Have you damaged the life of a child?

[LargeSquareRock]

The Cass Review into child’s gender services is out. For those of us who have been following this for years, it really is a No Shit Sherlock moment. All of our beliefs and fears for what is happening to vulnerable children (mainly autistic, traumatised or same-sex attracted girls) is set out in black and white.

https://cass.independent-review.uk/home/publications/final-report/

So,

Every doctor, psychologist and therapist who ignored evidence and went along with this medical scandal and who set a child on the path of no return to future infertility, osteoporosis, increased heart disease and dementia risk, lower IQ and foreshortened life span;

Every school counsellor who felt they were Rosa Parks, whispering secrets to vulnerable kids and damaging the parent-child relationship;

Every teacher who adopted gender ideology and actively poured poison into their student’s ears;

Every teacher who shut down a student who wasn’t toeing the party line;

Every teacher who made girls feel ashamed for not being happy about sharing toilets with boys;

Every social worker who damaged the parent-child relationship and threatened parents with consequences for not affirming their child’s trans identity;

Every child’s friend’s “cool” parent who claimed their home was a sanctuary from the child’s bigoted parents;

Every autism organisation staff member or volunteer who swallowed the nonsense whole and damaged a generation of autistic girls;

Every person who cut off friends when they raised concerns about trans ideology and kids;

Every Facebook group moderator who blocked members raising the mildest questioning of gender ideology, then out up the sickening virtue signalling post about “no hate allowed”;

Every single person who chanted “protect trans kids” without knowing a single thing about the issues;

Every sports coach who allowed boys into the girl’s teams and berated objecting parents and girls as bigots;

Every separated parent going along with the child’s trans nonsense to get back at the other parent.;

Everyone who has ever donated to Mermaids;

Every single person who blindly believed that a parent’s doubts about transitioning their child were based on transphobia and bigotry, not love and concern;

Everyone who has ever told a child that society hates them because of their trans identity;

Every parent who didn’t do their due diligence and happily went along with their child and who enjoyed the attention of having a trans child;

Every politician (pretty much all of them) who decided to ride this one out, even though they could see the harm occurring in real time

This disaster, ruining the lives of a generation of children, is on you.

I always told my teen to go and read the original source documents and then critically think though things that they had read to work out what is likely to be the truth. It is remarkable when they start to questioning what they read and the veracity of news articles. It is sad though. We used to read news items and feel some trust, these days it feels like we have to check everything.

Well done you and your son though.

Deputy Head/Head of Pastoral Care was a rabid rainbow warrior. The rest of the staff had no choice, i think, but wave the flags and dance to the beat of her drum.

That's the situation in so many schools though and on so many topics, a bit like MN, if one isn't 'on message' then there'll be trouble.

That’s not how systematic reviews of medical evidence works. If you put junk in, you’ll get junk out.

Some of the available data was junk, due to having been collected in a way that renders any statistical conclusions unreliable.

It’s like if you wanted to decide the nation’s favourite sport and you had a study that only asked the favourite sport of people coming out of a football match. It would be entirely reasonable to disregard that study as the study design was badly flawed.

No. YABU and all of this is so so toxic 😔. This “debate” is just getting so out of hand. I think it’s time that everyone who is not trans and is not a trans child just please sit down and shut up.
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1778824854105416143.html?

Some of the available data was junk, due to having been collected in a way that renders any statistical conclusions unreliable.

That's actually unfair. Not everyone writes research/articles as if they were to be evaluated by systematic reviews.

Some excellent research, including much of mine (!) is highly qualitative. I've rejected my own articles for systematic reviews because they are not what I am looking for according to very particular criteria.

This does not mean they are 'junk'.

@Tandora you are wrong.

https://genspect.org/parenting-a-trans-identifying-child/

100% this. The questions the Cass review sought to answer through the methods they sought to answer them was absurd. It was no wonder they came out with “no evidence”- which is all they came out with by the way - no terrible evidence of harm as the OP is maliciously trying to suggest.
This is not how paediatric medicine works in other areas , this is all driven by politics and transphobia and it’s trans kids who will suffer.

