NHS announce independent review of puberty blockers and cross sex hormones!

Going by your post Robin you had 47 years to arrive at the conclusion that transition was the right thing for you. 47 years old life experience and 47 years to develop fully comprehensive understanding of the consequences of your decision. That’s a million light years away from the capacity of a young adolescent. You have benefit of hindsight and experience - you waited and made a fully informed decision - the least we can do for children is to give them that opportunity too.

12 year olds might well be capable of articulating their own feelings but those feelings and expectations are severely limited by their minimal life experience and very narrow understanding of consequences. I still can’t quite believe that we’re even having to argue this point to be honest.

Such a good professor I professored him twice

Well professor the professor of evidence based medicine at oxford university found no evidence puberty blockers are safe, so I'm hopeful the medical community can , I dunno, first do no harm......

I don’t think this is acceptable and neither do many of the most experienced medical professionals in this area

I think its almost ironic that the very ability to look back, analyse and articulate why you think it would have been better to have done it all earlier and know for sure it was the right thing for them to do, is sometnumh they may never have had if they had done it earlier because our brains dont finish developing and maturing til our 20s and blockers lower IQ. Puberty is the "cure" in 80-90 percent of cases and that's the one thing that people want to ^deny: the children.

The way its presented as a cure all by so many people who grew up,. Got married,.had kids,and made a life for themselves. Yes they were probably suffering from dysphoria the whole time.

But do we want kids depressed about behind in their development,.losing their sexual function, their fertility, their bone density along side their dysphoria. When at the end of it, if they go the full distance their surgeries are more complicated.

And given youngsters are mainly f2m which has a sky high complication rate not to mention requires a hysterectomy in their 20s is that a risk we want to take.

Especially since the complications and.problems.of this early intervention has been televised to the world.

Brazil have just announced a review of transgender treatment of minors too.
Puuulllll.
twitter.com/CanalCorpoCerto/status/1224148484292476935?s=19

ChattyLion I started looking at who was in that group (and thinking 'far too many TRAs') before I realised it wasn't the one which will be reviewing the use of puberty blockers. It's informative to see who is involved in that group as well, though.

It's interesting reading what you've looked at though chatty, I notice there hasn't been any activity on his blog or in the twitter hash tag he uses since May 2018.

Another here who will not accept any results until I have examined the whole process. It would be absolutely foolish to take anything on faith, especially because the frightening levels of organisational capture.

Thanks Crone, my bad. I shouldn’t post before coffee

I would have been able to express my views clearly from at least 12. Use of puberty blockers and late teen transition would have avoided: (1) the indescribable pain of male puberty, (2) resolution of my ability to form real relationships at the age others could (I am straight.) (3) the loss of a beloved career through anti-trans discrimination in my 20’s and (4) one period of severe depression and 3 times in life when I seriously contemplated suicide (now behind me after transition in 2011).

Many transwomen don’t alter their bodies and their identification as female is based on their feelings alone. How can you know that all children with gender dysphoria need to undergo medical treatment? Maybe they’ll stay as trans identifying but with their bodies unchanged. Certainly better for sexual function, fertility and bone health.

ChattyLion I think there are two separate groups with different aims. The one posted earlier was set up to review how gender identity services are delivered. The one announced a few days ago is reviewing the use of puberty blocking medication and cross sex hormones in children and young people. No names have yet been announced for this group, but since it is described as 'independent' the people in the other group should be automatically excluded.

Thank you Neuro for posting the terms of reference for this group invited by NHS England, in the screenshot upthread.

I googled the Chair of this group, James Palmer (who is staff from NHS England) because having read everything on this thread, I am concerned.

Clearly it would be important that a Chair comes to such important questions with a politically open mind. Instead, there appears to be a be a heavily advocacy-led sense of priorities. (You can guess what brand of advocacy). These views and priorities are set out clearly on his series of blogs for NHS England.

I am travelling now but if anyone can please screenshot these blogs in case they are edited later, I think this would be helpful.

www.england.nhs.uk/author/james-palmer/

On the plus side James Palmer does say that comments are welcome on the blogs. I’d assume someone from the NHS England Communications team monitors these blogs, so perhaps some of the questions we have can be posted on there.

Hopefully that in turn may prompt another blog to be written about this latest enquiry. I think NHS England need to be communicating about this work as openly and publicly as possible as part of a commitment that they should be making to work transparently with as much freedom from political bias, or political one-sidedness as possible.

We all have political bias to a degree but the chairing role of this group really needs to not be actively be an advocate for any particular side of a debate. It also wouldn’t be OK for any such group to solely be comprised of people with the same political views.

I’m sure NHS England will wish to allay the public’s fears by supplying more information about this and eg they will publish declarations of conflicts of interest from the members of this group that they have invited soon..

Robin, you say you felt relief when you had surgery, you do realise that had you been on blockers, that surgery either could not happen or would have many complications.

Without RCTs, we cannot show causation, only correlation which may be due to confounding.

Robin I am reading your post and doing my best to take it in.

The hardest thing to accept about chemotherapy for normal development for me is that it is not doing nothing. On blockers you would not have experienced an absence of male puberty, but a forced halting of normal development while all your peers were going through it. This is an intervention of truly earth shaking proportions for children. I am really struck by the fact that even Dr Olsen Kennedy doesn't like putting children on these drugs. Even she thinks they are something to be on for as short a time as can possibly be achieved.

If this study truly addresses how we know whether and who this treatment could possibly benefit, I will indeed accept it. It is hard to see how it could honestly conclude that it does, given that as you say the only control group ethically available is the vast number of children who in previous generations did not exhibit any desire to change sex, though plenty of distress at puberty for all kinds of reasons.

