Hillary Cass at Scottish parliamet - live

@AlisonDonut
What has been done so far by the positive affirmation model crowd does not count as science. It's political and religious dogma. It is middle ages thinking.
To even describe it as experimenting on kids, is to vastly over value and give credit that is not due. Experiments follow the scientific method of observation and repeatability. It does not come close to meeting that bar. It is medical interference and mutilation based on political and quasi-religious beliefs by an empty headed virtue signalling social cast for likes and social credit.
This is "experimenting" only in the sense of word of Nazi and Japanese "doctors" torturing people in wartime.

I am not defending it, and I think it's the biggest medical scandal up there in scale with things like Thalidomide and Purdue Pharma OxyContin. Probably worse because it affects so many young people with serious mental health issues and involves surgery that has lifelong negative consequences. People should be going to prison for the rest of their lives for the damage they have done to young people.

That useful idiots in positions of power have for political and religion like reasons done so much harm to so many young people within the medical, scientific, and political spheres of life, does not mean that proper research cannot or should not be done on the subject going forwards. It is our duty to understand what has happened, why it happened, and the consequences of it. It's also our duty to make sure that the kids who have suffered so much already get the best care going forwards, and that the same thing does not happen to future upcoming generations of kids.

What has been done already cannot be classed as medical research or science because it abandoned the principals of the scientific method for "be kind" and feelings over facts. It is all tainted. The best that can come out of it, is understanding how the idiots managed to cause so much harm in an otherwise rational society that should never have let the harm happen.

I don't know what future research on this subject would show. But I am in favour of evidence based research. That idiots have fucked things up so much already does not mean we should not do the research, it just means the idiots should be purged from the process, and protocols put in place to keep them as far away from the process as possible. Jail would be good.

And if that future research shows PBs are never a good idea, I'm utterly fine with that, and if it shows under very exceptional circumstances they can provide the least worst outcome, then I have to be fine with that too.

A ) Obviously you're not going to test something that you know is harmful.

Yet that is exactly what is being proposed here with puberty blockers.

I feel that's a bit unfair in that of course :
A ) Obviously you're not going to test something that you know is harmful.
B ) Obviously you'd want to do as much theory, lab tests, tissue teats, animal testing etc... first. Human testing comes last. There's almost certainly years of work done before any drug gets anywhere near a human.
Or at least you'd hope so. Truth seems stranger than fiction on this point. Famous example. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-35766627

My point being that at the end of the day the acid test is when humans actually take the new drug. Everything up until then counts but humans taking it and observing the results is still important.

Not just some cases, the vast majority of cases.

Cass was discussing PB for children, of course this thread will discuss that.

So sorry, shall I get my posts deleted for you?

I don't have the expertise to judge your suggestion as a researcher, but I don't see any reason to give children a treatment which will harm them physically, which will probably harm their mental health and which is still a gamble in terms of how much they will look like the opposite sex when they grow up. That's the problem for me - we would definitely harm the child whose gender distress persisted, by giving them an essentially palliative "treatment". We can't get around that fact. The only justification for puberty blockers is to delay, in the short term, precocious puberty. I believe cross-sex hormones are needed occasionally in cases of some DSDs, but for health, not for gender presentation or gender distress.

Excellent questions, @OldCrone Very thought provoking. Thank you.

You know when threads on this board veer offtopic it ends up being hard to find them, or to decide which to read.
This discussion about the PB trials is really interesting but it's not Cass at the Scottish parliament any more.

However I am all for science based research. Observation, results, follow ups for the lifetime of the patient. Collating all results for all patients, accumulating as much raw data as possible.
A new cancer drug has to be tried out on people, the covid vaccines didn't have enough time for the usual years long medical trials, so there was an element of leap of faith in us all taking that.

But this is not a disease like covid or cancer. What is the illness that these hormonal treatments are supposed to cure? What is gender dysphoria? Is it a mental illness? Why is stopping the normal development of a child's body into that of an adult being used as a treatment for a mental condition which in most cases resolves itself by the time the child reaches adulthood?

What is the ultimate aim of the treatment? Why are problems to do with the mind or the child’s perception of their place in society being treated with irreversible medication with serious negative side effects? In what ways do they think that making someone's body resemble that of the opposite sex will improve their social functioning? How does sterilising children help them to have improved functioning as adults?

If this is to be a scientific study, surely the first thing they need to do is to define the exact nature of the illness that they are trying to cure.

We do know these drugs have high side effects, which is why the usage is restricted when used for what it is licenced for.

Using them to put a child in stasis is not one of them. Using them for years is against all usage guidelines.

We know that the reasoning is because adult men wanted boys who might grow up to want to be women, to not develop properly, in order to pass more easily. The very reason was to stop development.

We know that the two trial cases were girls though, and they did this because their parents didn't want butch lesbian daughters.
None of the original reasoning makes sense when they trialled it on girls not boys.

We know that the Dutch 'trials' were being done AFTER WPATH guidelines were stating it was an OK medical pathway. The evidence as to how they made this decision is difficult to find as they have wiped the old SOC documents which changed their 'don't do it to kids' guidance to 'do it to kids' guidance.

