Newsnight tonight: Britain's Experimented with Puberty blockers

No one knows what happens with long term puberty blockers and cross sex hormones?

They know.
Pharmaceutical industry knows
Farming industry knows
Horse racing industry surely

Countries that have dubious ethical controls.
They know, how could they not know?

www.reddit.com/r/transgenderUK/comments/ch7kqi/looking_to_speak_to_gids_tavi_puberty_blockers/

Looks like ‘DadTrans’ from twitter is desperately trying to discredit serious professional concerns about dosing vulnerable kids with powerful drugs.

Apologies - I took so long writing the above that I xd with Goosefoot and Wrath.

ItsAllGoingToBeFine - I think the best background read on this is:

www.transgendertrend.com/puberty-blockers/

The honest answer is that nothing is known for certain. Emphatically not the answer we want to hear about any intervention, particularly not one with lifelong consequences. The available evidence is from children and young people who used puberty blockers for a comparatively short time period with an agreed stopping point (e.g., delaying early menses in girls until they are 12 rather than 8, as can happen).

I doubt anyone has conducted a case study of someone who has artificially blocked puberty until the age of thirty without crossing over to hormone therapy. For various reasons, I'd be startled if you could pass through puberty with an adult body in some ways but not in some other critical ways. At this point, I give up thinking I'd even know what happens to the adolescent growth spurt or the laying down of calcium in the bones, or the changes in body composition, or the cardiovascular or pulmonary systems in this context. There will be some developments through different pathways, but they will be lesser.

For children, it looks like puberty blockers are transitional until such time as they're ready to begin cross-hormonal treatment (if they decide to do this and depending on age and other restrictions within that country's medical system) and then the prescription and interplay of suppressors and other hormones begins.

Not sure this has helped.

Do they block puberty for ever?
The testosterone receptors will still be there, they might down regulate, they might atrophy.
They might not.

Coming off puberty blockers is very likely to cause a surge of testosterone.
This is the demonstrated in the behaviour of adolescent males.

Coming off long term puberty blockers is likely to cause a similar surge.

The clue is in the advice given for stopping the medication.

The advice given for coming off any long term medication is to reduce the dosage slowly and cautiously following your doctors advice.

The body will fight back strongly to retain its normal balance.

An aside,
If progesterone cream is made from pregnant mares urine (aka Premarin)

Does anyone know where they get the testosterone from? (for Ftm).
My guess is the horse racing industry ie, stud farms.

I could be wrong.

If you go on puberty blockers, than cross sex hormones, you don't go through puberty. I think the cross sex hormones suppress the natural ones that would initiate puberty.

I also think that at a certain point people go past where puberty will happen, there is a window. But I may be wrong about that one.

I know this is a bit of a detail but I have a couple of questions about puberty blockers....

Do they block puberty for ever? As an extreme example if someone was on puberty blockers until the age of 30 and then came off them would they then go through puberty, or would puberty eventually happen anyway by "breaking" through the blockers. Or will puberty never happen if blocked for long enough?

If a child is on puberty blockers and then cross sex hormones do they stop the puberty blockers? If so, does that child then go through puberty as normal (obviously impacted by the hormones they are taking).

I have to be honest, I don't have a lot of sympathy with anyone complaining about poor health care when you have someone deliberately lying about their sex because it offends them, to the point that is hindering staff who want to help them and its affecting the health of other patients. Especially when it's being insisted being trans is not a mental health issue.

Like crying wolf though when there is actually transphobia people will ignore it
Not only that they simultaneously whinge about poor health care. Seems.obky research into.positive outcomes is allowed but its terfs fault when no one knows what happens when something is done/prescribed and went wrong.

If they are complaining on grounds of transphobia that really shows how ridiculous the claims of transphobia are.

Like crying wolf though when there is actually transphobia people will ignore it.

Sherpas the lot of them

Deborah Cohen
@deb_cohen
Replying to
@zeno001
and
@susan_bewley
Interesting...I’ve spent last 10 yrs investigating unreported harms, data, research misconduct, conflicts of interest etc. You argue same standards of ethics and research integrity should be applied to puberty blockers—you argue for equity—& that’s considered biased or phobic

Of course they're filing complaints. #nodebate has been spectacularly successful in enabling this group to remove rights from other protected groups and in enabling access to children and young people in order to push their particular narrative.
The idea that this can be contested and that most adults are concerned about actual harm from untested / unethical treatments on vulnerable children must be a massive shock.

we’ll be looking back at this period of fucking about with healthy endocrinology with the same horror we now have for lobotomies.

Yes!

I'm going through the protocol that OldCrone so kindly located for me and I'm attempting to marry it up with the timeline revisions. Overall, my impression about the ethics approval is that they were concentrating on the wrong thing to some extent (the trial design) when they should have been scrutinising the evidence and ethical grounds for this.

Change society. Change it so that men don't represent a threat to other men who wish to dress differently, love differently, live differently.

