AIBU to think puberty blocker trial is child abuse?

Should be more given that the trial is child abuse. Mental health support for a child would be better and less harmful.

Nearly 53,000 signatures now.

Thanks for sharing.

And now obtaining “life saving” puberty blockers is being pushed as THE fantastic amazing solution to being gender confused. Teen psychology is still teen psychology, they aren’t suddenly more sophisticated. When a medical intervention is presented to teenagers as “life saving” or as the obvious solution to identity related distress, it carries extraordinary persuasive power. If an intervention is described as unquestionably beneficial, morally urgent, and central to a young person’s identity, then genuine consent becomes difficult. Caution has been rebranded as “transphobic” and anyone questioning it is now the enemy. There are countless teen influencers gushing over puberrty chest binders for example, Lush was giving them away to teens. It’s marketing. Teens are susceptible to marketing. Even more so if it puts them in a special club.

Antidepressants were a badge of honour of suffering when I was teen (and a care experienced teen at that who had them offered to me at every doctor’s appointment) I also saw first hand how socially contagious self harm and depressed narratives were romanticised and glamourised amongst my peer group at school who were girls from nice families who aspired to being seen as tragically windswept. No one mentioned exercise and healthy eating and therapy.
The pill was sold on us as a symbol of sexual sophistication and we couldn’t wait to get it and show our friends.
No one mentioned side effects. I had terrible side effects from both.

Young people are listening to each other and trans influencers. They aren’t discussing side effects because that’s against the dogma of pretending puberty blockers are beneficial to otherwise healthy children. Healthy children don’t need puberty blockers or chest binders.
These interventions have been marketed mercilessly.

https://genspect.org/bathbombs-and-body-politics-how-corporate-activism-markets-medical-transition-to-kids/

And?

When we were teenagers the pill and antidepressants were glamorised.

How have we gotten to the point where we believe children are born in the wrong body and need their puberty stopped so they can magically change sex?
It’s state sanctioned child abuse.
People have lost their minds.

A quote from Hannah Barnes excellent column in the New Statesmen which raises a whole PILE of political questions and conflict of interest questions:

At a briefing on the new trial for parliamentarians on 3 December, Labour MP Jonathan Hinder pointed out that one member of the presenting panel, NHS England’s James Palmer, had been responsible for overseeing and developing youth gender services for more than a decade; Palmer had spoken publicly about it being a “good thing” that so many young people were exploring their gender. “Why on earth is he anywhere near this trial?” Hinder asked, given Palmer had been in a senior position while the many problems at Gids unfolded, but did not act to stop it. Another MP present at the briefing told me how unpersuaded they were by the argument that a new NHS trial was necessary because so many children were accessing puberty blockers from unregulated private providers. Risks and benefits had to be assessed in the safe environment of a trial, it was argued, to safeguard these children as much as possible. (This was an argument when the Tavistock study was seeking ethical approval in 2010, too: an “increasing number of UK families were accessing [puberty blockers] internationally.”)

Kids might take heroine illegally therefore we should just give it to them legal if they want it, is the equivalent argument. And yes I do think chasing puberty blockers has an addictive element from the social media side of things to it which is fundamentally unrecognised and acknowledged. It's part of the problem.

I totally understand and appreciate this and still think that the lack of disclosure is unacceptable because it could easily be generalised.

The point being that if there was nothing to see here there wouldn't be a need to hide the harms anyway. We know there are harms from the reasoning given to hide the harms and yet the study is being authorised because we aren't allowed to see the harms which inevitably will lead to more harms.

Imagine being one of the kids on the original trial and struggling with your own health issues and knowing that you have to watch the butchery of others or sacrifice your own privacy and come out alone to the press because the government won't release a more generalised picture of how it's gone wrong.

That's where it's fucked up. We assume that those who have been harmed want to be complicit in a cover up but actually it's probably more complex than that and for some seeing this continue to another cohort will be distressing in its own right.

I'm noting Kiera Bell is the one who is pressing ahead with a legal challenge in this context too.

Is it because individual children might be identifiable from the level of detail needed. Low numbers of children at each age group / gender etc?

I can see how too much detailed info would be problematic. But i can't see an issue with overall figures of Outcomes.

