Hilary Cass sent a document to every single MP and Peer, justifying and defending the puberty blockers trial

Clearly, some points of view are just worth more than others. I get it now. I don't think we've been having a debate or even an argument. We're being telt.

Ok, well, I don't have enough time in the day to put up with that, so anyway, thanks again @noblegiraffe for answering my question. It's refreshing to see that some people still have the courage of their convictions when advocating for experimentation on other people's children.

Good luck everyone with the "debate."

I was treating the ‘I find your posts troubling’ with exactly the level of seriousness it deserved.

I’ve spent a lot of time on this thread explaining my reasoning. You might disagree with it but I’ve not shied away from answering questions.

The reason I’ve been posting on this thread is because I read Cass’s document upthread and thought ‘fair enough - there’s bits I don’t agree with but she’s clearly thought about this reasonably’ to then read a thread about how she obviously has been receiving death threats and coerced into writing it, or she’s a mad trans activist who thinks she can turn little boys into little girls.

I’ve put quite a bit of time into explaining how it’s possible to support this trial going ahead without being a mad TRA, with actually having concerns about safeguarding kids and without being forced into it by death threats. So yeah, to have someone throw the ‘I find your posts troubling crap at me, I’m pretty contemptuous of that as a tactic. I hope that contempt came through in my deliberately flippant response. And if you didn’t like it, that was the point.

I've been reflecting on the "pretty little head" comment, having had a really upsetting experience myself some time ago, where I found myself out of kilter with what felt like the majority of posters on a thread. It related to my neutral stance on speaking to TW who drop into threads. Apart from one thread where I played the "character" of a TRA (which I'll admit was very enjoyable 😂), so as to highlight the ridiculousness of the comments that the TRA who was on the thread was making, I continue to take a neutral approach on whether or not gender identity is real when writing on this forum. I don't believe in it but many do, including some TW. Obviously others just pretend they do... for... reasons.

From my experience, if you're going against the tide while holding what you believe is a neutral position, it's a lonely ride. It felt like a pile-on when I experienced it. My reaction was to end up in floods of tears and leave for a month. I came back stronger but still resolute in my neutral position on gender identity belief. Plenty of people believe in things I don't and that's OK.

Instead of crying, an alternative reaction I could easily imagine having had is to have bitten back with a barbed comment. Perhaps this is what's happening here? @noblegiraffe that's meant to sound like a benefit of the doubt comment. Hopefully it doesn't come across as condescending. Is there anything to it?

I've seen you post lots as a teacher and your posts have mostly centred safeguarding. But this isn't the first time I've seen you bring in a "balance" that ultimately becomes anti-safeguarding. In this example it's anti-safeguarding to advocate for a trial that will highly likely harm children, even if it aims to save more. Especially so if you already think that PBs are harmful.

Edited for typo and clarity.

Data management on clinical trials is extremely rigorous.

So what went wrong in the Tavistock trial? If the data management is always as rigorous as you say, then we'd already have the data from the Tavistock trial from about 15 years ago.

How can we be certain that the same thing won't happen with this one?

@DrBlackbird

Don’t worry your pretty little head about it. Not worth being ‘troubled’ over.

Yes, this is the comment that showed me that the poster doesn't appear to be arguing in good faith, and that actually there might be another agenda at work here. I doubt this poster knows anything about clinical trials.

There really isn't any reason for a comment like that unless you're really, really angry or feeling very, very superior. If you're arguing in good faith, and from a position of knowledge, why would either of those two emotions come into play? It's a puzzle.

And, yet, I suppose, some argue just for the sake of arguing.

@DrBlackbird This comment is extraordinary. It is a shame that a debate on the clinical merits of the trial vs safeguarding lacuna has deteriorated into sexist insults.

Yes, it was a bit of a surprise to wake up to. I think our long-necked friend has a tendency to think she(?) is being witty, when she really isn't. Let's hope she doesn't behave like this in the classroom.

Lets keep kids off social media, whilst also never tackling the purchase of illegal drugs off the internet. Yay.

