaboration with young people and their families. It is wrong and dangerous for politicians to override the expertise of psychotherapeutic, psychological and medical professionals and exert control over such significant clinical decisions.
Furthermore, the ban has numerous other troubling and questionable aspects.
This ban affects only trans youth — even though the same medicines remain fully available for conditions like early puberty, endometriosis, and prostate cancer. The government’s decision further marginalises a group of people who already experience disproportionate rates of discrimination, violence and adverse mental health outcomes.
The Ministry of Health is fully aware of New Zealand’s disastrous youth suicide rate, which, as reported by UNICEF in 2020, is the second worst in the developed world at 14.9 deaths per 100,000 adolescents. This rate is more than twice the average among the 41 OECD countries surveyed (6.5 deaths per 100,000 adolescents). Further, we know that trans and gender diverse youth are amongst the most vulnerable to self-harm and suicide (https://countingourselves.nz/). Research into the effects of a similar ban on puberty blockers in the UK found that this significantly increased these risks for trans youth and resulted in a myriad of other negative impacts on mental health (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09589236.2025.2521699)
We are therefore drawn to an inevitable conclusion that the decision to ban puberty blockers is about political benefit and appealing to prejudice and misunderstanding, rather than protecting the needs of the most vulnerable in society.
The Government claims it is acting “out of caution” because long-term evidence is limited. But this argument collapses under simple scrutiny:
- Many childhood medications (including ADHD medicines and some antidepressants) are prescribed with limited long-term data — yet no one proposes banning them.
- The medicines used as puberty blockers have been safely prescribed to children since the 1980s (Carswell, J. M., Lopez, X., & Rosenthal, S. M. (2022). The Evolution of Adolescent Gender-Affirming Care: An Historical Perspective. Hormone Research in Pediatrics, 95(6), 649-656. doi:DOI: 10.1159/000526721 )
- Only transgender youth are being denied access, even though the drug itself has not changed.
If the evidence truly concerned the Government, the ban would apply to all uses of the medication — not only to one group of young people. This is discrimination, not caution.
A responsible approach to policy and practice development for prescription of puberty blockers would place evidence and care at the heart of decisions – evidence gathered from data gathered scientifically, from clinical experience and from the perspectives of transgender and gender diverse youth and their families.
This development overrides clinical judgment. It denies families a say in their own children’s healthcare, and it sets a dangerous precedent where politicians, not doctors, control treatment.
This ban will not protect young people — it will hurt many.
It removes access to medicine known to reduce distress and suicide risk.
It singles out transgender youth for unequal treatment.
And it ignores the voices of the very people whose lives are at stake.
Judgements and decisions around prescribing puberty blocker medications are clinical decisions which involve important and complex considerations.
Hannah Barnes, New Statesman, 6 December 2025:
A new trial [in Britain] looking at the impact of puberty-suppressing hormones on children with gender incongruence (a mismatch between birth sex and gender identity) will begin in the new year, having received all the necessary regulatory and ethical approvals. The research, led by a team from King’s College London (KCL), aims to determine whether these drugs are of benefit to often vulnerable and distressed gender-questioning children, or if they could be harmful. Or, perhaps, both. But will the way the trial has been set up allow it to achieve that?
In March 2024, after a decade of routine clinical use, NHS England (NHSE) ended the prescription of puberty blockers for the treatment of gender-related distress, based on the findings of Dr Hilary Cass. Cass, a former president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, led a four-year independent investigation into the care provided to gender-questioning young people on the NHS in England via the Gender Identity Development Service (Gids), part of the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust. NHSE concluded that there was “not enough evidence to support the safety or clinical effectiveness of [puberty blockers] to make the treatment routinely available at this time”.
In her final report, published in April 2024, Cass was clear: “This is an area of remarkably weak evidence, and yet results of studies are exaggerated or misrepresented by people on all sides of the debate to support their viewpoint.” The reality, she wrote, is that there is “no good evidence on the long-term outcomes of interventions to manage gender-related distress”. The outgoing Conservative government outlawed new puberty blocker prescriptions the following month, and the ban was made permanent in December 2024 by the current Labour regime. Puberty blockers – which Cass has described as “powerful drugs with unproven benefits and significant risks for children” – remain illegal in the UK outside of an NHS trial context.
https://archive.ph/C4YbN