Newsnight tonight: Britain's Experimented with Puberty blockers

I think other documentaries specifically on puberty blockers will follow now Popchyk. They did have Louise Theroux cover it in his Transgender Kids doc but as part of a whole and it was US based.

ITV did Butterfly so not sure they will back track, Piers Morgan would be presenting if they did but Channel 4 might follow up. Either way it would be great to get exposure and whilst it's The Times really are leading the way, any follow up coverage on mainstream TV would inform more people, more parents. The TRA will peak trans a fair few more just by calling the BBC transphobic for this.

It feels good to wake up to this but I'm not sure the tide is turning quite yet.

I listened to it so I could do other things at the same time so I missed all the creepy shop dummies and stuff. Newsnight is a bit notorious for using ridiculous graphics and video set ups to illustrate their items when they have a lot of talk time to fill.
By itself with only the audio to go on, I thought it was a sensible balanced piece asking important questions!
Thanks to Deborah Cohen at the BBC, Professor Biggs, Professor Bewley.

Just watched it.

Agreed with the sitting on the bench on a set surrounded by child manequins and a creepy rocking horse was all sorts of bonkers. Why? And odd Cunk delivery from the presenter.

They didn't do that with the interview with Tony Blair which an item on just previously, so why the hell do it with this subject? This is much more serious than Tony Blair flapping his jaws.

Anyways, this is a start from the BBC, as others have noted.

The very first questions have been asked. Transgender Trend has a whole shed more questions.

GIDS stating that the feelings of self-harm noted in the study couldn't be given any weight because "these numbers are far too small to draw final conclusions". And yet, not so small that GIDS couldn't use the initial outcomes (from a study never published, remember) to prescribe puberty blockers to ever-younger children.

I wish the BBC would do a one hour program just on the early intervention puberty blocker study. No rocking horses, no creepy music, no interviews with young people who profess to be happy with blockers. Just the study itself.

I think the one of the first steps that need to be taken to protect children in the UK is for all schools to distance themselves from Stonewall's propaganda programme and to reject outright the Allsorts guidance that has been pushed into our schools.

Also did I hear correctly that statement from GIDS: including that their staff have always said that ‘blockers may crystallise gender identity’ (at around 33.28 or 45.23)

But if professionals always say and suspect this: (that their TREATMENT not their CONDITION causes the effect in the patient) how can they still offer that treatment as a ‘pause’, a ‘breathing space’, ‘time to reflect’, as a ‘reversible’ thing or all the other ways blockers I have heard them described by patients and parents?!!

I don’t know how GIDS and the private doctor counterparts to them actually present these to parents and discuss this issue because I haven’t been in that position. But in any case, how, ethically, can blockers be offered as a known ‘treatment’ at all and not stopped from being given to kids until after research has been done to investigate this question? I really wonder do the parents or teenagers signing the consent form actually understand all this doubt around this ‘treatment’.

Invasive permanent treatment is being nodded through as though it were standard clinical care (even though the evidence of benefit seems scant with big gaps and the evidence of harm seems well established)

And we know the only way this is happening is because false suicide statistics mean they’re treating death of the patient as the likely outcome of no intervention rather than seeing suicide threats as the manipulation they are.

Sorry to celebrate from such a low base.. of a government organisation actually doing their job (once alerted to it by the BBC) ... but that is a massive breakthrough, that a regulator will be chasing up on where are the results of this.

A massive part of the problem is that this invasive permanent treatment is being nodded through as though it were standard clinical care (even though the evidence of benefit seems scant with big gaps and the evidence of harm seems well established).

But at least in the few areas where there IS research happening, of course it needs to be run properly and published so others can learn from it. So that’s great the Health research authority are looking at it and not doing the usual scandalous othering that other organisations seem to be doing of ‘oh it’s trans kids’ special soft voice, head tilt, ‘of course the normal ethics and safeguarding and consent standards shouldn’t apply to their care’...

By the way, BBC, of course there are ‘children who identify as trans’ - and their distress is real and needs to be helped by professional objective talking therapies, but accepting the glib, political lobbyists’ wet dream that there are ‘trans kids’- a purely adult label placed on the child’s distress, which could actually be arising from a myriad of different issues- is part of what got us into this terrible mess. Children in distress need to be treated objectively, professionally, cautiously. Not given a shiny politicised label and rushed through with a minimum of questions asked.