For example, our council wouldn't provide info for an FOI on the number of children in each age bracket that applied for different ASN school placements and the outcomes. They said this would risk individual children being identified from the data, because there were so few of each age.

Yes, it absolutely is. And heartbreaking.

Thanks, @RedToothBrush for the information, so well explained.

It's politically easier to authorise another deeply flawed study on children rather than examine existing information and reveal a massive medical scandal.

This is absolutely scandalous.

The worst thing is the reasoning given for not releasing some of this data. One of the reasons given was because it would have a devastating impact on some of the subjects. That made me sit up and notice whilst my jaw dropped.

That's not normal.

This is anonymous information. Information that wouldn't be identifying.

That means something significant and negative has happened. There isn't an alternative from that phrasing.

If the subjects had lived happily ever after they would not be devastated. If the information reveals the extent of harms done by experimentation (and covers the hospitals arses in the process) you'd have a medical scandal and traumatised patients.

A little reminder at this point: GDPR has limitations. If there is a compelling reason in the public interest on the grounds of health, there are exceptions to it where private information can be shared. The government effectively do have good grounds to push through on that - if they wanted. The fact they haven't says a lot.

It's politically easier to authorise another deeply flawed study on children rather than examine existing information and reveal a massive medical scandal.

And that's where this discussion should start and always return to.

What happened to the children of the Tavistock trial? That's what it was and was always framed as yet this is utterly forgotten.

This is rooted in a national scandal which we should NEVER step away from. Why have those long term effects been buried?

You don't bury a long term follow up, if everyone lives happily ever after.

Define 'benefit'.

This is the problem. The trial isn't really even doing this.

It's measures and the length of it are a terrible base to decide if they really do benefit anyone.

You have kids who are being told it will benefit them by a bunch of adults. A lot of the issue is that they will see blockers as the goal and will have satisfaction from this for a period anyway.

They also will have other forms of support so you won't know if that any psychological benefit is from the blocks or not.

And we already have a wealth of evidence about the physical effects of blockers on children from use in other areas and from previous trials which no one wants to show the data from (for some mysterious reason). We actually know the long term effects of blockers are not good for a sizable number of kids already.

We also know desistance rates without blockers are high. And that kids who take blockers are likely to go on to more medical interventions (so the harms of blockers may also actually include any of these subsequent treatments if the kid

So how do we know we are even giving the right children the blockers - should all those kids be in the trial? How are they selected and with what criteria? The Tavistock staff pretty much said they had no idea if the right kids were on the trial or not or if they hadn't have been drugs would they have desisted. There is absolutely no change on this point since the Tavistock in recognition of this fundamental point.

The worst thing about the trial for me, isn't that it's going ahead - it's that it's so poorly designed and is going ahead.

There has been absolutely no reflection on the Cass Review nor the findings of whistleblowers. It's just repeating the same flaws and flawed logic we already know with this preset idea that blockers will help some children. Which is a bias in its own right because the measures are so shockingly bad this study will absolutely say 'yes they help', not because it's showing anything but being of underlying patterns of how humans behave!

Anyone who has actually READ the Cass Review and the criticisms of the Tavistock properly and have even a dash of understanding of the concept of bad science and poor trial methodology can see from the moon it's complete bollocks.

If you are going to do a study on this, it needs to be shed load better than this scandalous car crash so it can actually look at benefits and harms without prejudice or other issues.

There is absolutely no comparison between drugs being trialled for life saving treatments for devastating diseases and drugs being trialled to stop puberty in healthy children.

Yes.

This is for purely cosmetic reasons, not life saving medicine.

Well it would be easier to do if all Trusts released the data they held. Some trusts refused to do this for the Cass review and I'm not sure if they've ever been compelled to release it in the meantime.

If that doesn't give people pause, I dont know what will. There are hospital trusts who will not share the data they have on the children who were given puberty blockers and other experimental treatment. How can that be allowed to happen?

They need to do a follow-up study on all those who have previously had PBs for gender distress. How hard can it be to track down those medical records? Far better to analyse existing data than to mess up a whole new cohort of healthy children. I wish these doctors would listen to people like Keira Bell who has been through the system and knows what she’s talking about.