One anonymous blog post proves bollox all I’m afraid. If there were a lot of these stories they would have come out more clearly in the review. The overwhelming majority of people affected by this review are horrified by its recommendations and the media (/public) response to it.

you. Are. Wrong.

history will not judge you kindly.

With no support from unions either let’s not forget who have bought into this rubbish lock stock and barrel.

I’m so disgusted at parents who have weaponised their children too, to shut down debate and discussion as “bigotry” while they were the ones damaging their own kids. Even now it’s still everyone’s fault, Cass is corrupt etc. Terrible people.

100% this. The questions the Cass review sought to answer through the methods they sought to answer them was absurd. It was no wonder they came out with “no evidence”- which is all they came out with by the way - no terrible evidence of harm as the OP is maliciously trying to suggest.

I agree with the OP and I did not say this.

I said that there was not necessarily a correlation between data being collected in a way that makes statistical conclusions unreliable and 'junk'. That is a different issue.

Also I just skim read this and it sounds like her child didn’t even get any medical services from Tavistock so what the hell are
you even on about? Sounds like the lack of services were the problem.

Well it’s a point that’s very pertinent to the Cass review and I’m very glad you made it.

They said there was no good evidence. (Which is not evidence of terrible harm btw).

There is plenty of good evidence of the benefits of hormonal treatments, just not of the type they were looking for.

Sorry to hear you agree with the OP.

Think. Please think.

https://x.com/assignedmedia/status/1779504643673837950?s=46

There is plenty of good evidence of the benefits of hormonal treatments, just not of the type they were looking for.

I disagree.

This is the kind of medical research that demands the rigour that Cass applied.

Not all studies that fail to do this are 'junk' but they are not relevant to the core question of Cass' review.

To answer the question she was given Cass needed to reject particular studies.

I have no question about this. I also accept that the question itself was valid and correct.

I am ecstatic about the resulting report.

Oh, we are. Always have been. Far more thinking should have been going on before this got as far as it did. We will look back on this with horror, and those supporting this even more so. That includes you. You will NOT be considered on the right side of history, I'm afraid.

YOU think. Seriously. Because what you've supported here has involved IRREVERSIBLE and unevidenced medical and surgical treatments to young people based entirely on their adherence or not to rigid, conservative sex stereotypes. The majority were same sex attracted and had other problems, as evidenced in the report. If that doesn't give you pause for thought, I really don't know what to say to you except there's something gone very wrong with your moral compass, you need to build some serious critical thinking skills, and I would also check your homophobia. Appalling lack of self awareness.

It’s my story. And resonates with other parents like me with children like mine. And totally NOT bollox. So eff off.

One anonymous blog post proves bollox all I’m afraid. If there were a lot of these stories they would have come out more clearly in the review.

Initially I was all for giving people like Tandora the benefit of the doubt in all this. In that they're wrong, but misinformed. Ultimately I once thought people like this meant well, but were misdirected.

But now, as the utter heartlessness is shining through the wreckage, I'm revising my view. This is just a totally inhumane take. How dare you dismiss vulnerable children's stories like this for your own ends?

As the Cass review makes devastatingly plain, we don't know how many examples of this are out there as records are not being kept (or will not be handed over).

How can anyone stand up for this abuse of children? That's the bottom line.

The UoY team that did the two reviews used a tool called the Newcastle-Ottawa which is used to assess studies to see whether they are useful or not for the aims of a particular review/meta analysis. Like every other aspect of Cass, the selection of the studies for the analysis was done objectively and carefully.

without looking at the studies characterised as “low quality”, I wouldn’t necessarily call them junk. There could be qualitative studies out there that fulfilled their own purpose but not in a way that made the data useful for other purposes. My interpretation is that these studies are treated by Cass as effectively anecdotal, rather than statistically robust.

We are talking about medicine. When you are testing medicine to see if it is safe and it works then those are the standards. The testing of drugs is highly regulated.

People complaining about the impossibly high standards demanded by Cass that simply aren’t expected anywhere else clearly don’t have any experience of clinical trials where those standards are what would be expected if you want your drug approved.

