@Brainworm, so, let’s do a little mental research planning exercise here.
In order to undertake a piece of research, you need to have a hypothesis - something that you can test. It is fundamental to every aspect of the study, from the way you choose your subjects, to the way you analyse your data. Also, you don’t just randomly choose a possible treatment - you have to have a reason for choosing it, otherwise we would be testing things like “eating ground up glass for breakfast,” or as a pp suggested “cutting off your big toe.”
Let’s look at the possible hypotheses that this study might be examining. We have pre-pubescent children who have expressed some degree of gender distress, being given puberty blockers, for a set period of time.
We know that the hypothesis cannot be “do puberty blockers stop children from going through puberty?” because the answer to this is already known: yes, puberty blockers stop children from going through puberty.
So the hypothesis must be based around what stopping children - particularly those who are going through gender distress - from going through puberty buys for those children.
One hypothesis is that stopping puberty for these children may give them a longer period of time in which they, and their carers (including therapists and doctors) can determine whether they are likely to be in the group of children who will not desist from their gender distress, and will therefore benefit from wrong-sex hormones.” However, we already know the answer to that, which is no, close to 100% of the Tavistock paediatric patients who took puberty blockers went on to wrong-sex hormones. The use of puberty blockers did not allow for a filtering of supposed “real trans” from “not-real trans” kids.
So, is the hypothesis “does stopping children from going through puberty alleviate their gender distress?” Unfortunately that hypothesis needs unpacking. In particular, why would we think that stopping a child’s puberty would alleviate their gender distress? What previous research points to the possibility that this would be the case? There really isn’t any. In fact, we already know from pre-puberty blocker research that just letting a child go through puberty will in and of itself alleviate gender distress. The brain development that happens in puberty is one of the biggest “cures” for gender distress.
In addition, if the proposal is “stopping children from going through puberty will alleviate gender distress,” what is the necessary follow-on hypothesis for the point at which children must stop taking puberty blockers and therefore go through puberty (or potentially not, if they are too old for that to happen naturally, which is a possibility)? Is the hypothesis that they will be mature enough by that point to cope with their gender distress? Well that cannot be the case, because we already know that children who have not gone through puberty will be absolutely no different, maturationally, than they were before they started the puberty blockers.
I cannot personally see any other possible, falsifiable reason for giving children puberty blockers if you are looking only at alleviating the problem of paediatric gender distress. And neither of those hold any water, from a purely research point of view. If someone can tell me of another possible hypothesis that this study might actually be testing, I’d be glad to hear it.
Now, if you have done any reading about the history of the use of puberty blockers in children with gender distress, you will know that there is one other reason to give children puberty blockers, and that is the reason they were originally given by the researchers who developed the Dutch Protocol: to keep little boys from developing irreversible adult male secondary sex characteristics - Adam’s Apple, enlarged chin, deep voice, body hair, adult-size penis - so that they would be more convincing as women when they are adults.
But I suspect selling that latter reason to the general public would be much harder.