Puberty Blockers Trial

When I look at all of this, I cannot shake the feeling that the mental health of the children involved was an excuse, not a justification. A group of doctors wanted to know what would happen if you swap from the hormone pathway appropriate for a particular sex onto the hormone pathway for the opposite sex before puberty has taken place (as they know what happens to adults) and had to create a cohort they could ethically justify experimenting on.

As almost all the children given gnrh analogues were then put on cross sex hormones, I don't think you can talk about gnrh analogues in isolation.

Some people with gender incongruence want their bodies to be more like their gender identity.

I'd rather like my body to be more like my internal image of myself (in which I am still 27, with a 23-inch waist). The NHS can't do anything about the former, and I don't expect them to sort the latter given that the level of increase above 23 is more of an aesthetic issue than a medical one and I could try eating less cake.

It's also a sign that some very bad people are powerful enough to dictate how we mistreat mentally unwell children.

Yes there are several psychological disorders based around people wanting to change their bodies.

Why would the NHS support body modification for any of those disorders?

Why would any sane society cosmetically alter children's bodies to address psychological distress??

It's a sign the culture is ill not the children.

Some people with gender incongruence want their bodies to be more like their gender identity.

In what way is making that change a function of the NHS?

Puberty blockers cause osteoporosis, reduce IQ and prevent normal maturation. This is known and evidenced.

Why is a trial needed to show whether cosmetic body modification of children is worth these effects?

Surely the appropriate trial is to work out what talking therapies, parenting skills and safeguarding procedures bring about the best result of children maturing into adults with the best physical and mental health outcomes?

"Sex they were given at birth"?

FFS!

Thanks for that link.

Once again, they are talking absolute nonsense. From the abstract:

For the purposes of this abstract, we are defining gender incongruence as characterised by a marked and persistent incongruence between an individual’s experienced gender and assigned sex.

Without a definition of what constitutes "an individual’s experienced gender", this is completely meaningless.

The Plain English Summary is no better:

Gender incongruence is when a person feels their gender identity differs from the sex that they were given at birth. Some people with gender incongruence want their bodies to be more like their gender identity.

What is a gender identity? Without a definition this too is meaningless. And saying that children are given a sex at birth? In a medical document?

In the recent past, doctors sometimes used medicines to stop puberty....The idea was that GnRHa might give young people time to think about their identity without worrying about their bodies changing during puberty.

Why? Wouldn't going through puberty enable them to establish their identity as their brains mature? Have they not considered that keeping adolescents in an immature childlike state means that they are still going to be making their decisions as children?

And why is it so important to 'think about their identity'? They can't change sex and children don't understand what it will be like to be an adult man or woman. Children don't have an adult understanding of fertility or sexual function which is what these drugs interfere with.

Children think it's all about stereotypes. Adults are encouraging them to think their bodies need modifying because of their preferences. Doctors want to do more unethical experiments on children.

However, we don’t know if GnRHa are safe and helpful for young people with gender incongruence.

On their own admission, these drugs might not be helpful and they don't know if they're safe, but the proposal is to experiment on even more children anyway.

We also do not know enough about how identity and feelings develop for young people with gender incongruence as they grow up and what treatment is helpful.

Why not? The Tavistock has already done one experiment and failed to keep proper records or follow-ups. Is this going to be any different? Why not try to track down the missing information from the previous experiment instead? I'm sure they could do that for less than £10m and it would avoid more harm being done to even more children.

There was a story in the Guardian a few days ago about thousands of children in the UK being accused of witchcraft:

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/feb/24/thousands-of-children-england-falsely-accused-witchcraft-kindoki-witch-boy

I feel this puberty blockers trial is rather like this. Frontal lobotomies were horrific, and a dark episode in the history of medicine, but they aimed to treat a real condition. Gender dysphoria is more like witchcraft - it's a made-up condition that doesn't need treating.

The irony is that most of us regard the idea of children being accused of witchcraft as an unfortunate relic of backward and superstitious cultures. Yet this idea that a boy could be born in a girl's body, or vice versa, is the product of a supposedly more rational and enlightened society. We don't even have the excuse of it being a longstanding belief of a less educated culture. We have come up with this entirely idiotic idea all by ourselves, in one of the most educated countries in the world.

