Britain’s Good Law Project Again Claims the NHS Caused a Surge of Trans-Youth Suicides—Without Proving Its Case

GLP has falsely claimed the NHS all but eliminated access to puberty blockers starting in 2021 and that this led to a suicide surge, based on data too unspecific to connect such deaths to NHS policy.

Good Law Project’s Feb. 7, 2026 press release

Once again, Britain’s Good Law Project (GLP) has made a damning accusation connecting National Health Service (NHS) England’s imposition of what it claims was a restrictive policy on minors’ access to gender-transition drugs to suicide deaths among trans youth.

On Saturday, the liberal legal nonprofit issued a press release claiming:

“New data shows surge in trans kids’ suicides following healthcare rollbacks: A freedom of information request by Good Law Project has found that deaths by suicide of trans young people under 18 surged following the withdrawal of gender-affirming health care.”

The release reported the following numbers of suicide deaths among minors identifying as trans:

• 5 deaths in 2019-2020

• 4 in 2020-21

• 22 in 2021-22

• 10 in 2022-23

But GLP is misrepresenting the history of puberty blocker access in England in an apparent effort to buttress its long-standing claims on the matter, in particular to accuse the NHS of causing a wave of deaths by denying gender-transition treatments to youths.

Importantly, the NHS did not, in fact, “withdraw” access to puberty blockers at the Gender Identity Service, or GIDS, which was England’s only pediatric gender clinic, during the period in question. The NHS did not fully terminate puberty blocker access until the spring of 2024, when GIDS was shuttered and the NHS started the process of setting up a new system of clinics to replace it. The NHS did indeed pause access to blockers for six months during 2021. GIDS then resumed providing the drugs, ableit at a lower rate than it had previously. But GIDS absolutely did not eliminate such access until nearly three years later.

Also, when GLP and its executive director, Joylon Maugham, made similar accusations in 2024, tying NHS policy regarding blockers to suicide deaths, the organization’s claims pertained to data limited to minors that GLP said were either on the waiting list for GIDS or seen by the program. But the new dataset is based on national data. And there is no information in that data set on whether any of these youths attempted to seek care at GIDS, were seen by GIDS, wanted blockers or got blockers.

Presuming the data showing a surge in suicide deaths in 2021-22 is accurate, it is simply not possible with any degree of certainty to connect that shift in mortality to GIDS’s policies on blockers.

Also, of the 46 deaths among minors identified as trans during the four-year period in question, just 11 had a recorded diagnosis of gender dysphoria. And of that group, six had gender dysphoria recorded as a factor that might have contributed to their death. In England, to have received a referral to GIDS in the first place, a minor would need to have been diagnosed with gender dysphoria at a primary care clinic. So, provided these data are comprehensive, it is likely not possible than more than a quarter of the youth identified as trans who died of suicide had ever even attempted to get an appointment at GIDS before their deaths. Consequently, how could GIDS’s policies on puberty blockers have caused such a sweeping impact on the whole group?

The 2024 claims

GLP’s June 2024 press release

GLP made a similar claim in June 2024 about the NHS’s policy on blocker prescriptions being responsible for suicide deaths. That claim was based on more limited data than the group has on hand now. At the time, I analyzed the available data for The New York Sun and, as I reported, found it did not support the major points in GLP’s thesis.

GLP made the following claims at that time:

1) GLP said that following the Bell v Tavistock ruling in December 2020, GIDS placed harsh restrictions on minors’ access to puberty blockers.

GLP put the matter like this (bold text mine):

In 2020, the High Court ruled in the Bell case that it was “unlikely” young people could give informed consent to puberty blockers and the NHS immediately pulled down the shutters on healthcare for young trans people. But when the Court of Appeal overturned that decision a year later – on multiple grounds – the NHS left those shutters in place.

2) Following the supposed shutter pulling, GLP claimed, suicide deaths underwent a “huge increase” among youths on the waiting list for the clinic. Specifically, in June 2024 GLP claimed: “Two whistleblowers have told Good Law Project that in the seven years before the High Court decision there was one death of a young person on the waiting list for Gender Identity Development Services (GIDS). In the three years afterwards, there were 16.”

