History tells us that denying safe, properly regulated access to abortion causes women to seek out dangerous unregulated access. In the UK we effectively deny safe, properly regulated access to reversible puberty blockers. So children seek out other access which is less safe.
And it's not only that trans children's access to reversible puberty blockers carries unnecessary risk. It's also that their difficulties in accessing blockers drive some to move more quickly to Stage III (after therapy and blockers) of partially irreversible cross-sex hormones.
If you don't have reversible 'blockers' during puberty the shape and form of your body changes in ways that are both highly distressing to you and physically irreversible. So the families of trans children I speak to don't feel they have a choice about taking reversible blockers.
All of this is understood in every developed liberal healthcare system in the world. The international WPATH guidelines have existed since 1979. Only in the UK do a small group of politically motivated hobbyists dominate our mainstream media and override the views of experts.
The Times has long run an ignorant, and I would say often intellectually dishonest, campaign effectively to close down safe NHS routes to puberty blockers. So it is rather rich to see it here clutch its pearls at the inevitable, if undesirable, consequence of its own campaigning. 
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