Dr Lucy Griffin of Bristol Royal Infirmary has expressed serious concern over the long-term effects of adolescents who are taking sex-change drugs

The health of hundreds of children is being put at risk by sex-change drugs doled out on the NHS, a leading doctor warns today.

Dr Lucy Griffin, a consultant psychiatrist at Bristol Royal Infirmary, says she is ‘extremely worried’ about the long-term effects the medication is having on adolescents.

She is the first NHS doctor to publicly voice fears about the damage being done by the huge increase in young people receiving irreversible medical treatments after declaring themselves transgender.

In an interview with The Mail on Sunday, Dr Griffin reveals that:

Patients are being given drugs to change sex after claiming they are transgender, despite having serious psychiatric conditions;

The NHS is ‘running scared’ of challenging requests for transgender treatments in case it is accused of bigotry.

Medicines being given to teenagers to help them change gender can render them infertile, cause osteoporosis and result in sexual dysfunction, Dr Griffin warns.

Two treatments are causing the most concern. One is ‘puberty blockers’ which are not classified as sex change drugs, but instead halt the onset of adulthood.

Their effects are completely reversible when patients cease taking them.

The other treatment involves the administration of ‘cross sex hormones’, that do start the physical process of changing sex.

Last year this newspaper revealed that 800 children in England who were unhappy being the sex they were born were being given puberty blocking injections.

Some of the children were as young as ten years old.

But Dr Griffin said that such medication was never designed to treat patients who are confused about their gender.

She explained that it was developed to halt ‘precocious puberty’ – a rare condition which causes children under eight or nine to begin going through puberty. ‘Puberty blockers are not designed for the blockage of puberty in healthy adolescents,’ she said.

‘Now they’re being used for something that’s a psychological presentation without a body of scientific study behind it.’

The 48-year-old said doctors still know very little about the long-term effects of taking puberty blockers over an extended period and added that there was ‘anecdotal data’ these drugs were linked to osteoporosis.

Children as young as 10 have been receiving puberty-blocking drugs on the NHS, file photo)

Young people who are prescribed blockers ‘almost always’ progress on to cross sex hormones, once they reach 16. Boys will be given oestrogen and girls will start on testosterone. The effects of this medication are irreversible and can have ‘lifelong implications’ for the users, Dr Griffin cautioned.

‘We know that cross sex hormones are associated with permanent infertility,’ she said.

‘Patients are also likely to have impaired sexual function. And there are other concerns. We think that [transitioning] women are at increased risk of heart disease. We know they are at risk of male pattern baldness and abnormal fat redistribution.’

Dr Griffin chose to speak out against a backdrop of a fierce debate between feminists and transgender activists over whether transgender women – who were born male – should be placed in the same category as biological females.

She attended a women’s meeting on the issue in Bristol last Thursday, which descended into violence after 30 masked trans protesters attempted to storm the venue.

But refusing to be silenced by such intimidation, Dr Griffin continued: ‘Children can’t vote and they can’t leave school, but we are allowing them to make decisions about their fertility and sexual function. My own feeling is I can’t see how young people’s health can be anything but harmed by these treatments.’

Dr Griffin revealed that she is not the only doctor worried about the ease with which young patients can get transgender medicines.

But she said that many other medical staff are ‘running scared’ because they fear accusations of bigotry, of being out of touch or, at worst, practising ‘conversion therapy’ on transgender people

However, Dr Griffin felt compelled to voice her criticisms because of the potential harm she feels is being done to patients by the eagerness of hospitals to appear politically correct.