The Ministry of Health has been painfully slow to act over the past several years to restrict off-license use of puberty blockers, despite mounting international evidence questioning their safety and efficacy for use in so-called ‘gender medicine’, the Women’s Rights Party says.
In doing so, the Ministry handed the Minister of Health a ‘wet bus ticket’ by coming up with a range of options, rather than a recommendation based on the evidence.
The Ministry’s consultation has also been pathetically timid, the Women’s Rights Party says. As far back as early 2024, when the UK Cass Report was released finding weak evidence of the safety and efficacy of these drugs, the Ministry then noted that puberty blockers should remain available as a treatment option and endorsed what it called ‘current best practice, namely a cautious approach of prescribing with supervision from a multi-disciplinary team’.
This lack of leadership from within the Ministry of Health led to the debacle in which High Court Justice La Hood earlier this week overturned Government Regulations that would have banned use of puberty blockers for children with a gender disorder known as ‘transgender ideation’.
Some say politicians should not be making such decisions; this should be left to ‘medical experts’.
The Women’s Rights Party disputes this, saying the Government does have a legitimate role in regulating use of medicines. Under the Medicines Act 1981, Ministerial consent is required for the control and distribution of medicines, and such consent can be revoked by the Minister of Health under certain conditions.
“To be clear, as the Court found, it is the role of the Minister and Cabinet to decide what, if any, restrictions should be placed on access to puberty blockers for what Justice La Hood terms ‘gender dysphoric/incongruent young people’,” Co-leader Jill Ovens says.
Further, Justice La Hood found Health Minister Simeon Brown did not abdicate decision-making power to Cabinet or act for an improper purpose given the evidence he made the decision himself after consultation with Cabinet. PATHA had argued that the Minister was unduly swayed by NZ First’s so-called ‘woke agenda’.
Having said this, Justice La Hood found that the current Regulations were not made lawfully. He accepted the arguments of PATHA (Professional Association of Transgender Health Aotearoa) that the Regulations breached the consultation requirements of s 105 of the Medicines Act and s 19 of the Bill of Rights.
The Women’s Rights Party says that unfortunately his decision was made on spurious information. For example, he said “the targeted cohort were young people who are at high risk of seriously poor health outcomes, particularly self-harm and suicide”.
Jill Ovens says: “Numerous international studies have found that the risk of suicide is greater after medical intervention, especially when young people engage in extreme body modifications such as surgical removal of healthy breasts, which they later regret.”
Studies have found there is a lack of evidence supporting the efficacy and safety of puberty blockers, and that they inevitably lead to reliance on cross-sex hormones and in some cases, to mutilating surgery, which can cause irreversible harm including sexual disfunction, infertility, cardiovascular health, bone density, impaired brain development, mental health outcomes and even higher mortality rates.
The Court also found that the regulations breached the right to freedom from discrimination under s 19 of the Bill of Rights on the prohibited ground of disability.
“The use of the ‘disability’ ground by PATHA and others who usually argue that transgenderism is a ‘normal’ state and not a pathology, is very odd,” Jill Ovens says.
The Women’s Rights Party says it is ridiculous to find that the Government breached the Bill of Rights because of ‘differential treatment’ between those with gender-related needs and those who could access the drugs for other health conditions.
“It is not unlawful discrimination to forbid use of a medicine where it is harmful, and to allow it when it promotes health. Use of puberty blockers to prevent puberty with gender-confused children is an off-label use of these very strong drugs, i.e. it is not an approved use of these drugs.”
The Regulations in question were introduced in November 2025, and prohibited new prescriptions of puberty blockers (gonadotropin- releasing hormones or GnRH) to treat transgender ideation in children and young teenagers.
GnRH medications prevent the pituitary gland from making the hormones that stimulate the production of sex hormones and have been used to prevent the development of sex characteristics during puberty. The drugs remained available for other medical conditions such as precocious puberty and some cancers, and for children who already had a prescription for transgender ideation.
