They’re gone! Puberty blockers for gender-distressed kids get banned in New Zealand

It's been a long time coming, but now it's done.

The news is out. Yesterday – 19^th November 2025 – New Zealand’s government announced new safeguarding measures for the prescribing of puberty blockers.¹

In the announcement, they state that gonadotropin-releasing hormone analogues, used to block puberty as well as having other uses, will “remain available for patients who need them for conditions such as early-onset puberty, endometriosis, or prostate cancer, where there is strong clinical evidence of benefit.”

But, for gender-nonconforming kids who’ve been encouraged to believe they’re in the wrong-sexed body, and blocking their puberty will lead to a successful change of that sex, NZ’s Ministry of Health found “there is a lack of high-quality evidence that demonstrates the benefits or risks ….. for the treatment of gender dysphoria or incongruence”.

In his statement on X, the Minister for Health, Simeon Brown, referred to the Cass Review, commissioned by the UK’s National Health Service, as being influential on the decision. NZ’s Ministry of Health reached the same conclusion in November 2024 as the Cass Review, that the evidence for blocking kids’ puberty, over and above early onset puberty, was very shaky indeed, and the so-called ‘benefits’ of doing so were highly disputable.

Why it took a year after the Ministry of Health reached that conclusion to make the announcement to ban puberty blockers here in NZ, alongside the UK, Sweden, Finland, and Norway, can only be guessed at. I expect there may have been much wrangling amongst MPs about whether to implement a ban, or not, depending on the prevalence of ‘trans kids’ in their lives, whether close or more removed. However, Simeon Brown made it clear in his statement that this was a clinical decision, not a political one.

Will successive governments reverse this decision? There’s no doubt they’ll be aggressively lobbied by transactivist groups to do so. NZ First, the party that pushed hard for a puberty blocker ban for gender-distressed kids, is not under any illusions that these transactivist groups will be incensed, and already planning an onslaught of lobbying even the current government to reverse it.

In NZ First’s own announcement on their website and email to members, Casey Costello, an Associate Minister for Health, says: “You and I both know this war is far from over. The same activists who flooded the system with ideology won’t give up quietly. They’re already drafting their press releases, lobbying MPs, whipping the media into a frenzy, and preparing their next campaign to get these dangerous drugs back into children.”

And, indeed, the indications are already there.

In RNZ’s article about the ban, Jennifer Shields, a man who says he’s a woman, and head of transactivist lobby group Qtopia, as well as president of PATHA ( Professional Association for Transgender Health Aotearoa) says it will have a “devastating impact on the lives and wellbeing of our transgender and gender diverse young people”.

Of course he’d say that – alarmist messaging from transactivists’ lobby groups has been their bread and butter for a very long time, with nothing to substantiate it apart from poorly conducted self-selecting surveys, which too many health professionals have bought into as ‘evidence’ to back up what they want to believe.

Dr Dame Sue Bagshaw, for example, (once) widely-respected for her work in youth health, and interviewed on Newstalk this morning, is still firmly of the opinion that puberty blockers are “very safe” and there “have been no disasters so far”, and doesn’t like the “political influences on what could be a life-saving medicine”.

Clearly, the stories from detransitioners, as told by Issy and Zara, don’t constitute a “disaster” in her view.

Naturally, PATHA was quick to condemn the Cass Review when it came out, as the findings definitely weren’t in the best interest of the group’s foundations of shonky science. In a social media message from ‘Jennifer’, it seems that transactivists had been confident to date that they had the government and medical bodies in their pockets, and will do so again.

The amusingly self-important transactivist, Paul Thistoll, also rattles off his raggedy reckons about the banning of puberty blockers. In the usual manner of the context-deficient, he is blind to the context of how and when it would be right to prescribe puberty blockers to kids. No surprises there. However, I expect he’s correct about the pushback, as Casey Costello and all of us foresee.

Governments are no strangers to fallout from their decisions, though, and the NZ government will not be naïve about what will come their way from this one. The inboxes of certain MPs will already be flooded with condemnatory emails. What will be interesting is to see how much the Opposition do or don’t condemn this decision. We will hear in due course. But, whatever ensues, NZ must hold the line for the sake of our kids.

Some very good articles, blogposts, and media releases have already been written about NZ’s ban on puberty blockers. Here are some -

Puberty Blockers BANNED – by Ani O’Brien

Red-letter day in NZ – by Resist Gender Education

Genspect New Zealand welcomes the Final Report by Dr Hilary Cass following the closure of the UK Tavistock Gender Identity Clinic by the NHS – by Genspect NZ

• ¹New safeguards for puberty blocker prescribing

Header photo by Alexander Grey