AIBU to think puberty blocker trial is child abuse?

[F1rstDoNoHarm]

Have we not learnt from Tavistock closure?

Absolutely.
There is a reason why a lot of medication isn´t considered "safe" on kids or young teens. Not because it has been tested on them and considered unsafe, but because it hasn´t been tested on them as such testing would be unethical. Same goes for pregnancy.

Yes, that's what I meant. We had someone on the thread who thought she might have been taking them for ten years. I can't see how that is possible. Surely you'd have to be well under the normal age before drugs would be considered at all, and they'd be stopped at the earliest healthy age for a child of that sex to start puberty.

Not sure this has been posted yet.

This is Michael Biggs speech from a Medico Legal Society meeting on the 13 October 2025.

History of and evidence for puberty suppression as intervention for children experiencing gender dysphoria

Published 9th December 2025

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00258172251392357?url_ver=Z39.88-2003&rfr_id=ori:rid:crossref.org&rfr_dat=cr_pub%20%200pubmed

This is the final two paragraphs of an extensive recounting of the history of children’s treatment. There is a lot in the speech to take in.

“One final speculative reflection. It’s true that only a small number of adolescents who are going through a transition or identify as transgender undergo early puberty suppression. Even if you look at the ones who go for medical intervention, the typical patient would be a 17-year-old girl who thinks she’s non-binary or thinks she’s a boy, and of course puberty suppression is irrelevant in that case. However, even though only a small number of children have undergone early puberty suppression, they dominate media portrayals and they help to construct the image of the transgender child. It’s very telling that all the media-friendly trans kids have had early puberty suppression: Jazz Jennings in America and Jackie Green in the UK; there was also a trans boy called Leo who was featured on BBC Children’s television; and Valentijn de Hingh, a very famous transgender woman in the Netherlands. So actually they have an outsized role in constructing this idea of a transgender child. Moreover, the availability of puberty blockers becomes a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy because it makes social transition feasible. Before puberty blockers, it was not really possible to socially transition in school because, obviously, your emerging sex characteristics would become visible to everyone. But the availability of puberty blockers makes social transition in school possible; consequently, social transition becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy because it locks in the transgender identity.

I think the final broader cultural ramification of puberty suppression is that you begin to conceive puberty not as a crucial life stage that we all have to go through in order to become adults – but as literally a disease or almost like a disease. As de Vries, the most published Dutch gender clinician, says, ‘Disallowing puberty suppression, resulting in irreversible development of secondary sex characteristics, may be considered unethical’.This is why she said we can never have a randomised control trial because it’s actually unethical not to stop puberty. So the broader social and cultural implications of puberty suppression are very wide.

What? Unethical not to stop puberty? 🤯 I’m reading that and I’m thinking, “Yep, exactly what I’ve been saying: this ideology pathologises a normal and essential part of human maturation”, yet the Dutch physician comes to entirely the opposite conclusion! That puberty is harmful if it makes the child unhappy!

Mind. Blown. 🤯

My two cents: It is completely unethical. It’s so wrong. It is horrifying and a scandal in the waiting. Disgraceful. No child should be put on an unnecessary medical pathway, and I’m appalled that anyone would support this experiment on healthy children. “First, do no harm” - whatever happened to that? The decision to medically transition is a decision that only a fully-grown adult can make. Leave kids alone and let them figure things out in their own time. Shame on Streeting if this goes ahead.

As an actual physician I love these threads. Maybe look up the sciebtic facts lads.

Which sciebtic facts would those be?

Which ones are you talking about?

The conclusions from the ethics committee that gave this the green light need to be published.

It is unconscionable that they are being kept secret

I think it's abusive and sick tbh. Leave the bloody kids alone.

They need to do a follow-up study on all those who have previously had PBs for gender distress. How hard can it be to track down those medical records? Far better to analyse existing data than to mess up a whole new cohort of healthy children. I wish these doctors would listen to people like Keira Bell who has been through the system and knows what she’s talking about.

Well it would be easier to do if all Trusts released the data they held. Some trusts refused to do this for the Cass review and I'm not sure if they've ever been compelled to release it in the meantime.

If that doesn't give people pause, I dont know what will. There are hospital trusts who will not share the data they have on the children who were given puberty blockers and other experimental treatment. How can that be allowed to happen?

All adult gender clinics except one refused to disclose records of children who were transferred to adult services. (How convenient.) So, it is hard. Hilary Cass got nowhere trying to obtain these records despite spending four years on the review. Gender clinics don’t do any meaningful follow-ups and state explicitly in their service specification that their services are not lifelong. The lack of follow-up is scandalous in its own right.

This is for purely cosmetic reasons, not life saving medicine.

Yes.

There is absolutely no comparison between drugs being trialled for life saving treatments for devastating diseases and drugs being trialled to stop puberty in healthy children.

Define 'benefit'.

This is the problem. The trial isn't really even doing this.

It's measures and the length of it are a terrible base to decide if they really do benefit anyone.

You have kids who are being told it will benefit them by a bunch of adults. A lot of the issue is that they will see blockers as the goal and will have satisfaction from this for a period anyway.

They also will have other forms of support so you won't know if that any psychological benefit is from the blocks or not.

And we already have a wealth of evidence about the physical effects of blockers on children from use in other areas and from previous trials which no one wants to show the data from (for some mysterious reason). We actually know the long term effects of blockers are not good for a sizable number of kids already.

