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

You may claim to be a stickler for expertise but it doesn't show in your endless comments. There are so many aspects of this that you display significant ignorance about.

The rest of us on here are primarily concerned about children and their welfare. The well evidenced capture of the NHS by extreme transactivism raises many questions about the motivations of too many medics. The abandonment of fundamental principles of "first do no harm" and the need to safeguard children from unethical experimentation being clear evidence of pandering to a niche ideology rather than centring the rights and safety of children.

What assertions?

Cass mentions multiple risks of the treatment.

And why does something need to be asserted in one review for it to be true? What about other documents?

As I already said I'm stickler for expertise & right now all countries that have conducted systemic reviews on puberty blockers either have them available for a restricted cohort or available under trial so like Cass I support the usage for a very restricted cohort.

So explain which cohort should get them and how you are selecting this cohort.

And that means they can be MINORS. So its you that's doesn't understand your own claims.

Indeed.

And thankfully now it's all getting much more scrutiny from a safeguarding perspective.

With lots of people wondering how they ended up thinking that it was in children's best interests to progress as we had been doing.

The sunlight really is pouring in on this. It's pretty mainstream now to question why it's ok to experiment on these children's brains and bodies just because the children and their parents say they want it.

So none of your assertions are in the Cass report as poorer outcomes? Interesting that they wouldn't mention them.

I already explained why puberty blockers is the lesser of two evils upthread.

And you can't have it both ways by deferring to the Cass report only when convenient.

As I already said I'm stickler for expertise & right now all countries that have conducted systemic reviews on puberty blockers either have them available for a restricted cohort or available under trial so like Cass I support the usage for a very restricted cohort.

I don't think any child can be Gillick competent to consent to taking PBs. They simply cannot have the maturity to evaluate the long term consequences in terms of sterility or sexual function.

I'm not proposing a 'fresh set of data to yield different results', I'm proposing a complete, comprehensive and accurately recorded set of data that will yield statistically valid results.

Children are not a "data set." This trial proposes using drugs on healthy children to see what happens. Experimenting on children. The only way to get your "fresh set of data" is to experiment on healthy children.

Let's call this what it actually is.

The appeal won by the Tavistock was that it was for doctors to determine the consent on the issues outlined in the case, not the courts.

You don’t understand Gillick, unsurprisingly.

Wrong again.

Both Gillick and Keira's case are complex and don't simply translate in the way you hope - speaking as somebody who was involved in numerous professional discussions about Gillick / Fraser guidelines in relation to children.

@Tottenhamhotflushes:

Why do we keep having to go over the same undeniable facts? If puberty blockers are given to boys at Tanner stage 2, and they never stop them and allow puberty to resume, they don’t make sperm and are therefore sterile. That’s what happens now to children around the world and that’s what this trial is proposing to do. This Is incontrovertible.
Can you point to exactly where in the Cass report this is stated? I can't find it.

Well established:

Fertility preservation: is there a model for gender-dysphoric youth?

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12022625/

Boys offered FP in prepubescence and early puberty (Tanner stages 1 and 2, in which gametes have not yet matured), have only the option of testicular tissue preservation available to them, since they have not yet developed mature spermatozoa (5, 16).

Can you point to exactly where in the Cass report this is stated? I can't find it.

Why does it have to be in the Cass Review for it to be true 😂. It’s basic biology. The process of spermatogenesis takes place through puberty and isn’t complete until late in puberty. So if a boy is stopped going through puberty as soon as it starts, he doesn’t make sperm.

Can you point to exactly where in the Cass report this is stated? I can't find this either.

I asked YOU why you thought “no deterioration” is the lesser of two evils.

Again, why does it need to be in the Cass Review for it to be recognised that the usual standard of care for mental health conditions is the pathway of therapy, support and medications targeting mental health? It’s completely anomalous to treat a still yet to be defined in this thread mental health condition by puberty manipulation with hormones.

If that's how you rationalise normally that's very concerning. I'm simply a stickler for deferring to professional expertise on complex matters I have no qualifications in. Just like have no qualifications in climate or vaccine science, I defer to scientific consensus & expertise for my support.

Okay, explain why you’re so keen for it to go ahead. And what about the experts who are opposed to the trial? And what consensus are you talking about? It’s being debated in parliament, that’s how little consensus there is.

So there are experts opposed and no consensus, so you must be deferring to the idea of puberty blocking children for other reasons. What are they?

It is according to the Keira Bell & Gillick court judgments.

Not when we're talking about children it isn't.

That's upto an individual's priorities to decide.

Why do we keep having to go over the same undeniable facts? If puberty blockers are given to boys at Tanner stage 2, and they never stop them and allow puberty to resume, they don’t make sperm and are therefore sterile. That’s what happens now to children around the world and that’s what this trial is proposing to do. This Is incontrovertible.

Can you point to exactly where in the Cass report this is stated? I can't find it.

And has been established multiple times, on previous occasions, as ANOTHER fact we have to revisit, the children also received mental health support in both groups, and a third got worse in that particular trial. So it cannot be established that puberty blockers were the cause of “no deterioration”.

Can you point to exactly where in the Cass report this is stated? I can't find it.

