Transgender drugs for sale online for just £25
Children buy them from foreign sites – with no questions asked
CHILDREN who believe they are transgender are secretly beginning the process of changing sex behind their parents’ backs by buying drugs on the internet, the Daily Mail can reveal today.
As part of our investigation, we were offered a range of transgender medications online, with no questions asked, for as little as £25.
One 50-year-old mother, whose identity is known by the Mail but who wishes to remain anonymous, told yesterday how she discovered her teenage son developing breasts after ordering pills containing the female hormone oestrogen from an online pharmacy based in the US.
The drugs, which she found in his bedroom, were sent in a plain wrapper to his local Post Office in London where he collected them.
She said: ‘I noticed my son was growing “breast buds” like a young girl. I looked on his bedroom desk and found the packet of pills, with an import duty slip.
‘They had come from America to a mail box he had set up at the Post Office.
‘He told me, at 16 and in the sixth form,
that he “felt like a woman”. He thinks he is in the wrong body and should not be male. He then bought the drugs online.’
This newspaper also found DIY sex change drugs easily available online with no age checks on buyers. Scores of online chat forums for transgender children explain how to order them and which pharmacy sites to use.
A packet of pills claimed to be male hormone blockers was sent to us two weeks after using a bank card to order them online from a Thai pharmacy for £34, including postage and packaging.
The label says the tablets contain ‘natural oestrogen’ to promote ‘transgender breast growth’. It took a half-minute internet search to find them.
We were not asked about age
and no prescription was needed. On another website based in India we were offered sachets of testosterone gel, marketed under the name Cernos. It is sold as transgender hormone therapy for females transitioning to male.
The order form warned some effects of the tablets in girls, such as deepening of the voice, are ‘irreversible once they develop’.
A third pharmacy site, in Florida,
offered us a drug called Triptorelin for £25. It acts on the pituitary gland to pause sexual development in boys and girls reaching the early stages of puberty, which makes it easier for them to undergo a full transition later. Triptorelin is the same drug prescribed for some children by gender identity clinics in the UK, according to the results of a Freedom of Information request
seen by the Mail. The issue of children changing sex was tackled in the ITV drama Butterfly, in which Anna Friel plays the mother of an 11-year-old boy who identifies as a girl, played by Callum Booth-Ford. Stephanie Davies-Arai, who runs Transgender Trend, a parents’ group worried about a huge rise in the number of children wanting to change sex, warned last night the internet fuels the phenomenon. ‘It can start with a teenager going on to websites where they are convinced in chat rooms by total strangers that they must be transgender, even if what they are feeling might be little more than normal teenage angst,’ she said.
‘There are young transgender “celebrities” with hundreds of thousands of followers on internet sites where youngsters are encouraged to want to change sex and then told how to go about it.’
Transgender Trend said waiting lists for gender identity clinics are long, and it can take more than a year for a child to get an appointment for expert advice.
Miss Davies-Arai added: ‘ Children don’t want to wait so they turn to the internet.’
She demanded the introduction of parental controls to block sites that push sex change medicines aimed at children and teenagers.
The only NHS gender identity service for children is also con-
‘He thinks he is in the wrong body’ ‘It is incredibly dangerous’
cerned about drugs sold online. The Tavistock Centre’s Gender Identity Development Service warned: ‘It is completely unregulated – they don’t know what they have been taking. It is incredibly dangerous to buy these online.’
A spokesperson for the London clinic said many young people later change their mind about changing sex, adding: ‘By getting drugs off the internet, adolescents may start on a path they don’t want to tread later on.’
The service said the waiting time for children and adolescents to start treatment is between 14 and 18 months. ‘That seems a very long time when you are young,’ the spokesperson added.
The 50-year- old mother who spoke to the Mail about her son, who has now started university, said last night: ‘These drugs for trans kids are completely unregulated and any child can buy them. I want to warn families of that.
‘I have been on these pro-transgender sites. I believe my son has been brainwashed by them.’