If you walked into a hospital and asked, “What is medicine for?”—most people would offer some version of the same answer: to heal what’s broken.
But what if medicine stopped healing and started interrupting?
What if a medical intervention didn’t restore nature, but halted it?
And what if the patients were children?
That’s the debate surrounding King’s College London’s new trial on puberty blockers for 226 kids under sixteen—a trial whose central question is not whether puberty blockers should be used, but when they should be administered.
And that, right there, reveals everything.
Today, we need to talk about why puberty blockers are not just risky, not just poorly evidenced, and not just morally incoherent—but why they are, in the deepest Christian sense, bad medicine.
TWO KINDS OF MEDICINE
Let’s begin where Mary Harrington begins in her article Why Puberty Blockers Are Bad Medicine. She distinguishes between two kinds of medicine:
1. Medicine that heals—which restores a natural process that’s gone wrong.
2. Medicine that disrupts—which interrupts a natural process on purpose.
Restorative medicine is Christian through and through. Jesus heals. The Church heals. Doctors heal.
But the trial at King’s College isn’t trying to heal anything.
Puberty isn’t a disease. It’s not a malfunction. It’s not an affliction. It’s the God-designed process by which a child becomes an adult in body, mind, and soul.
Harrington notes that puberty is a “complex set of naturally occurring changes intrinsic to the human genetic template.” But the King’s College trial doesn’t ask whether halting these changes is moral or wise. It only asks:
Should we delay puberty blockers—or give them earlier?
And there’s the problem: the worldview underneath the trial has already decided that human nature is raw material—neutral matter that exists for us to re-engineer.
But Christians don’t believe in engineering the human being.
We believe in receiving what God has made.
NOTICERS VS. ENGINEERS
Harrington describes two kinds of people in this debate: Noticers and Engineers.
Engineers
Engineers look at the world the way Francis Bacon did in the 17th century:
The world is stuff. Stuff can be rearranged. And the job of science is to overpower nature “for the relief of man’s estate.”
There’s no form.
No telos.
No given meaning.
Puberty, therefore, isn’t a stage of creaturely development—it’s an expressive option. Something you can modify according to your inner sense of self.
Noticers
Noticers, on the other hand, see the world as Christians have always seen it:
Creation has shape.
Creation has direction.
Creation has purpose.
This is Aristotelian1Something the Greek philosopher Aristotle taught. It’s Thomistic. It’s John Paul II. (Saint John Paul the Second.2Pope from 1978 to 2005)
It’s Genesis. It’s Jesus. (Gen 1:26-283Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”
; Matt 19:4-64[Jesus] answered, “Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.”)
Our bodies are not blank canvases. They are icons—physical revelations of invisible truths. Male and female are not costumes. They are modes of being human.
And as Harrington puts it, even in the most secular scientific contexts:
“Form and ends never really go away.”
You can deny nature only so long before it comes roaring back.
THE LIMITS OF CONSENT
One of the most powerful parts of Harrington’s argument is her explanation of how our culture replaced metaphysical limits with the single moral requirement of consent.
After the horrors of the 20th century—eugenics, forced sterilizations, and the experiments of Josef Mengele5Josef Mengele was a Nazi physician notorious for brutal experiments at Auschwitz—Western ethics focused intensely on coercion. The logic became:
As long as a subject consents, the action is morally permissible.
But this missed the deeper problem.
The Nazi doctors weren’t evil only because they coerced people. They were evil because they treated human beings as manipulable material—as lab objects.
Here’s the uncomfortable truth:
If your worldview treats the human body as raw material to be reshaped for psychological comfort, you’ve accepted the same metaphysical mistake that drove eugenics.
Harrington writes:
“Never mind consent, it’s an offense not just against that child, but against reality itself: an atrocity only distinguishable from those of Dr Mengele in its having manipulated the victims into seeing it as ‘medicine.’”
That sentence should shake us.
It isn’t hyperbole.
It’s moral clarity:
If children are persuaded to view the disruption of healthy development as “care,” the wrongness isn’t lessened. It is compounded.
Children cannot meaningfully consent to the permanent interruption of their own maturation. You can’t sign a permission slip for your future self.
Consent cannot sanctify what violates nature.
THE CASS REVIEW: WHAT IT REVEALED (AND WHERE IT STOPPED SHORT)
In 2024, the Cass Review shook the UK medical establishment by revealing that the evidence base for “gender-affirming care” in minors was astonishingly weak.
It found:
• No robust evidence that puberty blockers improve mental health.
• No convincing data that blockers reduce suicide risk.
• Significant concerns about bone density, cognitive development, and fertility.
• A clinical model driven more by ideology than by science.
As a result, puberty blockers were banned in the UK—but only until better data could be gathered. And there’s the rub!
King’s College intends to gather that data.
But here’s the problem:
Cass framed the issue as uncertainty. Christian anthropology frames it as impossibility.
You don’t need “more data” to know that interrupting a child’s sexual maturation is a violation of creaturely design.
The Cass Review was a step in the right direction, but from a Christian point of view, it didn’t go nearly far enough. It never asked the foundational question:
Should we be medicalizing gender distress at all—especially through interventions that halt the very process by which a child becomes an adult?
THE METAPHYSICAL FAULT LINE
Here is Harrington’s most important passage, which I’ll read in full:
“The nub of the King’s College debate, then, isn’t over trial design, or consent. It’s a metaphysical disagreement so deep as to be irreconcilable. Is there any difference between using a drug to restore normal health in a child with cancer or premature puberty, and using the same drug to induce abnormal puberty-less-ness in a child who simply believes themselves to be the opposite sex?”
Mary Harrington
That is a razor-sharp question.
To the Engineer, there is no difference.
To the Christian—noticer, realist, creature—the difference is everything.
A cancer drug given to correct disease is medicine. A cancer drug given to abolish normal development is harm.
And Harrington continues:
“The engineers… say it’s all just ‘healthcare.’ But noticers of human nature respond: no, puberty is not an illness… It’s an aspect of our form and telos.”
Form. Telos. Purpose.
Puberty is the God-given road by which childhood becomes adulthood.
It is ordered toward future vocation, future parenthood, future communion between male and female.
To interrupt it is not compassion.
It is, quite literally, a denial of human nature.
WHAT THE CHURCH MUST SAY
So what do we do with all of this?
First: We tell the truth.
We tell the truth about the body. We tell the truth about creation. We tell the truth about the limits of consent. We tell the truth about the dangers of engineering the human being.
Second: We care for hurting children with compassion—not affirmation of falsehood. A child in distress deserves love, stability, patient listening, and the promise that their body is not their enemy.
Third: We reject the false choice between cruelty and “affirmation.”
There is a third way: truthful love.
Love that does not lie about creation. Love that does not cooperate with ideology. Love that sees the child not as an identity project, but as a creature of God.
Finally: We remember that the body is an icon, a revelation.
Your body is not a problem to solve.
It is a gift to receive.
It is a form that speaks.
It is a telos that unfolds.
Puberty is one of God’s good words spoken into creation.
It is not ours to erase.
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Psalm 139 says,
“You knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.”
To receive the body is to receive God’s work.
To reject the body is to reject His wisdom.
And to interrupt a child’s development is to tamper with what God Himself has ordained.
May the Church be a place of clarity, courage, and compassion—a place where children are protected, where truth is spoken, and where the human body is honored as the handiwork of the Creator.
Thanks for listening.
If this episode was helpful, please share it—and join me next time as we continue forming a distinctly Christian imagination for the world God made.
SOURCE: Why Puberty Blockers are Bad Medicine by Mary Harrington
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Celebrate God’s Good Creation