They didn't lose their long term studies, they didn't ever plan to DO long term studies.

When the GIDS wanted to trial it, they had to go to at least two ethics boards, and they were finally given permission to trial it aged 12 and above, and they then ignored the age restriction AND DELIBERATELY only asked for approval to get patient feedback until they got to 16.

This has specifically always been designed to avoid collecting evidence because from the beginning, they knew about the harms. They have been doing this for at least a generation already.

This whole thing is an experiment they did on kids and the follow up has been specifically designed out. This is not a 'my dog ate my follow up studies' situation.

"By the end of the hour allotted for Cass’s testimony, the past had been thoroughly rewritten. None of the committee’s MSPs had ever embraced a medical pathway of unproven utility based on gerrymandered evidence at the behest of activist lobbyists for whom any and all dissenting views were axiomatically proof of bigotry and “transphobia”. They were always on the right side of history."

🔥 🔥🔥

Oufff at the final sentence! Thank you for the link, Utopia.

Alex Massie’s take on today’s committee session:

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/21d78408-5443-49ca-84c6-d02f78d2719b?shareToken=c7dd182540fcf6d28c4e4a2963fdce8d

We can never know if a treatment is any good without trying it out and observing the results.

Nonsense. We can be very certain many treatments are going to be bad without trying them out. We are not stuck in the Stone Age, we know an awful lot about biology, chemistry, etc. New drugs and treatments are not discovered by simply giving them to people and asking the ones who don’t die how they feel. You don’t get anywhere near clinical trials without masses of lab and animal work first. And the result of most of that lab work would make it totally unethical to provide the treatment to humans. That is why it costs on average over a billion dollars to bring a new drug to market, and why drug companies are so keen to push their drugs before the patent runs out.

So, unless I am mistaken, neither Harvie, Slater or person person could be arsed to show up to rip Cass to shreds? Nothing to do with having a bona fide world class expert who would make you look utterly stupid if you tried it then? Fucking cunts, the lot of them.

Well staying on my not behaving like the other side high horse.
We can never know if a treatment is any good without trying it out and observing the results. Someone has to be first by definition.
I'm hugely against the positive affirmation model of care because it's far more political/religious dogma than medical best practice.
However I am all for science based research. Observation, results, follow ups for the lifetime of the patient. Collating all results for all patients, accumulating as much raw data as possible.
A new cancer drug has to be tried out on people, the covid vaccines didn't have enough time for the usual years long medical trials, so there was an element of leap of faith in us all taking that.
What I'm utterly against is a OSFA approach based on virtue singallers feeling good about themselves and ignoring all medical best practice.
What I'm for is proper medical study with no element of politics or religion, just pure evidence based research. I hope we as a society go down that path now given the Cass report, and I hope other countries follow suit.
In "voting" for science and evidence I have to acknowledge that the medical science might not arrive at the exact result I was expecting. I think worst case it will be pretty close to what I'm expecting and very far from the current affirmation model dogma, but I do have to keep an open mind that there may be some individual cases ( and I believe that these would be very rare ) where PBs, even after the negative effects are taken into consideration, allow for the best quality of life outcome.
As to does the evidence to support this exist right now? No I don't believe it does, but it is possible that if proper medical science is done, that it might exist in the future, and then again it might not. The point being that if your science knows the result before you do the science then it's not science. I think to do the medical studies properly on this topic will take at least a generation. Participants undergoing ANY treatment should be follow up tracked for the rest of their lives to see how it affects them for the entirety of their life.

My point was that Dr Cass apparently said that hormones are the right treatment for some.

I have no objection to anyone saying “might be” about any of these treatments, but conceding that transition is the right treatment for some remains unproven.

I suspect history will conclude that, like lobotomy, the entire concept was flawed and that, even though some people survived it (or even thrived despite it) it wasn’t ever a reasonable or justified treatment.

What a tosser that woman Gillian McKay is. Still happy to harm children.

FFS could they try to be a wee bit less mortifying 🤡🤡🤡

To say that PBs could never give someone a better quality of life, even after all the negatives are taken into consideration is also a OSFA approach, and for that reason I have to reject it.

Sometimes a OSFA answer is correct, though. Banning Victorian arsenic face creams was a OSFA solution, but that didn’t automatically make it wrong. They worked as a way to make skin paler, but the cost to health was too high - so they were banned even for people who really wanted to be pale.

Even assuming there were some way to work out who is 'actually trans' at a stage where PBs are relevant (which is not.currently possible), if research shows that the best possible benefit is small and the unavoidable harms are large then saying they are not suitable for anyone will be the right answer.

Look at the state of Gillian McKay's amendment to the Tory proposal to implement the cass review findings. 🙈🙈🙈

There really is no evidence that keeping a human in a child like state, not allowing them to develop and giving them drugs that in any other instance would be stopped after a short dose due to their harmful effects, is going to be beneficial to them.

None at all!

I can't get over how people have been hoodwinked into thinking some kids deserve this.

It really does show how deep indoctrination can go.

Thanks for the thread @ArabellaScott .