This may already have been addressed but:

1. the Tavistock was running a clinical trial - still delivering crappy data and more to the point sitting on it for years before being pressured to publish by the courts. In the meantime they opened access to pbs for all before the trial was finished
2. this takes no account of long term impact or the damage of xsh as these children now on a pathway to more harm
3. children already on PBs are not eligible for the trial so there will be up to 250 more children harmed and probably more as there’s no upper limit to participation (IIRC)

Thank you for pointing this out. I've been reading this thread with incredulity.

This comment is extraordinary. It is a shame that a debate on the clinical merits of the trial vs safeguarding lacuna has deteriorated into sexist insults.

Are you not an science teacher? And are you not female? These may be assumptions but have been inferred from a variety of your contributions across multiple threads. And your comments have typically been measured and thoughtful, yet here you’ve resorted to a classic sexist trope to dismiss another female poster who only said that no agreement was going to be reached.

And by now it is crystal clear that you believe in the need for this trial but it should be equally clear that others replying are not. So that’s that. What’s more to say? The only helpful aspect of the continuing debate is, for me, reading about other reasons for this trial to be stopped that I hadn’t thought about.

And like I've been saying, you can't do a proper analysis of a pile of crap.

And you’ve made posts like this one that rather rudely dismisses the many comments others have made in defence of the usefulness of the linkage study. As if you do clinical trials for a living. Do you? Some of these posters making those comments do clinical research for a living.

Harming more children to try to persuade people who are breaking the law that their actions are harmful is just insane.

This ⬆️ And, in addition to prosecuting those that break the law by obtaining these banned drugs, to paraphrase a PP (I apologise for forgetting who wrote it), we should be analysing the hell out of the data that already exists.

It was a few pages back now but TwoLoons' proposed (parody) "2 cigarettes a day for 2 years" trial remains the perfect analogy here.

To extend it further, to match the parallel of the real world we're in today, imagine that there was no data available to say whether smoking was harmful or not, just a few people hypothesising that there may be long term harm. Imagine also that there's big money behind keeping people smoking and lots of information in the media (today it would be social media) about the positive benefits of smoking from a young age.

Would anyone advocate trials on children? Or would they take any data that was available on adults that had started smoking as children and analyse that?

It beggars belief that anyone who thinks it's highly likely that PBs are harmful thinks that more children should be experimented upon. Especially when the data set won't mean anything after two years' collection, unless there's a way to differentiate between those that went on to cross-sex hormones and those that had only ever taken PBs.

Regarding living in the real world, in what real world will children who've been fed constant messages, including in schools, that they can choose their own sex decide that after 2 years of being on PBs, it's time for the natural puberty to continue again? The trial is as pointless as it is harmful.

There are plenty of places prescribing them legally

Link to evidence please as prescribing PBs to under 18s for gender dysphoria/incongruence has been illegal in the UK since March 2024.

Can we just stick to what's happening in the UK? The children in the UK are being harmed by adults in the UK. Even if the drugs are coming from abroad, their parents are in the UK. Before we try to fix the whole world, let's fix what's happening here.

Do you have any data on how many parents are buying these drugs from overseas? Since this is illegal, they would be giving these drugs to their children with no medical oversight and injecting them themselves. There can't be many parents doing this (I hope).

Meanwhile, back in the real world, we have laws. It's illegal to supply these drugs to children in the UK (how many times do I need to tell you that?)

Most people, fortunately, comply with laws. Those who don't can be arrested and fined or jailed.

Harming more children to try to persuade people who are breaking the law that their actions are harmful is just insane.

There are plenty of places prescribing them legally and prosecuting the illegal ones (who seem to be abroad) won’t do anything to help the kids where it’s legal.

As to the trial

As others have already commented, we have evidence (multiple research reports from different decades) that show between 60 and 90% of children will desist from believing they are wanting to be the opposite sex simply by going through puberty.

There is no way of knowing which will persist.

Therefore any trial will explicitly not help at least 60% of participants.

We know from research already conducted on PBs that over 90% (as high as 98%) of children go on to ash from PBs and will further medicalise. This will harm at least 60% of participants who start as physically healthy children and would otherwise desist.

