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

This thread is not your personal domain, either. And this puberty blocker trial is not your personal pet project, at least I hope it isn't! We all have a stake in this, and we all have a right to express our opinions on this thread.

I was addressing my comments to OldCrone because I had previous experience on this thread, and the argument hadn't move on at all in 30 pages.

I am allowed to post to other posters and you are not required to read my comments, or respond to something I posted to someone else.

Again, after 30 pages of going around in circles, this is still a waste of time.

@OldCrone I hope you have more luck in getting some useful answers.

How many of these parents have been prosecuted for harming their children? Does anyone ever take any action against them?

So you agree that this is driven by quacks and doctors with a god complex? Are clinical trials on healthy children normally conducted in order to try to persuade such people that they shouldn't be medicating children like this? Would they even care about the results?

Helen Webberley was prosecuted for giving testosterone to a 12-year-old girl. Shouldn't we just prosecute these other quacks?

Under 18. I guess sometimes it's the kids and sometimes the parents. I think I've seen a thread about it on here. Reddit is full of advice of how to self-medicate.

How old are these 'kids'? Are they buying them with pocket money and injecting themselves? Where are the parents?

I agree.

10% of the kids at gender clinics have reported (so there will be others that haven't) that they are self-medicating with cross-sex hormones. This isn't a small and easily solved problem.

Perhaps you could answer my questions then.

Who in the UK is purchasing the drugs for the children? Who is injecting them? As they are in the UK, breaking UK laws, why can't they be prosecuted?

Why were people following the Dutch protocol when that's such a small country?

Well, that's a very good question. I posted a link to this article earlier in the thread which gives us some idea of what was going on 20-30 years ago in this area (the article is from 2015, so when he talks about 15 years ago he's talking about around 2000).

The New Girl in School: Transgender Surgery at 18 - The New York Times

But the drive to treat children is relatively new. One of the first and biggest hormone programs for young teenagers in the United States is led by a Harvard-affiliated pediatric endocrinologist, Dr. Norman Spack, at Boston Children’s Hospital.

Dr. Spack recalled being at a meeting in Europe about 15 years ago, when he learned that the Dutch were using puberty blockers in transgender early adolescents.

“I was salivating,” he recalled. “I said we had to do this.”

Yes, Dr Norman Spack said he was 'salivating' at the idea of medicating children to try to make them better facsimiles of the opposite sex.

It's vile. Doctors who want to play God. Just because they can.

Butting into a conversation I'm having to tell the other poster not to bother is pretty rude, so no, I'm not being defensive or reaching for things to be annoyed about.

This thread isn't your echo chamber.

It's really not, and you're now reaching for things to be annoyed about because you have no other argument. There are lots of regular posters on MN who are male, and I didn't want to assume, as I did once and got shot down for it.

But, please do continue to see insults wherever you want. It's a very defensive posture, and says a lot about you and nothing about me.

Ah, the hint that I'm not female. Really following the playbook. 👍

Why were people following the Dutch protocol when that's such a small country?

Evidence-based medicine is about science, it's very much an international effort.

The reason I remain unconvinced is that I absolutely do not see one single person overseas thinking that a flawed and inadequate trial in Terf Island butters a single parsnip.

Why do you think what is done in England is likely to matter a single damn to anyone in any other country? We stopped being a world power or the gold standard decades ago.

I'm afraid that reasoning has been done to death on this thread already. The lady's (?) not for turning.

Except it isn't. It's more like there's a trolleyfull of 246 children who are all going to be injured in some way, guaranteed, if we don't stop the trolley. But you want to let the trolley continue, because at the bottom of the hill, there might be one child who is about to be hit by a car, and if we swerve the trolley just enough, it might nudge the car, so it doesn't hit the one child.

But all of the other children are still going to be injured.

That's what you have continued to advocate for over 30 pages of a thread. It's unbelievable.

Who in the UK is purchasing the drugs for the children? Who is injecting them? Perhaps as they are in the UK, breaking UK laws, they could be prosecuted.

People also ignore the fact that not putting kids on the puberty blocker trial certainly isn't preventing them from being given puberty blockers.

Nor that it is hard to prosecute people who deliberately run their clinic from a different country.

It's like the trolley problem. Currently the trolley is headed towards 5 kids. It could be switched to 1.

Other people prefer to just ignore the 5 kids.

I see we haven't moved on from that rigid position at all.

Your posts on here seem to support the trial. Why do you support a trial which involves harmful drugs being given to children for something which isn't a medical condition?

I asked @noblegiraffe this question, as did a lot of other posters, about 30 pages ago, and the answer is: "If we do this trial on UK children, it might stop people in other countries [not the UK, because puberty blockers are already illegal here] from giving puberty blockers to their children."

That's it, I'm afraid. We should experiment on UK children in the hope that other people somewhere will stop harming other children. Hopefully. Maybe.

Do we really need to test these drugs on physically healthy children just because quacks all over the world are giving them to other children?

At the moment, we have two sides shouting at each other with crappy evidence supporting each position.

Really? Is that really how you see the current situation? Is it 'crappy evidence' to say that people can't change sex and that children shouldn't be medicated for failing to conform to outdated gender stereotypes?

I'm afraid I can't agree with you that perfectly physically healthy children should be used as lab rats to confirm that the harms outweigh the benefits of these drugs.

Edited to add: What sort of benefits do you think the people in charge of this trial expect to see in their young patients? What does a successful outcome look like that would convince them (and others) that this is an appropriate treatment?

Because thousands of kids globally are being given these drugs, without them having been properly tested or subject to a clinical trial.

Clinicians are prescribing them based on the idea that they are helpful to these kids for various reasons, including 'fully reversible' 'time to think' etc etc.

And they're probably going to keep doing it, because of 'protect trans kids' 'don't deny trans kids lifesaving healthcare' etc etc.

At the moment, we have two sides shouting at each other with crappy evidence supporting each position.

If we could take the opportunity to properly study a small subset of the children who are taking these drugs, do the MRIs, the bone density scans, the cognitive tests and can comprehensively document the harms that don't outweigh the benefits, then we have a chance to shut this crap down far more quickly than just hoping that it all blows over eventually.

So are you saying you don't think so-called 'gender incongruence' is a medical condition?

Your posts on here seem to support the trial. Why do you support a trial which involves harmful drugs being given to children for something which isn't a medical condition?

A medical condition.