Puberty Blocker Trial Paused

Quite, though the parents and activists pushing this will be very displeased indeed. Maybe now the real reasons for blocking puberty will come to public consciousness.

Yes, maybe she needs to remind f herself if the core principle. “First do no harm”.

If your trial anticipates sterilisation, bone density losses, cognitive impairment etc then it should have been a non starter.

Why on earth they would allow children to stay in the program for up to 12 months if they start seeing bone density or cognitive impairment I can’t fathom.

Surely, the minute ANY of those issues start that child should be out of the program - once those drugs start affecting bone density, it’s not going to get any better unless they stop taking the drugs. As this is a known and worryingly common side effect (see the Lupron class action in America) it should be a major red flag.

But then the whole ‘study’ is a giant red flag so I guess that level of medical sanity is too much to ask for.

Lupron puberty blockers have harmed vast numbers of people in America. Surely the study designers should have looked at these first?

She's as susceptible as anyone to the pressures of ideological group think.

Hope it's cancelled entirely.

What is the point of starting at 14 years old? Most girls have already gone through puberty by that age.

Not that I want them have these drugs, but the outcomes and harms would possibly be reduced if they started at a later age.

It might make it seem less harmful than it really is to these children.

Half of the trial participants were due to wait a year before they were given PBs so would be 15 years old.

There was a big campaign by TRAs to get people who were being treated in adult clinics (which presumably would have included some ex-Tavistock patients) to preemptively refuse to participate in a data collection exercise.

Their argument was “the data would be weaponised against them.” This was the same argument that was used by Olsen-Kennedy in the US when she blocked publication of a huge study that showed extremely unfavourable results for so-called “gender affirming care.”

Even should this 'trial' go ahead but with no children younger than 14 - everyone involved will now know for certain that they are under the microscope.

Thank you, that is what I thought. Schrodinger's patients that simultaneously do and don't exist. But why hasn't there been a national campaign asking for those patients to step forward, bypassing the clinics themselves. Surely a first hand experience (albeit without medical or scientific data) to see a general outcome is better than experimenting on new bodies. But maybe I'm just too dumb to understand.

Agree.

I can't fathom how she can see this trial as 'essential otherwise they will get their drugs elsewhere' unless she has been sucked into this.

Well, I'm struggling to fathom Cass at all tbh.

Not sure if this is old news but the petitions UK website now has a date for parliamentary debate for the puberty blocker petition:

9th March 2026

Let's give a would be addict drugs because they're mentally ill.

If that persuaded Hilary then I despair.

Apparently that's 'too difficult' - largely because the adult gender clinics are trying to avoid scrutiny and refuse to cooperate. But somehow a new trial (which is remarkably similar to the previous trial the Tavistock ran) will magically be able to follow up their participants longterm, despite it being impossible to find out anything about the previous Tavistock participants.

God that's awful. It's like reading about a drug addict pleading for drugs.

I imagine this is the kind of thing Cass was persuaded by.

The point at which they were discussing the children being rendered infertile and harvesting gametes should have been the point at which this nonsense was brought to a halt. It’s completely unethical. Children cannot consent to sterilisation.

I've been living as a girl since I was 10, and my body has been slowly mutating and my voice has been distorted and I've slowly got less beautiful and I get treated worse and worse by the public as years go by, theres no point in living if its just gonna keep on getting worse and worse and worse and worse. I need estrogen but it is completely out of reach

Estrogen isn't going to stop us all recognising him as a bloke. He's been sold a catastrophic lie.

@Brainworm:

I am not in favour of the Pathways trial, I think it is/ was unethical. My point was that it’s important that research is conducted to inform how best to treat young people with the condition or symptoms of gender distress.

Thank you for that. I agree with you that good research should be conducted.

My point is and has always been that, from a research point of view, there is not, and has never been, a reason to propose that stopping puberty will alleviate gender distress.

We have historical evidence from all over the world about things that do - the most powerful one being, do nothing (ie, the “watchful waiting” approach that was the gold standard before the Dutch got their hands on things).

So why test this drug as a possible mental health treatment? The only reason it was ever given in the first place was to stop little boys from developing secondary sex characteristics so that they would be more convincing as women. Testing its effectiveness by itself for alleviating gender distress just smacks of trying to justify its use without referring to any of that messy gender reassignment surgery stuff.

Anyway, I think we’re on the same page.

Look at this post. A clearly very very mentally unwell 17 year old boy is being coached and directly messaged on how to get drugs online

https://www.reddit.com/r/transgenderUK/comments/1r9l7m0/im_probably_not_gonna_survive_until_18/

it’s happening every single day. I can’t understand how it’s allowed to happen in plain sight

Have you seen what the Fail is reporting today?