The Dutch results have never been replicated as it was later discovered that they switched the questionnaires so a transitioning boy would fill in the ‘boy’ questionnaire pre medicalisation/surgery and the ‘girl’ one after. So there is no evidence that PBs benefit children as a cohort

There is a body of evidence that suggests very serious risks to giving children PBs.

Looking at all that - and without a coherent definition of the condition being treated- does not lead to a slam dunk conclusion that a trial would be a good idea.

There are also multiple issues with the trial design but there are so many issues even to the principle of running any trial that I still can’t believe an ethics committee signed off on it

Great questions!

Who is doing the prescribing? This is illegal in the UK. The parents are also culpable.

The solution to people distributing illegal drugs to children isn't to run a state funded trial of whether they're harmful. The solution is to apply the law and prosecute the people who are breaking the law. This includes the children's parents.

Harmful drugs don't become harmless just because it's the NHS supplying them rather than quacks.

Ok, I’ll allow myself to be persuaded:

Many posters on this thread have highlighted the known issues with the proposed trial.

As you are clearly a researcher of some expertise, you must have some ideas of how the trial researchers intend to mitigate these issues. How are they planning to ensure that - despite all appearances - this study is more water-tight and rigorous than any other study that has ever been carried out?

I am totally open to being persuaded, but so far no one will tell me how the holes in this study are less worrisome than the holes in other studies that no one has bothered to pay any attention to.

I’m far behind in the thread but Cass’ fake two and a half year old makes me think of the Portuguese chicken girl case study. In the 1980s this was considered abuse. I’m not sure why Cass thinks it isn’t abuse now

Isabel Quaresma is ten, but cannot talk, and is only now learning to eat with a spoon.
She is a ‘wild child’ who has only recently been bought into regular contact with human
beings. Since birth the child has lived in a chicken coop. Her mother is a mentally deficient
rural worker living in poverty. The mother works in the fields all day and soon after
Isabel’s birth confined her to the chicken coop where she was thrown pieces of bread
and shared the chicken feed with the fowls. Neighbours gossiped about this scandal for
years but had done nothing, not wanting to interfere with a family matter.
At last, however distinct hospital radiographer at Torres Vedras Hospital approached
Isabel Quaresma
local institutions to accept Isabel. After a string of refusals, the radiographer took her into his own home,
but could not cope. Isabel’s contact with humans had been minimal and she could neither talk nor was
she potty trained – in the chicken coop she had lived in her own excrement. Her gestures and sounds
resembled those of fowls she had lived with since infancy. She scratched food up with her hands. Isabel
now lives at a private clinic for severely handicapped children in Lisbon. The most striking thing about her
appearance is her severely stunted body. She has a tiny head, and the stature of an infant. X rays have
shown her skull structure to be sound. Her dwarfed form is almost certainly due to malnutrition. One eye
is clouded with cataract, thought to be the result of a scratch from the hens she lived with. She
communicates through repetitive calls and beats her arms and drums her feet to express emotion –
actions probably imitative of her only living companions. Dr Joao dos Santos is optimistic about her
chances of a social awakening. But, he explains: it all depends on whether we can build warm human
contacts which will move her to want to speak and communicate with us’ (Source: Jill Joliffe in the Guardian, 12th June
1980)

Yes, I don't think risking the health and fertility of children for this badly thought out experiment is justified and neither did the first ethics committee that looked at it. There are other ways of shutting down illegal trade in PBs (proper long jail sentences might help) and more and more countries that look at available data are stopping legal provision. This trial will do nothing at all whatever its outcome.

That’s actually quite funny.

What it highlights to me is the shit quality of what some people must think they can pass off as research because they have no idea what it looks like when it is done properly.

I would invite you to look again at the Finnish study and consider the extremely limited and carefully couched in caveats conclusion that they were able to draw from their far superior dataset.

Oh well, best not even try then. Let’s leave them to it.

As if your world is any less fantastical:

”We conduct a tiny and ill-designed study and all the world suddenly has their mind changed, when nothing that’s been presented to them previously has done so.”

Magic!

There’s your dealing with the world as you would like it to be again. “How about just telling the adults not to prescribe the drugs”

and the children continue to be prescribed the drugs.