Theresa May’s health secretary has snubbed Christian campaigners and backed the use of sex-change drugs for children under the age of 18.

The Department of Health and Social Care, led by Jeremy Hunt MP, said that young people have a right “to determine what happens to their own bodies,” including consenting to drug treatments that can sterilise them and stunt growth.

It comes as the Government considers a 2016 parliamentary report demanding “trans issues” are “mandatory” on school curriculums, 16-year-olds can change their gender without parental consent, and calling for “fast-tracked” sex changes.

Hunt’s department was responding to a petition by the Christian group Voice for Justice UK, signed by more than 8,000 people, which called for all surgical and hormonal sex-change treatment to “be banned below the age of 18.”

The group referenced recent reports revealing the number of people regretting and seeking to reverse sex-change procedures is sharply rising, and criticised the fact children as young as four are being encouraged to embrace transgender ideology in school – something first exposed by Breitbart in 2015.

“The inevitable result is that increasing numbers of children are seeing themselves as having been born in ‘the wrong body’ and are demanding treatment,” the petition, addressed directly to Jeremy Hunt, says.

Were going for the 10,000 mark today. Please sign our latest stand. https://t.co/JPu2p4bdMI — Voice for Justice UK (@vfjuk) January 22, 2018

“While some children may genuinely suffer from gender dysphoria,” they add, “it is medically well documented that expression of such feelings are frequently both normal and transient, and without intervention naturally dissipate over time.”

Indeed, studies have found that 70 to 80 per cent of children who “feel” transgender lose such feelings, and another concluded that such feelings are much more likely to persist when adults in authority, such as teachers, tell kids they could be in the wrong body.

This government response is uninformed: puberty blockers may be given at age 10. If a child progresses to cross-sex hormones at 16 (as over 90% do) they are sterilised. Is this in a child's best interests? @DHSCgovuk @Jeremy_Hunt https://t.co/ZP7nmux8JP — TransgenderTrend (@Transgendertrd) February 20, 2018

However, Hunt’s department wrote that “if children have the capacity to give consent for themselves, then consent should be sought direct from them.”

A person under 16 can consent to a sex change procedure “if they have ‘sufficient understanding and intelligence to enable him or her to understand fully what is proposed’,” they claim.

Furthermore, controversial sex-change drugs can be prescribed “generally once the patient is around 15 years old for hormone blockers and 16 years old for cross-sex hormones.”

The petitioners had concluded their appeal by asking: “If a young person cannot legally buy a glass of beer below the age of 18, how is it we encourage them to make life-changing decisions involving the surgical mutilation of an otherwise healthy body, lifelong infertility, and with a lifetime spent on sex change hormones carrying well documented health risks and shortening life expectancy?”