Netherlands Puberty Blocker Review Comes to Opposite Conclusion, Dismisses Cass Review

I've already explained at length why I think for a small number of kids the harms associated with withholding hormonal interventions outweigh the harms of the interventions themselves.

That's not for you or anyone to decide, though. It's for their adult selves to decide whether transitioning so early was worth not being able to have children. Except their adult selves will never have that opportunity, because of decisions other people made for them when they were children.

This is abject.

That is a very interesting question.
These are the exclusion criteria:

1. Physical conditions preventing puberty commencement or advancement.
2. Unstable physical health requiring active intervention.
3. Hypersensitivity to GnRH, its analogues, or any of its excipients.
4. Known congenital long QT syndrome
5. Unstable mental health impairing ability to provide informed assent/consent. 6. Family/home situation affecting adherence to protocol.
6. Clinical concerns about capacity to consent.
7. Insufficient understanding of PATHWAYS TRIAL
8. New or ongoing safeguarding concerns.

10. Birth-registered females with undiagnosed vaginal bleeding.
11. Birth-registered females who are pregnant or lactating
12. People of child-bearing potential who are at risk of pregnancy during the trial

Now, let's think about the mythical 'Jo', the child that Cass invented to tug at the heartstrings of parliamentarians. 'Jo' was an amalgam of children - transed by parents, unable to function, in danger of bone damage through lack of exercise.

The trial is developed as a way to give children like Jo access to PBs. Yet surely Jo fails the inclusion criteria on points:

1. (bone health)
2. deteriorating mental health
3. Because no child can informed consent/assent to a process that may rob them of an adult sexual function and fertility that they cannot comprehend

and 9. the child's parents are a safeguarding concern.

edit to say you will have to figure out MN's bizarre numbering fail yourselves

I fully agree.

Exactly. In fact it is other adult selves that are pushing for these children to be 'transitioned' before pubertal change, because these adults are still unhappy and imagine that it is because they 'transitioned' post-puberty, and not for any of the myriad other reasons why 'transition' didn't make them happier.

They are chasing the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. But also doing so often as not having had children - something they will deny others.

Why does anyone need medicating because of social roles?

Surely social roles are just the expectations of how people should behave in social situations. If these differ for men and women they are based on stereotypes.

Again- this is just circling back to a long conversation earlier in the thread

Indeed. Except, of course, for that other cohort of trans-identified males - the adult fetishists who come 'out', often after marriage and children, and then retcon their childhood narrative. They have a vested interest in the invention of the 'trans child' as a way of drawing a veil over the fact that their transition was for sexual reasons in adulthood.

Didn't make sense then. Doesn't make sense now.

Not really long. You said it was just names / pronouns/ and access to the facilities for the opposite sex

Yes. This was almost certainly why "trans children" were invented.

That and the Dutch Frankensteins who had the bright idea of experimenting on children.

Well quite. It’s a cheek to pretend that anything at all was explained when it very clearly wasn’t. It was just the usual obfuscatory tripe.

There is nothing to gender but stereotypes.

All I said was that we’d already had a lengthy discussion about these points. Whether you found my explanations convincing is a different question entirely.

If you think what I said was “obfuscatory”, then quote the bit you think was unclear or evasive and I’ll happily try to explain it differently or more clearly . But simply repeating the same basic questions we’ve already spent hours discussing like you've never heard an answer to them , isn’t engaging with the conversation.

At some point it starts to look less like an attempt to understand the other side and more like a determination not to. That’s exactly why discussions on these forums so often go round in circles

I've just had a look back at that discussion, and all you said is that gender' dysphoria isn't about stereotypes, it's about a feeling of being in the wrong social role. When pressed you mentioned that this meant distress about being referred to with correct sex pronouns and not being able to use opposite sex toilets.

This is a quote from one of your posts:
So anything that society does to recognise and give meaning to their placement in the “assigned/ observed/ correct” (whatever word you prefer) sexed category causes them acute distress. whether that’s referring to them by their birth sex pronoun, or making them wear a particular uniform, or use the toilet according to their birth sex, or anything else.

Perhaps it's time you made an attempt to understand the other side, because I haven't seen any evidence of that in this discussion so far.

Yes that quote is from me. It was by no means all I said- the conversation went on for pages, the examples I gave are just simple examples of where we give meaning to biological categories in society- that is the "social" part. It's the act of meaning making, not the content of the meaning itself . So it could be anything. So it's not that a person thinks "I love pink so I must be a girl"- they may prefer the colour green- but they may wear pink so that they have a better chance of being seen by others as a girl, because that reflects how they see themselves.

Im sorry you don't see evidence of my attempts to understand the other side. Thats all that interests me in engaging with these conversations.

I think there is a central contradiction here, and it's one that people who support a more permissive informed consent to access to hormonal treatments also point to. On the one hand to receive a clinical diagnosis of gender dysphoria and be eligible for treatment a child must demonstrate clinically significant distress, on the other hand evidence of this distress can be treated as an exclusion criteria as evidence the child doesn't possess capacity to consent.
I imagine in the context of the trial this will be navigated pragmatically. So yes if a child is in a psychotic state at the time of assessment, they obviously won't be able to consent to participate. But if a child is in distress specifically due to their embodied feelings about sex, but otherwise meets gillick-Fraser competence and seems to have the right support in place etc, they would be eligible.

As already explained numerous tines Dysphoria is a disturbance of the mind. That is literally what it means.

