The judge who heads the High Court’s family division has warned of the risks of obtaining hormone prescriptions from online gender clinics, after an expert witness told the court that a teenager had received “dangerously high” amounts of testosterone.1
Giving judgment in the case of “J,” to whom testosterone was prescribed at the age of 15, Andrew McFarlane said, “There must be very significant concern about the prospect of a young person such as J accessing cross-hormone treatment from any offshore, online, unregulated private clinic.”
Jacqueline Hewitt, a paediatric endocrinologist and senior lecturer at Monash University in Melbourne, who advises government bodies in Australia on sex and gender, agreed to act as a single joint expert in the case, after an extensive search produced no endocrinologist in the UK who was willing to accept the role.
J, now aged 16, was assigned female at birth but from around the age of 12 began identifying as male and changed his name and pronouns. At 13 …