And even if it were true, why is “no deterioration” in mental health a “lesser of two evils” requiring puberty blockers when “no deterioration in mental health” is the sort of outcome that is obtained from the most established of mental health treatments, therapy and support?

Can you point to exactly where in the Cass report this is stated? I can't find this either.

The bottom line is people like you want to puberty block children. You need to puberty block them because you need them to grow up and claim to be trans. You live vicariously through these children and the harms are inconsequential to you.

If that's how you rationalise normally that's very concerning. I'm simply a stickler for deferring to professional expertise on complex matters I have no qualifications in. Just like have no qualifications in climate or vaccine science, I defer to scientific consensus & expertise for my support.

One question really isn't an interrogation.
I'd thought from another thread where you were trying to persuade the OP not to write to schools about the new KCSIE guidance plus vague memories of previous threads that you'd said were a teacher. I tend to remember educators on here as we so often share the same views about safeguarding children, ethics and the capture of the unions etc by trans extremism.

I was just curious. No worries.

“bunch of things”.

The “things” we need to know about.

Mental health status.
Recognised physical side effects: fertility, bone health, sexual function, impact on pelvic floor of testosterone, cardiovascular risks.

It’s not a list of random “things”. Just because the “things” we currently have no long term data on, but need long term data on is extensive doesn’t mean we can’t or shouldn’t look.

It demonstrates the opposite: the list of potential negative impacts of a proposed prospective study is so extensive we need to consider why it’s appropriate to do it before knowing anything else.

As a starter for 10, how would you remove the impact of cross-sex hormones on long term outcomes

You have to look at short term outcomes before you can look at long term outcomes.

OK. Then what? We'll have a 2 year data set in isolation that tells us whether children have been harmed or not by being on the PBs.

Do we need some of them to agree to resume puberty or does it matter if they all go on to have cross-sex hormones? If it doesn't matter, how will the effect of PBs alone be isolated from the effect of cross-sex hormones?

What valuable information does the short term data tell us once we have our outcome from it, given the concerns raised all relate to long term outcomes?

If we end up knowing that brain development and bone density both decline but mental health seems to remain stable over 2 years (because the impact on mental health is likely to be over a much longer period, considering participants will likely feel positive that they are being treated), what then?

You were throwing out a whole bunch of things and hoping something will stick.

Fishing exercise.

If there are more with positive or more with negative, that tells a story.

No it doesn't. If you don't know whether your cohort suffered childhood trauma or not (which is higher among gender confused children but wasn't recorded by the Tavistock) then if you have a higher number of mental health problems in the adult cohort how can you attach any meaning or story to it?

The person I was responding to when I used the term fishing exercise was proposing doing exactly that.

If you believe conducting a standard clinical audit of data a “fishing exercise” that’s on you. Most people recognise it’s what happens in medical research constantly.

This potential linkage study would be looking for specific data.

The person I was responding to when I used the term fishing exercise was proposing doing exactly that.

I'm not proposing a 'fresh set of data to yield different results', I'm proposing a complete, comprehensive and accurately recorded set of data that will yield statistically valid results.

At the moment we have a pile of crap data full of holes, missing extremely important data points and people think that if they go rummaging around in it long enough they'll find something that will convince people to stop giving these drugs to kids. They won't. The completely valid objections to whatever is found are already written before they start.

As a starter for 10, how would you remove the impact of cross-sex hormones on long term outcomes

You have to look at short term outcomes before you can look at long term outcomes.

If there are 9000 data points which sit equally around a national average (i.e. there are just as many with good as bad mental health, when compared with the general population) that tells a story.

If there are more with positive or more with negative, that tells a story.

If only 3000 of the records make any reference to mental health at all, the same applies (but this time in a reduced data set).

In a data set that size, every viable data point should be examined. The hypotheses need to be written first. Some won't be viable to test against the data set but many will.

Edited to add: mental health is just one category. All potential outcomes should have hypotheses written and tested, including bone density, cognitive/executive function and so on. We don't know what's viable or not in the data set because nobody wants to look....

I was laughing at the idea that you think looking at data points from 9000 people to examine patterns (as per PPs' examples) is simply a fishing exercise.

The term itself is perfectly viable but if you think that I'm advocating a spurious look at data to prove my own hypothesis (e.g. the cognitive impact issue) then I don't think you've understood a single thing I said in this thread.

What baffles me is that you believe that a fresh set of data will yield different results. As a starter for 10, how would you remove the impact of cross-sex hormones on long term outcomes if any of the 226 children go on to take these?

Could it be that Cass found herself between a rock and a hard place? Ske knew what had gone at the Tavistock was unacceptable and that there had been no proper follow up or monitoring of the children that passed through its doors, and yet she also knows that many people have fully signed up to this business and have been 'transed', including many children ( the awful example of the child transed at age 2, who now won't leave the house).She also knows that these people are now accessing puberty blockers illegally and in an unregulated way, including for their children.

This recent mail out to MPs could well be her feeling deeply panicked/compromised. She is now under-playing or even denying the known potential harms caused by puberty blockers because her professional judgement is on the line. She has seen many in both houses express extreme doubt and worry about the ethics of such a trial and she feels she needs to defend her decision. She knows that her neck, and her judgement, is now on the line.