'Gender' only exists in social contexts because it is predicated on how people perceive and attribute certain characteristics based on one's sex. The problem is not one's sex - but one's feelings about it based on what one thinks is expected because of it.

The truth is that in our society there is now no compulsion to have to perform gender.The best way to resolve psychological difficulties rooted in feelings around 'gender' is to resolve them through modifying and adapting one's responses. We all struggle with issues around social perceptions and as a result we can all feel misunderstood or mis-read. Such is life.

A more secure and relaxed sense of self comes about by no longer being so dependent on other people's perceptions of us.( which we cannot control). Though if you want to attempt to modify their response you could opt to wear different types or styles of clothing and experiment with different hair styles, for example - or you could become more conscious of the way you hold your body and/or the way you move through space. ( though it is easy to imagine how one's life could spiral into being compulsively focused on trying to control people's perceptions of us, which would not be healthy)

This understanding is what we need to be enabling in children and young people; not encouraging them to effectively self harm because of psychological distress; and not by encouraging them to believe that they can somehow change sex just by mimicking gendered performances associated with one sex or other.

If a child wants to experiment with 'performing gender' they can do that without physical harm to their growing and maturing body, though encouraging them to expect that others will go along with, or validate, their cross sex imaginings is irresponsible - because we cannot compel others to see us as we see ourselves; and we cannot demand, or control the terms of engagement in social situations. And finally, we cannot actually change our sex or its biological blueprint; and in certain types of situation sex actually does matter and it has certain consequences.

So it's not that a person thinks "I love pink so I must be a girl"- they may prefer the colour green- but they may wear pink so that they have a better chance of being seen by others as a girl, because that reflects how they see themselves.

The explanation which has been missing from your posts is why the boy in your example sees himself as a girl. I would say this is due to a delusion, or if the child is very young, due to him not having reached the developmental stage where he understands the fixed nature of sex and how it applies to him. How would you explain this?

The wearing of pink even though he prefers green just emphasises the fact that he isn't a girl, since a girl would never have to do anything to be seen by others as a girl.

Oh we’re getting more of the same, I see.

You did waffle on for a couple of posts about social meaning given to sex roles and when I asked you for specific examples you didn’t respond, which of course is fine, there’s no obligation. However, to see you now telling other posters that you’ve had that conversation, given those examples when you really haven’t is annoying.

Perhaps the conversation you’re thinking of was on another thread, in which case you can easily link the posts where you did it.

But if a child is in distress specifically due to their embodied feelings about sex, but otherwise meets gillick-Fraser competence and seems to have the right support in place etc, they would be eligible.

This mythical child has been transed by his parent(s) at 2 1/2. Cass said so. He is in distress because his identity has been foreclosed by all the abusive adults around him. He fears puberty because he has been told to fear puberty. He is not even that elusive creature the 'truly trans' child with the magical internal feeling. Yet the solution proffered is for the adults to continue the conversion therapy and to shut down the future choices for that child until only one remains. That is a safeguarding fail and for that reason this child fails the inclusion criteria.

Gender' only exists in social contexts because it is predicated on how people perceive and attribute certain characteristics based on one's sex.
Yes
The problem is not one's sex - but one's feelings about it based on what one thinks is expected because of it.

I don't think that's quite right.
These feelings aren’t caused by what someone thinks is expected of their sex. Gender dysphoria isn’t about believing “boys should like football” or “girls should wear pink.”
It's a deep-seated, embodied sense that one’s body or sex category is wrong. The distress isn’t produced by stereotypes; it’s about the body/ sex itself.

A child may hate the colour pink, prefer football to netball, and have no interest whatsoever in conventionally feminine things. Yet every day they may still beg to wear a pink dress and play netball—not because they enjoy those things, but because doing so allows them to be recognised by others as the girl they feel themselves to be. The pink dress isn’t the cause of the dysphoria; it’s an attempt to alleviate it.

So yes we could eliminate the idea that certain colours or sports are for boys and girls (and we definitely should because gender stereotypes suck). But there’s no reason to think that eliminating those stereotypes would eliminate gender dysphoria, because those stereotypes weren’t what caused it in the first place.

There is, however, a more philosophically interesting argument. If sex categories themselves had absolutely no social meaning or consequence, perhaps gender dysphoria would disappear because there would be no meaningful category in which to feel misplaced. I can see the logic in that.

Even then, though, people would still have different bodies, and many people with gender dysphoria experience profound distress about those physical characteristics themselves. And in any case, the premise is entirely hypothetical. Sex categories exist because human beings are sexually dimorphic. Those biological differences have significant social consequences—for example, only some people become pregnant. It isn’t realistic to imagine a society that simply doesn’t notice or attach any significance to those differences.

So no, I don’t think it’s accurate to say that gender dysphoria can be “cured” by abolishing gender stereotypes. Those stereotypes may influence how dysphoria is expressed, but they are not generally understood to be its underlying cause

I agree with you that Cass's example is stupid, along with most of her report

That's fair, I haven't said why, because we don't know. We don't have the scientific understanding to explain why some people have gender dysphoria any more than we yet have ti explain why some people are autistic.
I suspect that eventually (as with so many things!) we will find evidence that there is a (complex / multiple) genetic aspect to it- although of course there may be a range of different causes, and anyway this is just my personal prediction , we don't have the evidence yet.

Those stereotypes may influence how dysphoria is expressed, but they are not generally understood to be its underlying cause

Unevidenced assertion.

I didn't say it was 'stupid'. Why do you think Cass's example is stupid?