Safeguarding trans issues

It is always concerning to see and adult who did not have, from their own personal account, a normal puberty giving advice about giving PBs to a child who has a completely different experience with such strength of conviction. Especially since giving these drugs to children for identity issues has been consistently found to not provide the evidence of improving the long term mental health for that group of patients.

However, Operation: Let them speak has been going well it seems.

It's worth noting that the child in the OP has an entirely different presentation than Butterflyhatched describes. Neurodiverse, multiple co-morbidities, no suggestion that the gender dysphoria is long-standing. Give this, it is unreasonable to conclude that the clinical treatment Butterflyhatched describes receiving would be in any way appropriate for the child in the OP. To assume otherwise is a bit like declaring someone with appendicitis needs the same treatment as a woman in labour, simply because they both present with abdominal pain.

The doctors themselves admit that they have no way of telling which children will grow out of it and which won't. But the statistics do suggest that most children who are left alone do grow out of it, whereas having puberty blockers appears to make the outcome a foregone conclusion.

That means that by prescribing puberty blockers, doctors would be condemning a majority of their patients to a lifetime of poor health and being something of an outcast, for no reason.

You actually have no way of knowing whether you would have grown out of your dysphoria or not, given the chance to grow out of it. That chance was taken away from you. It shouldn't be taken away from any more children.

So even after pumping your body full of synthetic hormones, castrating yourself and butchering your genitals to make a cavity/fake vagina your gender dysphoria still wasn't completely alleviated? Don't you find that really disturbing? Why would you ever encourage other children down that path?

What does identify with the female sex mean? Surely it just means liking girls stuff? Why do you need to damage yourself so badly just because you like girl stuff? Don't you think there could have been a better, healthier alternative for you?

It's a sad and depressing story IMO, gender dysphoria should be treated as a mental disorder along the lines of body dysmorphia and i don't understand for one minute why it's not. When did it become acceptable for doctors to cut off healthy, functioning parts of their patients bodies?

Peple are showing compassion.......and they are doing that by not wanting for children to go down an irreversible path; one which will not ultimately resolve their issues.

The only treatment for a mental health issue is a mental health treatment. Your post illustrates this perfectly. Who would wish any of this on anyone?

Yet multi stage assessment wasn't what was happening.
And TRAs actively had it banned as "conversion therapy".

If they'd left you well alone you would more than likely have grown out of it and gone on to be a normal man.

Which is why it was only available as a treatment after an initial multi-stage assessment process and with ongoing monitoring.

There's no doubt that the desperate children who've been gaslit that changing sex is the solution to their pubertal angst are being pushed to the front of this debate by the cynical adults driving all this. It's hard to say no to a weeping teenager who believes the tale they've been sold that puberty isn't essential, that mental & physical health aren't vital for a fulfilling life and future fertility issues can be resolved via surrogacy.

Society is finally seeing the manipulation for what it is and are now taking on the middle aged men behind all this. As we've seen, these people will continue to emote about children in the hope that people don't look at what's really going on.

Their demands are dangerous for children & women and toxic for society. If you're in doubt about this, just take a look at the writings of those pushing this. The words I, me and my will be repeated incessantly. This is not about children's needs - it's about disappointed men's demands.

OP is it that the child wishes to be the opposite sex, or that they believe they are a girl/woman in gender terms, with "girl"/"woman" meaning something other than female-bodied?

Afaik Butters is one of those people who believe women are female, so I'm not sure whether the child would agree with them on that.

There was a strict criteria for referral for GnRH agonist treatment. It was only prescribed in cases of clear need - remember that this was the concessionary measure used to keep gatekeepers happy.

That almost all of those prescribed them went on to take CSH is a testament to the quality of the initial filtering process - these were kids who were asking for CSH treatment and got given a concession instead.

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How many children who would naturally grow out of their cross-sex identification do you think it is appropriate to harm in order to 'help' these "desperate children whose dysphoria doesn't resolve itself"?

Since the vast majority outgrow their trans phase, how do you justify harming the majority in order to 'help' a tiny minority of children?

I have said 'help', because I'm not convinced, that even in the case of those who don't outgrow this phase, the positive effects of the puberty blocking drugs outweigh the negative.

Edited because I got my negative and positive the wrong way round.

Well, it seems that some children were lying to clinicians, having been coached by Mermaids about what they should say to get the medication. So it's much better that the risk of this happening has been removed, and these children can now grow up to be healthy adults and can choose whatever path they wish as adults when they are capable of fully understanding the consequences.

And they haven't been having this treatment for three decades - GIDS only launched their Early Intervention Study in 2011. Only a couple of years before that, Susie Green had to take her child to the US to get those drugs, since they weren't available here.

As for the children's needs, what they need is proper evidence based care, not harmful medication peddled by gender zealots to prop up the fantasy of middle-aged crossdressing men that they were 'trans kids' themselves.

I beg you to show compassion for the desperate children whose dysphoria doesn't resolve itself and who don't have a nice comfortable road ahead.

They now have no options for timely immediate treatment and still have to face a culture war trying to ban their rights and protection from discrimination alongside future avenues for treatment.

Unfortunately butterflyhatched is quite an example of the harm pb do with development. There is no subtlety to what should be persuasive arguments it comes across as manipulative instead. Ok I don't actually believe there are persuasive arguments but it very much is if you don't regret not doing as they say you are very very lucky.

Yes, it is a good thing. So you must agree that giving children puberty blockers (which fixes them in a trans identity, since nearly all children on puberty blockers end up on cross-sex hormones) is the wrong thing to do.

Much better to let them grow up first, and then, if they still feel the need, to transition as adults, once they have the mental capacity to fully understand the consequences of doing so.

And that, in a nutshell, is why puberty blockers should not be administered to children. Most will pass through puberty, lose their dysphoria and travel the more straightforward road.

I know, and now the possibility of anyone else who needs this treatment (which Cass herself said she hopes will still be able to happen in cases of clear need) getting the chance I did has collapsed away to nothing.

That's a pretty grim sacrifice from where we're standing. "Sorry you can't have the treatment your predecessors had for the last three decades, but I'm afraid that your needs are less important than the chance that some children might only be pretending to experience persistent gender dysphoria and consistently lying to clinicians for years at a time." isn't ever a nice conversation to have.

HamiltonFan I hope your friend pointing out she’s following Cass recommendations to SS is enough to get them to back off. Parents that leap all into supporting the new identity make it hard for a child to say maybe they were mistaken at a later stage.

It may be worth putting in place some internet parental controls limiting what porn he has access to.

I feel desperately sad for parents in this situation.

I'm not even sure what your argument here is?

This child would clearly have had an even harder time if their dysphoria had been persistent and they'd decided to transition. It's one less thing they have to deal with in life. They don't have to worry about being the victim of transphobia; they don't have to worry about the government taking away future treatment options because it turns out they don't actually need it after all. They still have all sorts of stuff to deal with, but the list is slightly shorter and the road slightly more straightforward now.

Isn't that a good thing?

It’s scary isn’t it?

Community note:

Butterflyhatched is apparently a trans woman who took puberty blockers as a child, and who spends a lot of time on here telling women that women's rights and child safeguarding transphobic if they involve anyone saying "no" to a trans person in any circumstances.

Where on earth did Butterflyhatched get puberty blockers as a chikd? 🙄

Maybe they are male. How would you know? You often inform us that we can't always tell