My June 2024 article in The New York un

Contrasting with GLP’s claims, I found the following:

There was a six-month pause on puberty blocker prescriptions after the Bell verdict, but after then, such prescribing resumed. In other words, the so-called shutters most definitely did not remain in place, as GLP claimed.

I reported:

Beginning in August 2021 and at the behest of the N.H.S., a newly established independent review panel began surveying GIDS referrals for patients under age 16 to see an endocrinologist for gender-transition treatment. The panel sought to ensure that all the appropriate processes had been observed in making the referral.

The Cass Review provides data through April 2023 indicating the panel approved 138, or just over three quarters, of GIDS’s 180 referrals during these 22 months. By comparison, per the Bell judgment, during a 12-month period from 2019 to 2020, GIDS referred 161 children to endocrinology for puberty blockers. So while the pace of endocrinology referrals definitely slowed after the judgment, they did not all but grind to a halt as Mr. Maugham suggested.

I also found:

However, it was not solely the late-2020 judgment that led to a subsequent change in GIDS’s methods as Mr. Maugham suggested. This shift was also driven by a Jan. 2021 report from the U.K.’s Care Quality Commission that found the clinic’s care was ‘inadequate.’ Mr. Maugham made no mention of that report.

I additionally reported that “the Cass Review suggests that at least some of the 16 apparent recent suicide deaths were among youths who were either GIDS patients and thus not on the waiting list or who had already turned 18 and aged out of the program.”

There were other ways that the data on hand didn’t seem to support GLP’s claims of the 16 suicides. I reported:

On X, Mr. Maugham provided screenshots from minutes of 2018 to 2023 Tavistock board meetings that reported suicides. But post-2020, only three such deaths were indicated in the screenshots to have been minors on the GIDS waiting list. For other reported deaths, it was often unclear whether they were adults or minors or whether they were on or off the GIDS waiting list; at least two were, however, reported as GIDS patients and two as former GIDS patients.

An July 2024 report by the NHS suicide czar, Louis Appleby, vindictated my reporting. Dr. Appleby found:

1. The data do not support the claim that there has been a large rise in suicide in young gender dysphoria patients at the Tavistock.

2. The way that this issue has been discussed on social media has been insensitive, distressing and dangerous, and goes against guidance on safe reporting of suicide.

3. The claims that have been placed in the public domain do not meet basic standards for statistical evidence.

4. There is a need to move away from the perception that puberty-blocking drugs are the main marker of non-judgemental acceptance in this area of health care.

5. We need to ensure high quality data in which everyone has confidence, as the basis of improved safety for this at risk group of young people.

The 2024 Appleby report

The new, February 7, 2026, Good Law Project claims

GLP’s new accusations hold that there was a “surge” in suicides of trans minors “following the withdrawal of gender-affirming health care.”

The GLP press release states: “For years, successive governments have denied an increase in suicides among trans youth following the withdrawal, and criminalisation, of gender affirming healthcare.”

In that particular sentence above, GLP is compressing several events in the British timeline on this issue. This includes the six-month pause on blocker access in early 2021. Then there was the resumption of access (albeit at a slower pace than before the pause), which GLP clearly, from the larger context of the press release, claims never transpired. Then there was the NHS’s decision in the spring of 2024 to end access to blockers pending a clinical trial (which the nation is currently attempting to launch, to much outcry). And finally, there were the policies passed by the conservative and then Labour government in 2024 that placed a legal ban on all puberty blocker prescribing outside of a trial, including by private doctors.

UK to Launch Long-Awaited Puberty Blocker Trial

And yet the suicide death figures that the GLP press release highlights only run throuh mid-2023. So GLP is misleadingly referring to what transpired since the spring of 2024 and apparently suggesting those events contributed to the suicide deaths in question.

The scope of the suicide death figures that the GLP now provides is quite different from the data set it used in the 2024 analysis. Previously, the data set was limited to youth who were either on the GIDS waiting list or had been seen by the clinic. But now, GLP has widened the scope to include all suicide deaths nationwide among minors determined to have identified as transgender.