The Cochrane Collaboration works along similar lines to the Cass review.

I’m not sure why e.g. people working at the Tavistock weren’t interested in finding out if the drug actually worked. Not having a control group in their study is a pretty basic flaw.

I’m not sure why e.g. people working at the Tavistock weren’t interested in finding out if the drug actually worked. Not having a control group in their study is a pretty basic flaw.

Well this is a pretty big question, isn't it?

The difficulty with this is that nobody wants to be allocated to the control group.

When I was pregnant for the 6th time, with no living children, I agreed to take part in a clinical trial for an experimental treatment for recurrent miscarriage. I ended up not participating because that pregnancy and my next one both went to term.

In that situation I'd have been happy to take the risk of being allocated to the control group. I got pregnant very quickly and easily and the likelihood is that another three miscarriages would have only "wasted" six months of my life.

I imagine that for children with dysphoria who are desperate to be prescribed puberty blockers and believe that time is of the essence, if they are taking part in an NHS clinical trial and they start to show signs of puberty, they will realise that they are in the control group. The risk of them then dropping out of the trial and seeking puberty blockers from a private provider such as Gender GP is, I imagine, high. In fact, I suspect that the only children who would complete the trial in the control group would be those whose parents would prefer them not to medically transition and are very glad that their children turned out to be in the control group. So if those children in the control group subsequently desist, how does the researcher know how much of that is due to the passage of time and how much of it is influenced by their parents?

They should have already started puberty before taking them. Effects could be described as slowing or limiting rather than stopping dead or reversing so you wouldn’t know for sure what you’d been assigned to.

But people dropping out of trials is always a risk. Plenty of parents wouldn’t be happy for their child to get drugs from a dodgy internet site so I don’t think it’s an overwhelming risk.

I am laughing now. That some posters think that Cass is wrong, despite Cass being consistent now with:

A German research team.
A Finnish research team.
A Swedish research team.
NICE findings.
The World Health Organisation findings.
The Dutch are reviewing their findings because they realised it was not really as strong as first thought.
Didn't France also make the same statement?

But apparently, they are all wrong.

When people have a personal investment that research that has been deemed to be weak be found stronger than it is, it is potentially about that person's very heavy personal investment in either themselves, their career or a loved one.

Always important to remember which posters refuse to post evidence that supports their claims, yet will denounce a report stating lack of evidence that then matches with at least 5, if not at least 7, other countries and organisations reviews. At what point will it be considered a fact? When 10 independent countries or organisations make the same declaration from their own review? Does it need to be 15?

Well, if I remember, the Norwegians and the Danish have stated they also believe that there is little evidence to support the use of puberty blockers. Surely their governments would have used experts in the field to check any other governments findings before announcing they were following. Can we make that 9 yet? 10 including the Cass findings from the UoY?

How many more before heavily personally invested people will start to re-evaluate and say, Ok, I got this wrong?

We are talking about medicine. When you are testing medicine to see if it is safe and it works then those are the standards. The testing of drugs is highly regulated

Yes. However, not all studies doing during drug development are randomised, double blinded, placebo controlled. You can still get useful data from open label (ie patient and doctor know what they’re getting), observational studies. It just isn’t as powerful as the gold standard approach. But if you’re studying a rare disease, and/or in children, sometimes the best you can get is “we gave it to 12 adolescents and this is the data”. MHRA/EMA/FDA won’t give you a license for children on that basis, but if the drug is approved for adults or other diseases, then once the data is published it allows physicians to decide whether the drug could be of benefit for their patients and to prescribe it “off-label”.

This is how we’ve ended up with puberty blockers being used in this situation for this purpose. The thing is, now the drug is being used far wider than originally thought, what would normally happen is that FDA/EMA/MHRA would approach the drug manufacturer(s) and say “we note your drug is being manufactured, distributed and used in far more patients than for its original purpose. Please provide us with data to show a) it’s safe and b) it’s effective. And if it is meeting an unmet medical need then please run some studies, submit the data to us and then we’ll give you a license for that specific medical need too.”