AIBU to think puberty blocker trial is child abuse?

[F1rstDoNoHarm]

Have we not learnt from Tavistock closure?

I think it is horrendous - the fact that we are even debating whether this is a good idea is just crazy. For anyone advocating it is "healthy" for yound people to be given the option of having puberty blockers is frankly insane. This whole debate is out of control. Just for clarity - there are two genders - male and female. Thats it. If you think it is wise to push drugs which effectively BLOCK somebodys sexual development is totally and utterly crazy. I cant believe we are even debating the pros and cons.

and who in their sane mind would have set up a bloody clinic (tavistock clinic to facilitate young people changing gender in the first place!!! totally insane thinking. I feel so sorry for the fact young people are exposed to this sort of mentally derranged thinking!

YANBU. Its institutional abuse to stop more children going through the essential biological process of puberty. I do not understand how people can be so cavalier about the rights of children to a fully functioning body. And for what? Aesthetics?

Why is anyone supporting radical cosmetic surgeries on children? There is no rational or ethical reason to destroy a healthy body to manage a (very likely temporary) mental health problem.

No @Inchworms you said everyone eventually goes through puberty, even after taking blockers for "gender questioning." This is not correct, as Hannah Barnes has shown.

Around 80% of those on puberty blockers for this reason go straight to artificial cross-sex hormones: they don't go through a healthy puberty.

That is the problem.

I meant all medication. Everything will need to be tested on its target group.

I believe all drugs should be trialled. This is a medical trial and the results will determine whether these are safe to prescibe. Saying that drug trials are child abuse would mean that we could never trial medicines to make sure they are safe, leading to worse outcomes for thousands of people. I say that as someone who had a family member with muscular dystrophy. When he was a child his parents consented to radical new surgery. It was a risk, but one which if it paid off (which it did) would lead to better quality of life for him. His bravery, and his parents bravery, paved the way for an evidenced based treatment that helped thousands of boys.

It is total and blatant abuse of young people. Truly awful. Incidentally for all their faults (of which there are many) do you see Russia advocating this type of non-sensical policies??? i am sorry but for the most part (definitely not all) people who think are born in to the wrong bodies are mentally unwell and need to treated accordingly.This is a very tiny minority of people who would be wise to follow such a treatment journey.

I was listening to the GP on LBC on Thursday who runs a "gender change clinic" - she is utterly derranged in her views. Totally and completely unhinged.

I honestly believe that as a society if we are advocating these sorts of policies, we are a spiral of moral decline.

what to help change their gender??? are you crazy?

these trials and policies need to be banned - full stop

Treating a psychological condition in children with medication to stop puberty is crazy, but it’s been normalised now.

We don’t give girls with body dysmorphia lip fillers and BBLs yet somehow, here we are.

What about using the information from the thousands of children worldwide who have already had them?

For precocious puberty they’re used for a short period to delay puberty, not to stop it forever. Puberty is a huge developmental process the body goes through, it’s not just boobs whatever, the brain changes and so do muscle development, heart & lung development - it’s huge. Why we’d want to do this to children and affect their sexual development forever is beyond me.

Yes, they are running tests to see just how much damage it does to children who do not have a condition that needs medicating.

That should be grounds for arrest and the other sort of trial.

Puberty blockers were designed to prevent precocious puberty in very, very young children, ie where babies were already seen to be sexually maturing.

They've since been used to halt sexual maturation in teenagers who think they were born in the wrong body.

One use is outright abuse, one use is medically necessary. Which is which to you?

Some will experience severe distress and dysphoria by going through puberty into a body they aren’t comfortable in - I’m not sure how anyone could be against medication that will help with this. Testing is the first step.

No child should be given puberty blockers because adults have lied to them by telling them they can change sex. They can't. It's impossible.

They are being sold an impossible dream that will damage them physically and mentally for the rest of their lives.

Very few of them will ever "pass" and those that do will only pass some of the time. Those closest to them might pretend they have changed sex, but literally no one will actually believe it.

These children need honesty from the adults who are supposed to care for them. They need to be encouraged to like and love themselves for who they actually are and not be persuaded that drugs and surgery can make them someone else.

but even if children are uncomfortable with the body of their sex they can never have the body of the opposite sex.

Puberty blockers will stop the completely natural process of a childs transition to adulthood in favour of being medicalised with artificial hormones for the rest of their lives.

Telling a child that they can be the opposite sex is a lie, cruel and imoral

We already know that these drugs are dangerous! There is so much evidence of harmful, permanent, side-effects from their use in slowing down precocious puberty, that they are used for the shortest time possible, just until the child reaches the lowest normal age for puberty. And then they are allowed to go through all the normal hormonal changes of puberty. Which include emotional and mental maturation.

At the Tavistock, almost every single child who was put on puberty blockers went on to take cross-sex hormones. They never had a chance to mature emotionally or mentally. Yet the vast majority of gender-confused/distressed children come to terms with their sexed bodies as they mature - when given the chance to.

What should be being trialled is the role of psychotherapy, social therapy, talking therapies, anti-depressants etc in treating these distressed children and their parents.

What should also be explored are the outcomes for children who were given blockers and those who were allowed to mature without interference: the state of their health, happiness, sexual orientation, and even their gender identity. There should be at least ten years of data…

She didn't say drug trials are child abuse, she said the puberty blocker trial is child abuse.

We already know they're not safe to prescribe because the expected effects already constitute harm to children's healthy bodies, before even considering unwanted side effects such as loss of bone density and a significant drop in IQ. This study will provide very little useful evidence because the control group are also being given the drugs, just a year later.

It is deeply unethical to prescibe these drugs to a whole new group of children without even bothering to collect and analyse the data from the children who have been previously treated.

Sometimes it's worth trialing and prescribing drugs and treatments with known harms when they are used to treat serious life-threatening and life-limiting conditions. Drugs which reliably induce permanent sterility should only be trialed in children for the most serious conditions, where death is the likely alternative outcome, not for mental health conditions which tend to resolve naturally if puberty is allowed to continue unhindered, not for conditions which weren't even really a 'thing' until a couple of decades ago.

Puberty is uncomfortable. Painful. Messy. Confusing. This is normal. Calling it dysphoria and claiming it needs irreversible treatment pathologises a perfectly normal condition that everybody experiences. Pathologises an important life stage, and replaces it with something even more unpleasant.

You are 100% right, OP.

Society needs to stop lying to children. The children think they want these drugs, they think they are "hated", they think if anything negative issaid it its "transphobia".

If they were supported, taught that it was ok to be different, that society doesn't gate them maybe they wouldn't think drugs were necessary.

Medicine is rarely tested on under-18s because it is fundamentally unethical to do so.

'Puberty is uncomfortable. Painful. Messy. Confusing. This is normal. Calling it dysphoria and claiming it needs irreversible treatment pathologises a perfectly normal condition that everybody experiences.'

Very well said @JellySaurus . Adults should be reassuring youngsters that what they're going through is perfectly normal, and that it will pass. Dysphoria is an unpleasant but common experience when you're going through an enormous hormonal transition - pathologising it does no one any good

It's not actually clear whether they will go through the cognitive changes associated with puberty, particularly if they start on cross sex hormones