We also know desistance rates without blockers are high. And that kids who take blockers are likely to go on to more medical interventions (so the harms of blockers may also actually include any of these subsequent treatments if the kid

So how do we know we are even giving the right children the blockers - should all those kids be in the trial? How are they selected and with what criteria? The Tavistock staff pretty much said they had no idea if the right kids were on the trial or not or if they hadn't have been drugs would they have desisted. There is absolutely no change on this point since the Tavistock in recognition of this fundamental point.

The worst thing about the trial for me, isn't that it's going ahead - it's that it's so poorly designed and is going ahead.

There has been absolutely no reflection on the Cass Review nor the findings of whistleblowers. It's just repeating the same flaws and flawed logic we already know with this preset idea that blockers will help some children. Which is a bias in its own right because the measures are so shockingly bad this study will absolutely say 'yes they help', not because it's showing anything but being of underlying patterns of how humans behave!

Anyone who has actually READ the Cass Review and the criticisms of the Tavistock properly and have even a dash of understanding of the concept of bad science and poor trial methodology can see from the moon it's complete bollocks.

If you are going to do a study on this, it needs to be shed load better than this scandalous car crash so it can actually look at benefits and harms without prejudice or other issues.

The worst thing is the reasoning given for not releasing some of this data. One of the reasons given was because it would have a devastating impact on some of the subjects. That made me sit up and notice whilst my jaw dropped.

That's not normal.

This is anonymous information. Information that wouldn't be identifying.

That means something significant and negative has happened. There isn't an alternative from that phrasing.

If the subjects had lived happily ever after they would not be devastated. If the information reveals the extent of harms done by experimentation (and covers the hospitals arses in the process) you'd have a medical scandal and traumatised patients.

A little reminder at this point: GDPR has limitations. If there is a compelling reason in the public interest on the grounds of health, there are exceptions to it where private information can be shared. The government effectively do have good grounds to push through on that - if they wanted. The fact they haven't says a lot.

It's politically easier to authorise another deeply flawed study on children rather than examine existing information and reveal a massive medical scandal.

And that's where this discussion should start and always return to.

What happened to the children of the Tavistock trial? That's what it was and was always framed as yet this is utterly forgotten.

This is rooted in a national scandal which we should NEVER step away from. Why have those long term effects been buried?

You don't bury a long term follow up, if everyone lives happily ever after.

It's politically easier to authorise another deeply flawed study on children rather than examine existing information and reveal a massive medical scandal.

This is absolutely scandalous.

Yes, it absolutely is. And heartbreaking.

Thanks, @RedToothBrush for the information, so well explained.

Wes Streeting is speaking in parliament about it this morning.

Is it because individual children might be identifiable from the level of detail needed. Low numbers of children at each age group / gender etc?

I can see how too much detailed info would be problematic. But i can't see an issue with overall figures of Outcomes.

For example, our council wouldn't provide info for an FOI on the number of children in each age bracket that applied for different ASN school placements and the outcomes. They said this would risk individual children being identified from the data, because there were so few of each age.

I totally understand and appreciate this and still think that the lack of disclosure is unacceptable because it could easily be generalised.

The point being that if there was nothing to see here there wouldn't be a need to hide the harms anyway. We know there are harms from the reasoning given to hide the harms and yet the study is being authorised because we aren't allowed to see the harms which inevitably will lead to more harms.

Imagine being one of the kids on the original trial and struggling with your own health issues and knowing that you have to watch the butchery of others or sacrifice your own privacy and come out alone to the press because the government won't release a more generalised picture of how it's gone wrong.

That's where it's fucked up. We assume that those who have been harmed want to be complicit in a cover up but actually it's probably more complex than that and for some seeing this continue to another cohort will be distressing in its own right.

I'm noting Kiera Bell is the one who is pressing ahead with a legal challenge in this context too.

A quote from Hannah Barnes excellent column in the New Statesmen which raises a whole PILE of political questions and conflict of interest questions:

At a briefing on the new trial for parliamentarians on 3 December, Labour MP Jonathan Hinder pointed out that one member of the presenting panel, NHS England’s James Palmer, had been responsible for overseeing and developing youth gender services for more than a decade; Palmer had spoken publicly about it being a “good thing” that so many young people were exploring their gender. “Why on earth is he anywhere near this trial?” Hinder asked, given Palmer had been in a senior position while the many problems at Gids unfolded, but did not act to stop it. Another MP present at the briefing told me how unpersuaded they were by the argument that a new NHS trial was necessary because so many children were accessing puberty blockers from unregulated private providers. Risks and benefits had to be assessed in the safe environment of a trial, it was argued, to safeguard these children as much as possible. (This was an argument when the Tavistock study was seeking ethical approval in 2010, too: an “increasing number of UK families were accessing [puberty blockers] internationally.”)

Kids might take heroine illegally therefore we should just give it to them legal if they want it, is the equivalent argument. And yes I do think chasing puberty blockers has an addictive element from the social media side of things to it which is fundamentally unrecognised and acknowledged. It's part of the problem.

An Open Letter from clinicians to Wes Streeting on the PATHWAYS Puberty Blocker Trial

Open Letter from clinicians to Wes Streeting on the PATHWAYS Puberty Blocker Trial – Clinical Advisory Network on Sex and Gender

It says, in particular:

1. The expected benefits do not outweigh the expected risks, jeopardising the safety and wellbeing of participants.
2. Foreseeable risks to child development are not minimized.
3. The trial is not scientifically sound.
4. Important information from people who have already received gonadotrophin-releasing hormone analogues (GnRHa) (the Data Linkage Study) should be evaluated first.