Consequently, it is evidently not possible to derermine how any shifts in the availability of puberty blockers during the overarching period in question, 2019-2020 to 2022-23, may have impacted a group of minors that presumably includes both youth who did seek care at GIDS and those who did not and thus were never on the waiting list. The analysis does not break down the deaths into such subcategories and seek to draw any associations between suicide death and: a) efforts to seek care at GIDS; b) being on the waiting list; c) being seen by GIDS; d) wanting blockers but not receiving them; and e) wanting and receiving blockers.

The GLP claims (bold text mine):

Good Law Project can confirm that in 2021-2022 suicides of trans children in England surged to 22, a marked increase from 5 and 4 the previous two years. This spike follows the decision by NHS England to pull down the shutters on gender affirming healthcare for young trans people following detransitioner Keira Bell’s case against the Tavistock.

Again, the claim that the NHS pulled “down the shutters” on access to these treatments is a vast exaggeration at the very least, if not a brazenly false claim.

The GLP then asserts:

This new data was released via a freedom of information request made to the NHS-funded National Child Mortality Database (NCMD). The NCMD revealed that 46 trans children died by suicide from 2019-2025: 5 in 2019-20; 4 in 2020-21; 22 in 2021-22; and 10 in 2022-23. The NCMD adds “the numbers reported in more recent years will likely be underestimated, due to a higher proportion of child death reviews that have not yet been completed.”

In an appendix that explains the methodology of its analysis, GLP states the following about the data set:

• Of the 46 deaths among minors identified as trans, 11 had a diagnosis of gender dysphoria recorded.

• Of those, “there were 6 deaths where gender dysphoria was recorded as a factor that may have contributed to vulnerability, ill health or death by the Child Death Overview Panel.”

• Three of the 46 deaths, three involved youth who had documented gender distress.

• And “there were 0 deaths where gender-related distress was recorded as a factor that may have contributed to vulnerability, ill health or death by the Child Death Overview Panel.”

Consequently, attempts to connect the deaths of these trans youth to their gender dysphoria or distress only found that six of the 46 deaths had any evidence of such a contributing factor.

The GLP’s reporting of deaths in its main press release makes evident that it cut out part of the following sentence (which I’ve put in bold) that was published yet another appendix:

Of the 46 deaths where the child identified as transgender, 5 occurred in 2019-20, 4 occurred in 2020-21, 22 occurred in 2021-22, 10 occurred in 2022-23, 3 occurred in 2023-24, and 2 occurred in 2024-25. However, please note that the numbers reported in more recent years will likely be underestimated, due to a higher proportion of child death reviews that have not yet been completed.

The way that GLP presents this data in the press release, it reads as if the assertion that there is under-reporting in “more recent years” applies solely to 2022-23. Whereas in the appendix, it is unclear whether that disclaimer about under reporting applies to a substantial degree to 2022-23, or whether it only or largely applies to 2023-24 and 2024-25. So it is possible that the GLP has truncated that sentence in its release to falsely suggest that the decline in suicide deaths from 22 deaths in 2021-22 to 10 deaths in 2022-23 may have been only an artifact of under-reporting.

GLP reported the total number of suicide deaths in all minors during the period analyzed, April 2019 and to March 2025: 647 deaths. And yet the nonprofit did not break down those figures by year to determine whether the rise in deaths in the youth identified as trans was in keeping with or diverged from national trends.

Lastly, the report does not control the apparent growth in the suicide death rate among youth with a trans identity for changes in the number of youth who identify that way. Part of the cause of the rise in the suicide rate in this population could have been driven by an increase in the population itself.

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I am an independent journalist, specializing in science and health care coverage. I contribute to The New York Times, The Guardian, NBC News and The New York Sun. I have also written for theWashington Post, The Atlantic and The Nation. Follow me on Twitter: @benryanwriter and Bluesky: @benryanwriter.bsky.social. Visit my website: benryan.net