Change many things but do not mess with the endocrinology of vulnerable children and young adults. The false messaging around this is pervasive and undermining the possibility for any sensible discussion (see Yaniv's bizarre views that are probably taken as biologically accurate even by those who are taken aback by JY).

Just passing on this message I saw elsewhere: "TAs are filing mass complaints re bias on Newsnight. A BBC journalist has told me that it always helps to have supportive comments, to balance out complaints, so they can show they are not "biased". If you have time, please can you leave positive feedback here (select the feedback button)": ssl.bbc.co.uk/faqs/forms

Isn't height in women associated with a higher risk of cancers. I think it's height above a certain amount above the average but it increases risk.

www.wcrf.org/int/blog/articles/2017/06/link-between-height-and-cancer-risk

quote from the above link: It is not a person’s height itself that increases cancer risk. Instead, it is the process that your body has undergone to make you tall, that is linked to cancer.

I really think that in years to come we’ll be looking back at this period of fucking about with healthy endocrinology with the same horror we now have for lobotomies.

@FannyCann
That twitter feed is now gone???

Despite the flaws I am so glad questions are now being asked in public by organisations like the BBC. It's a huge change. I wonder how the public figure "lefty dude bro" types like James O'Brien will react. I am sure he must watch Newsnight. His interview with Posie Parker a while back was embarrassingly bad and infuriating to listen to. I suppose there's enough going on politically for this to be ignored for a while, but if more comes out then it will be very hard to ignore.

"Transgirls grew extensively on GnRHa and then unexpectedly only had modest growth when female puberty was induced with oestradiol". I had to read this a number of times to realise they are talking about males. How on earth are they having an induced female puberty?! Are these actual scientists?

I can't believe that anyone who had thought about this for more than a minute can believe this, although I do think that many in the wider public do think that blocking puberty and giving cross sex hormones creates someone with all the features of of the opposite sex.

Isn't height in women associated with a higher risk of cancers. I think it's height above a certain amount above the average but it increases risk.

Yeah it's a small increase for both tall women and tall men. There was a study reported at the tail end of last year about it.

From the BBC news report...

"The report, published by the Royal Society, says that for every 4in (10cm) increase in human height above the average used in the study of 5ft 7in for men and 5ft 3in for women, there is a 10% greater risk of that person getting cancer."

So yeah if these drugs they're putting girls onto causes them to grow taller than average then their cancer risk will increase. Also, hormones play a part in the development of certain cancers. Has the risk of this been looked into? Rhetorical question as I know the answer will be no as these are things that develop over a lifetime and the drugs haven't been used long enough to know these long term effects.

I am reminded of the 'pro-ana' sites that caused a furore about five minutes ago. There was much talk of how to combat them at the time but I don't recall what, if anything, happened beyond hand wringing.

I was a user of those sites from the age of about 17-18/19. If I remember correctly they changed the sites and made them harder to access and changed rules about what you could post about, I think a few of them closed down. The remaining ones became more about recovery. It's about 12 years since I used them so my memory is a bit blurry but it was a big part of my life for some time. I see a real similarity between them and the online trans community of today.

I often wonder about PIE and how that ended. I have read about it a lot but can't see how it came crashing down...conspiracy part of me thinks that the same kind of people who were involved in PIE have infiltrated the gender movement and help push it forward.

To pause puberty in these cases, is to get started on puberty blockers before the onset of puberty.

How is it possible to preempt puberty when you can't be sure exactly when it is likely to start.

Asking what age the parents start puberty?
Basically the age could be between 9 and 14 years old and wider to include outliers.

So it's just guesswork then,
on healthy, prepubescent children.

Isn't height in women associated with a higher risk of cancers. I think it's height above a certain amount above the average but it increases risk.

what they can't say, because it's so fucking awful, is that puberty blockers are about the aesthetic result that can be achieved for males

Bernard has it exactly right.

This is the reason for pushing the bullshit suicide stats, to obscure this. Bowl pointed out some time ago that without the bullshit suicide stats, the weight of medical ethics would NEVER fall on the side of using blockers. Only threat of mortality provides any kind of justification for this kind of experimental use of drugs on children. But anyone who’s looked, and anyone specializing in this field should have looked,, knows the suicide stats hold no validity.

I'd read that too DuMondeB.

Blockers are still off licence for precocious puberty and as part of a cancer treatment pathway.

However a key difference is that it is not used as a long term solution.

The plan is always that these children will, at the soonest appropriate time, stop the blockers and enter puberty.

As far as I'm aware there are no reputable studies into the long term side effects for even transient usage of these drugs.

In the case of GD the impact is greater in so far that nearly all children who take them move on to taking cross sex hormones and thus never go through a natural puberty at all.

Therefore there is a double whammy at play here. The lack of knowledge wrt the side effects these drugs have in and of themselves plus the impact of puberty denial.

Saying these drugs represent a "safe" and "reversible" pause button is highly disingenuous.

We simply don't know what the long term consequences are - other than the fact that those who take blockers almost always go on to transition using CSH's whilst the reverse is true for those who don't.

That fact alone should be a red flag about their use when treating GD.