Streeting declares the puberty blocker trial 'safe'

@Mackerelfillets if what you say is true, I would strongly suggest that you ask for you son to be assessed against expected milestones for his age. If he spent 5 years on puberty blockers there is sadly a high chance he will have been cognitively impaired. Obviously not everyone will have been affected detrimentally past "the norm", and he may be lucky - I'm in awe of how well Keira Bell comes across. Sadly, due to lack of data, we have no idea if she's a lucky exception. Or perhaps she is managing cognitive impact and we just can't see it.

If you're in the UK you'll be a medical wonder as so far there is only one record of a child who stopped PBs and didn't go on to cross-sex hormones. If you believe that PBs are a useful "safe" medication, it would be helpful for your son to consider volunteering to undertake the aforementioned tests. There won't be a control against his own personal cognitive development, but some data is better than no data.

Either way, it sounds like you and your son were misled about his options and that he had a lucky escape if you had both been told by doctors that he could go through female puberty. This is an impossibility, as other PPs have said, regardless of any difference of opinion you may have from others on what it means to "be" a woman. Female puberty is a biological reality. It can never happen to a male, no matter what belief anyone holds in gendered souls.

I've been meaning to find some time to create a new thread to discuss this recent Women and Equalities Committee session about puberty blockers. Time keeps running away with me so I'll drop the link here:

https://committees.parliament.uk/event/22659/formal-meeting-oral-evidence-session/

I'm only part way through it but some highlights so far:

• all 3 doctors/clinicians clearly believe in gendered souls
• the closest to getting how unethical it is to undertake this trial seems to be Dr Grossman
• Professor Chris Butler continuously conflates PBs for precocious puberty with PBs for gender dysphoria. At one point Rosie Duffield pulls him up on it and he offers the "clarity" that apparently he was talking about a (14 year old!) child with precocious puberty in his response.... erm. He then continues the conflation
• at one point the female clinician (didn't catch her name) references a (presumably non-existent) study that apparently validates that these children will not suffer any harm to their brain development. She even has the balls/ovaries to suggest that an animal study on the impact of PBs on the brain couldn't ethically be repeated. WTAF?! That's exactly what this trial is doing, albeit only collecting data for two years... so the full extent of the (surely inevitable) decline in cognitive function won't be within the trial boundaries and will be lost.... in presumably a similar place to wherever all the data from the ~2000 PB recipients from the ~9000 ex-Tavistock patients has gone
• a Lib Dems MP (Alex Brewer) asks if it's normal for doctors to prescribe medication off-label. Yes, say all the doctors. Everyone ignores the fact that in such circumstances, the medicine is prescribed for the same purpose as when used "on" label... but in this case, PBs aren't being used to delay puberty. They are being used to stop it all together. Forever.

What an utter shitshow. I think I saw Hamnah Barnes, Keira Bell and possibly Stephanie Davies-Arai in the room, so hopefully we'll hear their take on it all. Apologies if there is already a thread and I missed it.

I look forward to a more informed debate on 9th March. In fact I hope Alex Brewer attends and brings up how normal it is for drugs to be used off-label for children. I suspect she'd get a different response from the room.

Vegan cats.

Cass believes in Vegan cats.

Can an 8 year old understand gender / sex? Can they understand the medicalisation they are going through? In terms of distress they are EIGHT. If they are distressed about their sex at EIGHT there's bigger questions at hand.

I think the missing data is the 8 year olds on PB for a sustained time.

From research around precocious puberty, they know the side effects for 5 to 8 year olds.

Clinics have a lot of information about 14/15 year olds being on PB for a couple of years.

But how many 8/9/10 year olds have even been referred to clinics historically, let alone been given PB? They know they dont have this data.

Its a very strange detail for Cass to talk about. For a start, to get to a clinic at 8, the child would have had to show signs of gender distress at 6? So it would be rare for a child of this age to be distressed about puberty. And if they were going through puberty, the first concern would be that, not gender.

Cass has inadvertently created an issue for herself by describing a potential trial that only permits the testing of puberty blockers on those of at least 14 years of age as " really, really unethical". She is going to have to explain why.

Why is ethical only if it involves younger children?

I reckon this poster may be in the U.S. Activist language such as this is commonly used in gender clinics there.

Yeah. The symbolism of girlhood and puberty for an identity is also strong, not just for the fetish element either.