Is the NHS deliberately managing a short term trial that so that the negative outcomes (fertility, brain/ bone impairment, limited sexual function etc) just can't be measured?
That way they can announce - "nothing to see - here's the evidence" and they've bought themselves "proof" to use in all the court cases where young people sue the NHS for the catastrophic damage NHS medics have done to them and their ravaged bodies, minds and lives ?

Isn't the whole, crumbling edifice of transgenderism upheld by this concept of everything being worthwhile if it makes the individual happier? Affirming an individual's desires may make them happier in the short term, but is not necessarily the best thing for them out for society in the long term. Anybody who has brought up toddlers understands this.

And 'happy' is a transitory state. You can be happy in the morning and miserable in the afternoon. How are they going to measure 'happy?'

These are v serious drugs to assess with a sliding scale questionnaire.

We know increased suicide risk has been touted as an excuse for using these drugs in children who are physically normal and healthy because there is no other way to justify the damage that these drugs do, but I was my understanding that the data doesn't hold up. Kids who are distressed about puberty (and who have been convinced that if they were experiencing opposite sex puberty all their problems would be solved) don't have a higher suicide rate.

So what does a good outcome look like?

What are they going to measure?

Who has made the decision to award this funding? Who is on that board?

@MalagaNights

The methodology doesn't make sense even if you accepted the premise.Which I don't.

Totally. Even with all things being equal, what does a patient being "happier" tell us? There is plenty of evidence of positive outcomes from homeopathic treatment, not because the pills actually do anything but because they are being validated and listened to by medical staff.

If I were a flat Earther I would "feel happier" to have people agree with me too, which has nothing to say about the validity of the underlying belief.

https://fundingawards.nihr.ac.uk/award/NIHR167530

It says it “will be subject to rigorous ethical and regulatory checks by UK regulators and the NHS ethics committee.” I can’t find a link to the latter. And, as you suggest, I find it unclear as to whether it’s been through ethics assessment yet.

I wonder who will comprise the board which will investigate the ethics of this trial? I'd they approve it, I would like to see their reasoning.

All of us here are aware of the serious harms, which puberty blockers do. How can medical professionals not know, or brush that knowledge aside?

Not only will it have to get through an ethics committee, I think the individuals on the ethics committee need to be published. We have seen how TRAs have infiltrated everywhere and everything, including the BMA. Ethics committees are always short of members as it is a huge amount of work without pay.

Are they well known stakeholders?

Fairly we'll established, I think, and international. And that piece makes a very sound points.

10 million - suppressing healthy children's puberty, for an imaginary condition where autistic children play dress up as the opposite sex because they've been groomed by the internet, friend groups and institutions to think people can be born in the wrong body.

This is just child abuse by the NHS.

Our Duty response: https://ourduty.group/2025/02/27/nihr-pathways-a-misguided-use-of-10m/

Are they well known stakeholders?

The Cass review left the way open for this because of it's underlying belief that gender incongrunence is genuine diagnosis and there are a subset of children who could benefit from medical transition.

If that's your position then question is how would you identity who those children are.

To suggest the answer is: give all the confused children part of a mass social contagion harmful drugs and see which ones feel better seems an egregiously stupid methodology for scientists to come up with.

The methodology doesn't make sense even if you accepted the premise.

Which I don't.

So it's not yet got ethical approval? I'm genuinely gutted and horrified by the two year framing. Surely they must know that's not enough.

The legislation to allow clinics to share data with trhe Cass reviewers is clearly insufficient. They need to amend it to compel sharing, and analyse that throughly before even thinking of starting any new trials.

There's poor data on short term effects. But there's virtually none on long term effects - so following up existing patients will be most effective at filling the larger gap, as well as being the most ethical option.

NIHR funding award information. .

https://fundingawards.nihr.ac.uk/award/NIHR167530

OldCrone I know you and I are on the same page on this and this is an absolutely vital question that we often ask that no one ever answers. It’s often taken as a given that there’s a condition to treat, the only argument is about how best to do it.

But it is absolutely not clear what is being treated, particularly in children. The diagnostic criteria in children rely on stereotypes. What is being treated is not even close to being clearly defined, and that should be the first thing determined in a clinical trial.

In some ways, lobotomy makes more sense.

“There is distress in the brain. Let’s try surgically altering those connections to see if it impacts the brain.”

It’s a lot more logical than “a child prefers society’s stereotypes consistent with the opposite sex, and wants their body to match. Let’s prevent their body going through puberty to start with.”

This was my first thought too.

They should put more effort into tracking down former Tavistock patients.