It's the run up to the by-election so the Fail is almost certainly out on a smear campaign but none the less, this has been talked about before as potential policy, just not to this extent:

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-15579401/Green-Party-legalise-drugs-crack-cocaine-heroin-date-rape-chemical-GHB.html

Drugs including crack cocaine and heroin should be legalised for recreational use because they 'enhance human relationships', according to the Green Party's official policy.

Zack Polanski's party plans to create a 'direct partnership' between the Government and South American drug cartels to introduce a 'sustainable supply of coca and cocaine' to Britain, it adds.

Newly unearthed policy proposals show the Greens want to see cocaine drinks brought to the high street and Class A drugs including ecstasy and psychedelics sold at nightclubs and music festivals.

The policy adds that children 'starting in primary school' should be taught how to take drugs safely in Personal, Social and Health Education (PHSE) lessons to 'enhance the safety of all who use drugs'.

The plan to legalise drugs comes despite the policy proposing a simultaneous crackdown on alcohol and tobacco - including heaping more tax on beer and cigarettes to 'reflect the cost of harm caused by alcohol use on society'.

The internal Green policy, seen by the Mail, states that heroin and crack cocaine should be legalised because 'adults should be free to make informed decisions about their own drug consumption'.

So clearly there are a bunch of people within the greens who are at least proposing so pretty wild things with regards to drugs, even if it's not official policy.

I mean what could possibly go wrong with the proposal?

Can you imagine schools dealing with parents in Tunbridge Wells in the run up to that PHSE lesson?! "Today we are going to teach your kids how to shoot up and how to make a crack pipe safely".

It's absolutely hilarious and totally out of touch with reality. But I think it's probably a genuine conversation going on within the greens even if it's not official policy.

What for the love of god IS the differential diagnosis of 'gender distress'?

How is it screening out all the other distresses or conditions or ailments or experiences?

What IS IT?

I get your point, but I would have thought treating anxiety and depression with anti depressants would be the way forward. Or even better, no screen time and a lot of exercise outdoors (as suggested by Dr P).

As said above, treating 'gender distress' with PB just boils down to 'because the kids want it'. Society has been suckered into believing that there really is something to treat here above and beyond normal teenage feelings. And that makes things worse for everyone.

One of my issues with the trial is that how do you assess the mental health of a child when is having a treatment ‘delayed’ when they have been educated through messaging from support groups, well meaning adults and from peers in that group that if they are delayed in taking those chemicals they will not achieve their dream of changing sex and that their life will be harder for it.

If those children had never come into contact with anyone pushing the PB agenda, there wouldn’t be this confounding issue.

I have other issues with the trial of course but in structuring it in the current political environment it a
will be very hard to filter out the increase in anxiety of those in the delayed group. (Or filter out the euphoria of getting the drugs). I also question how many children will feel like they have to bias their answers and under report poor health and poor outcomes.

The first step is to remove their access to the internet, and the next step is to stop schools / parents / Social workers / therapists from taking an affirmation approach to their mental illness.
As many have said on here, if a child was anorexic and believed they were obese so were starving themselves, no one in their right mind would affirm that delusion.

I just can't fathom what's going on in this woman's head at all. She so very nearly grasped it. Then she floundered and bottled it.

It's a mystery. But I do think this is the beginning of the end for child transitioning, at least in this country. Very few people will want to actually break the law for their child by obtaining drugs illegally. In fact, an important component of parents who have Transhausen's Syndrome, in my view, is the validation they get from authority: the fact that proper medical people with important-sounding titles are taking their child's gender dysphoria seriously, prescribing them drugs and offering them surgery, while at the same time other authoritative figures (teachers, social workers and so on) are going along with the pretence that the child is the opposite sex by using opposite-sex pronouns, the child's new name, the child's desire to use the wrong changing room etc.

Once that stops, once you don't have the validation from either doctors or teachers, then the boast of "Look at me, I have a trans child" becomes much less attractive. Instead it just becomes a nuisance, I imagine. So I think soon if a child starts saying "Mum, I think I'm a girl," the parent will say, "No, you're not, Malcolm - now be a good boy and eat your dinner up." Just like the olden days.

Anyone here or in the media or politics arguing 'but we need to know what the drugs do' or 'children will buy them illegally' is ignorant of basic medical ethics.

The safety of study participants is more important than any benefit to science or society.

That is fundamental to research ethics.

There are many areas of medicine we don't have much information on. That's not a reason to do badly designed, high risk studies on vulnerable groups.

My point was that it’s important that research is conducted to inform how best to treat young people with the condition or symptoms of gender distress

Yes, but hormonal manipulation resulting in impaired fertility and sexual function in children needs to be removed as an option. Children cannot consent, it can never be ethical.