The Regulations were due to take effect on 19 December 2025, but were halted by interim High Court orders after PATHA launched judicial review proceedings. In a decision released earlier this week, Justice La Hood found the Government breached consultation requirements under the Medicines Act and unjustifiably discriminated against ‘gender-diverse young people’ on the basis of disability, breaching the Bill of Rights.
The Ministry’s botched consultation
In early 2024, the Ministry of Health advised the then Minister of Health Shane Reti, on potential regulatory options in relation to the prescribing of puberty blockers for young people.
From December that year to January 2025, the Ministry consulted on safety measures for the use of puberty blockers in gender-related health. At the time, the Women’s Rights Party said this move was “too little, too late”.
In its consultation documents, the Ministry of Health asked whether additional safety measures were needed, whether prescribing should be further restricted, whether young people with gender-related health needs should be able to receive this treatment if prescribing was to be further restricted, and what impacts there could be from additional safety measures.
“We said the questions are odd, given there were no safety measures currently in place at the time, and the use of puberty blockers (GnRH) to treat conditions related to ‘gender distress’ was not a registered use of the hormones,” Jill Ovens says.
In its submission, the Women’s Rights Party urged the Ministry to immediately take on board the findings of the damning final UK Cass Report, which found young people had been given life-changing treatment despite “remarkably weak” evidence of safety or effectiveness.
The Party criticised the Ministry’s failure to provide leadership, and noted that the Government had had to step in to push for action on regulation.
“We said New Zealand’s health authorities had been held hostage to a vocal minority who were putting our children’s health at risk of lifelong irreversible damage,” Jill Ovens says.
The Ministry’s consultation document made a particular point of inviting vested interests which promote puberty blockers, to provide input.
“This suggests that the Ministry is not basing its advice on medical and professional evidence, despite that fact that its own review found a lack of good quality evidence for the effectiveness or safety of puberty blocking treatment in young people with gender dysphoria,” Jill Ovens said at the time.
Arguing that the consultation was deficient, PATHA argued that the consultation had not signalled a ban on prescribing puberty blockers in the context of ‘gender medicine’. Indeed, the Court found there was insufficient consultation on the substance of the Regulations, and further criticised the Minister’s “failure to consult directly with gender diverse young people”.
The Women’s Rights Party says this is bizarre. “No one raised objections when the Government didn’t consult kids about the ban on cell phones in school. We don’t expect the Government to consult 12-year-olds on alcohol or driving age restrictions either.”
Ms Ovens says at one stage, the Ministry of Health quietly removed a claim from its website stating that puberty blockers were “safe and reversible”, yet the Ministry continued to prevaricate on its duty to provide leadership across the health system.
In the meantime, Pharmac data that excluded young children and older adults (i.e. includes only 12-17 year olds) had shown an alarming increase in the use of such medicines from 2014 to 2022, which could only have been off-label to treat children and teenagers presenting with gender-related distress.
The use of puberty blockers for such children is relatively new. Until the emergence of ‘the Dutch Protocol’, which set criteria for use of puberty blockers in gender medicine, treatment of a small number of mainly pre-pubertal boys had been therapeutic.
From 2014, puberty blockers were given to a broader group of patients who would not have met the inclusion criteria of the original protocol; notably adolescent girls.
The Women’s Rights Party says the unquestioning use of puberty blockers for the rapidly expanding cohort of adolescent girls already experiencing puberty was a dereliction of medical ethics.
“This should have been of considerable concern in light of follow-up studies dating as far back as 2008, showing that childhood criteria may ‘scoop in’ girls who are unlikely to persist with gender dysphoria into adulthood, and are more likely than the general female population to be lesbian or bisexual.”
As Cass reported: “Puberty is an intense period of rapid change and can be a difficult process, where young people are vulnerable to mental health problems, particularly girls. Unwelcome bodily changes and experiences can be uncomfortable for all young people, but this can be particularly distressing for young neurodiverse people who may struggle with the sensory changes.”
The Women’s Rights Party supports a holistic approach that looks at other conditions often found in young people presenting with transgender ideation, including ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorder), body dysmorphia (includes eating disorders such as anorexia), and sexual abuse.