Oh it is very much a thing. We all remember whassisface and the 365 days of girlhood, no? It wasn’t womanhood, it was girlhood. And there are loads of trans-identifying men who talk about going through the teenage girl phase that they were so cruelly denied.

You did say your child was male, therefore not female. A female is of course a biological category; one that is determined by chromosomes at conception.
A male taking oestrogen will never go on to develop ovaries or menstruate - because the underlying chromosomal 'hard drive' is male, and that hard drive will also shape how the body recieves and metabolises oestrogen.

The woman I know who took a GnRC for another reason has ended up with significant unexplained issues such as extreme osteoporosis, pancreatitis etc two decades after taking them. The NHS cannot explain why she has life shortening symptoms and because she went through a private clinic for the other treatment, there is no record of those drugs on her medical record from what she tells me.

I feel that these trials are really only focused on short term health issues and this is immensely harmful. There is a reason that for precocious puberty, the medical decision is based on considering the harmful medical conditions arising from that very early puberty to weigh against long term health.

It would be very interesting to hear more detail.....

What impacts did blocking puberty for so long have on his sexual development and secondary sexual characteristics, for example?

What is it you mean by 'gender diverse'?

Is he no longer trans identifying, and if so why not?

You say he stopped with the blockers at 18/19.....why?

Was it expected he would want to go on to have surgery?

Are you in the UK?

I'm not going to get into the ins and out of what constitutes a 'real' female.

Said no properly informed person ever.

I mean, this particular transman also calls themselves a gay man, so I don’t really think we’re talking about someone who is fully reality-based.

A male taking oestrogen does not go through female puberty.

That's not acceptable and shows an inability to have properly consented.

Yes. If the terminology is coming from clinician, it is very poor standards of care.

I suspect though the terminology is coming directly from the internet or support groups who have acquired this language for therapeutic benefit. ie. to allow a person to maintain their identity while describing their extreme body modification processes.

I agree that it is used without thought. If clinicians are at all using these terms that should absolutely stop.

Not only are patients believing that they are actually experiencing these 'puberties' solidifying their identities, they are then ad hoc repeating these inaccurate terms causing not only confusion but negatively impacting on those people who are and have experienced those puberties.

It is clear that people use the terms to also signify and to mark their extreme body modifications as part of their 'transition'. It is all part of the symbolism. However, every single time they do this it just reduces human sex categories to a commoditised event through inaccurate usage of the terminology.

Accurately, it should be described only as side effects of taking exogenous hormones in larger quantities than the person's sexed body would naturally produce. But this accurate description solidifies that the person taking those hormones is not the sex they base their identity on. Obviously, this reminder must be rejected at all costs.

I do feel the phrase is used as a shorthand, without the users having a good idea of what they are really talking about.

Which suggests that standards of clinical care are very poor.

A transman of my acquaintance who transitioned at 40-ish described the period of voice breaking (due to vocal fold thickening) and scruffy beard growing as “going through male puberty.” At 40.

I do feel the phrase is used as a shorthand, without the users having a good idea of what they are really talking about.

No your words were and I quote "They are safe. My child went on them for a quite a few years."

You are making a very bold and unscientific claim there. Your experience does not mean it is "safe". It certainly does not mean it's "safe" for females given your child is male. This is an egregious thing to say ESPECIALLY as it's immediately after we've been talking about issues relating to sex and medical trails and how you can not assume that success in one sex equals no harm in the other.

You don't get to wriggle out of making that claim by then just saying it was your experience. No that's not a demonstration of it being safe. Not even remotely.

You should retract that comment completely. At best it's grossly misleading. At worst it's an outright deliberate lie.

No one has proved it's "safe". That's kinda the point here.

Indeed.

I am sure you are right Arabella. That some people associate female puberty as 'developed breasts and fat redistribution around the body'.

Having seen this numerous times now, particularly recently, it is incredibly harmful to female people to have terms like this used so very inaccurately. It also actually shows how misogynistic the support of gender identity is if people think this is in anyway appropriate. Because reducing female people to 'breasts and fat distribution' is misogynistic.

However it is also highly inaccurate because those side effects from taking large quantities of estrogen in a male body occur at any time. It is a general side effect and is not 'puberty'. A male person can have already gone through full male puberty and will still have these side effects, because it is a general side effect.

It is in no fucking way 'female puberty'.

Except without the ability to use testorone to reach male sexual maturity, there is no puberty.