I understand why it’s used as a shorthand, but promoting labels like ‘trans kids’ as a factual state of being, when the child is too young to really understand what it all means or she or he is being kept in a state of mental immaturity by puberty blockers, is an othering, political move and it shouldn’t be used as label or accepted by any organisation who thinks they are objective about the needs of those children.

All MPs should see this clip because it’s only them who have the power to investigate and make new law that could actually protect these kids.

The endocrinologist interviewed by Benjamin Boyce says that it is the actual process of going through puberty that makes 80% change their minds about transitioning.

What happened to the Nuremberg Code wrt this trial? How did it get through an ethics committee?

Who are you referring to Watchful?

wondering why someone would want to defend them, the BBC I mean. Pretty high up are you?

Haven’t read the whole thread as haven’t got the time right now, but this isn’t completely new ground for the BBC. They showed this Panorama programme some time ago which also questioned the use of puberty blockers.
www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0002tw1

"It wasn't a trans piece. It was a child abuse piece"

just watched the programme, then read the whole thread.

this jumps out.

It hasn't turned yet.

I know none of what the programme covered was news to any of us here but it's huge for the BBC to run it.

Somehow, I don't think there will be many more rainbow-hued programmes celebrating the transing of children.

The tide has turned.

Strewth - the haunting music to suggest some kind of Victorian melancholia over an evidently completely fathomable reason for all these kids being born in the wrong body?

No mention of sterilisation, underdeveloped genitalia, operations, zero sex life. Or gender stereotyping. Or the damn memorandum of understanding.

Not to mention IQ points and stunted mental development.

And was that a teenage trans girl? Acting like a 10 year old?

Dear lord.

At least it's being talked about.

But bloody hell. They have all that to come.

It suggests that she thinks transition is the ultimate goal rather than desistance and comfort in your own body.

That was not what she meant, to be fair to her. The logic is that you give puberty blockers to kids who may or may not become trans adults. If 100% of the kids given puberty blockers go on to transition, that means that you're doing your assessment of "may or may not become trans adults" much too conservatively. So if that's what's happening (and under the unstated assumption that the benefits of puberty blockers outweigh the harms for the "may or may not become trans" group) you should do a less conservative assessment and put more kids on puberty blockers.

I think that clip needed more context - I've seen that exact argument about puberty blockers and desistance before so I understood what she was getting at, but it's not obvious.

Someone on twitter made a good point when replying to India Willoughby about Newsnight.

"It wasn't a trans piece. It was a child abuse piece"

Quite!

It could be being delayed cos the study is just so badly set up and run, the study hasn't made any conclusions that they can present to anyone with half a brain.

In their Early Intervention Study report published last month, they list the 'outputs from the study'. This consists of 5 conference presentations by GIDS staff and two more on bone density and growth by other people using data from the GIDS study. No peer reviewed papers other than one which is 'in press' (still no sign of that being published).

It doesn't look good for a study which started in 2011.

@2Rebecca If I were one of the medics who signed Stonewall's MOU on taking an affirmative approach to patients who identify as trans, I'd be worried. Surely they might quite literally end up in the dock?

e.g. Scotland's Chief Medical Officer (who, btw, is an obstetrician by training - she ought to know what a woman is)

www.psychotherapy.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/UKCP-Memorandum-of-Understanding-on-Conversion-Therapy-in-the-UK.pdf

Fanny that thread is terrifying!

I think that was an excellent programme, especially for the BBC. It really brought home to me as a GP the fact that when the music stops and the negligence cases start piling up its the doctors, nurses and psychologists who rushed these kids through for ideological reasons or fear of being called transphobic who will be in the dock. Mermaids etc will just walk away saying "we thought they knew what they were doing, they're the experts, we're just concerned parents".
The staff working in this field should be slowing down the pace of transition dramatically and starting to worry.

Fanny I think it is generally accepted that trans people are at greater risk of osteoporosis in late middle age 'at the normal age that menopause would occur' as the Royal Osteoporosis Society have it:

theros.org.uk/information-and-support/understanding-osteoporosis/causes-of-osteoporosis-and-broken-bones/medications-for-transgender-people/

So yes, there are additional risks. The ROS win my prize for subtle wording. No rubbish like menstruators or cervix havers but they refer to the age at which menopause would occur. I personally like that.

And GIDS delaying and delaying and delaying publishing the outcomes of this study makes me think the situation is even worse than we have feared.

How will we know?

There is no control group.

It could be being delayed cos the study is just so badly set up and run, the study hasn't made any conclusions that they can present to anyone with half a brain.