Ah Robin whilst pronouncing on the law you can rely on your legal credentials, you cannot do so when it comes to medical knowledge. There are medical researchers on here with far more knowledge in this area than you.

I will not ‘respect the study results’; I will do what any scientist would do and critically appraise them. We know little research exists in many areas of transideology so it is likely that the conclusions of any such study will have to be heavily qualified.

You also exhibit a shocking disregard for children. But of your own story, had you been put on puberty blockers it is likely that you would have increased your self-harming and suicidal thoughts, you would have been left sterile, with no sexual function and low bone density. You would also still have been denied your career due to the fact that your IQ would have been reduced by 10 IQ points.

Be, oh so careful with allying with the religious right

I'm not allying with the religious right. I have formed my own opinions and I take no responsibility for any other person or group who might share any of my opinions, nor do I necessarily agree with any other person or group on any other issue simply because we may agree on one particular point.

Robin what you are failing to take into account is that left alone, about 80% of children suffering from gender dysphoria will desist after puberty. Put simply that means that for every child who is like you, there will be about 4 who no longer identify as transgender as adults.

When presented with 5 children, all with the same symptoms of gender dysphoria, how do you know which is the one whose dysphoria will persist after puberty?

Treating all of them with puberty blockers is doing harm to the four who would desist after puberty, and it's by no means certain that it is not doing harm to the one who might persist.

Use of puberty blockers and late teen transition would have avoided: (1) the indescribable pain of male puberty,

But you would not have been able to have GRS with a child-size penis.

(2) resolution of my ability to form real relationships at the age others could (I am straight.)

What stopped you forming relationships? When you say you are 'straight' does that mean you're attracted to men? Saying you couldn't form relationships sounds a bit homophobic.

But to say, as some contributors here do that (1) transition should not be available, (2) a ‘control group’ should be denied that help - code for being forced to go through the puberty they find so distressing - (3) children are being ‘experimented’ on, are a travesty.

Children should not be transitioning. They are being experimented on. The Tavistock know this, which is why they were supposedly doing their 'early intervention study' (whose results have still not been released).

Nobody is 'forced' to go through puberty. It's a natural process. Stopping it happening at the normal age is unnatural and a cruel experiment on children.

Finally Robin, I asked you on another thread to define exactly what you mean by 'gender identity'. Will you give me that definition now?

I would have been able to express my views clearly from at least 12. Use of puberty blockers and late teen transition would have avoided: (1) the indescribable pain of male puberty

But on the plus side, you’ve (presumably) been able to enjoy sexual function and a healthy enough sex life, plus fertility (if you have a family), and your bone density is normal and you haven’t had your risk of stroke significantly increased.

(2) resolution of my ability to form real relationships at the age others could (I am straight.)

What does straight mean here? Hard to know. Do you mean you’re attracted to males? How sure can you be that puberty blockers would have solved this problem?

(3) the loss of a beloved career through anti-trans discrimination in my 20’s

How? Are you saying the only way to resolve anti-trans discrimination is to make sure all trans people pass by having their bodies altered at puberty? Wouldn’t it be better to alter society rather than the healthy bodies of children?

one period of severe depression and 3 times in life when I seriously contemplated suicide (now behind me after transition in 2011)

You have no way of knowing whether you would or wouldn’t have suffered significant depression when the realisation of never having a functioning sex life would have hit you, or realising that despite the physical alterations to your body you still felt dysphoric, or the mental suffering associated with complications of surgery done on pre-pubertal tissue.

a ‘control group’ should be denied that help - code for being forced to go through the puberty they find so distressing

It’s perfectly possible these children will end up better off in the long run. You don’t know. No one knows. That’s why it’s an experiment.

Why, as a trans person, do you think children with gender identity issues should be subject to a level of medicine with lower rates of evidence than the rest of the population?

Why do you assume that people who are against this are part of the “religious right”? I’m an atheist who votes to the left. So how does that work?

Apologies if this is a longish post.

I have been pleased to see some comments that members will respect the study results. That is good.

And it’s in remarkable contrast to the posts from members who plainly believe they know better than medical practitioners, trans individuals and trans children. Funny that, not unlike complaints that women should be allowed full control over their bodies.

Speaking as a fully transitioned trans woman, who has an entirely settled view of her gender identity since at least 12 years of age and can look back with the relative maturity of 56 years, I offer the following observations.

I would have been able to express my views clearly from at least 12. Use of puberty blockers and late teen transition would have avoided: (1) the indescribable pain of male puberty, (2) resolution of my ability to form real relationships at the age others could (I am straight.) (3) the loss of a beloved career through anti-trans discrimination in my 20’s and (4) one period of severe depression and 3 times in life when I seriously contemplated suicide (now behind me after transition in 2011).

I have been through the counselling required to allow access to medical transition under the WPATH guidelines and I entirely support proper psychological assessment of those proposing to undergo life changing surgery, and the need to study why (a tiny) proportion detransition.

But to say, as some contributors here do that (1) transition should not be available, (2) a ‘control group’ should be denied that help - code for being forced to go through the puberty they find so distressing - (3) children are being ‘experimented’ on, are a travesty.

Be, oh so careful with allying with the religious right who, for example, also ‘know best’ about abortion rights.

And organisations like ‘Transgender Trend’, apparently run by those who understand their own prejudices so well - but little about what it is to be trans - would be best to be honest that they are a pressure group promoting prejudice and stop masquerading as advice organisations.

They could ask the clinics to demonstrate how they know that interventions are successful.

Indecent? Independent!