To think 11 year old girls should NOT be eligible for the newly restarted puberty blockers trial?

[SingleSexSpacesInSchools]

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/gift/174c8f4252fcd5a5

We know puberty blockers cause permanent harm at any age. 11 is at least 5 years too young. How can the government sanction permanent damage to a child? Hundreds of children, IQ damaged, infertility and sexual function risks, bone density damage, not to mention not addressing that poor child’s underlying mental health issues which should be helped and addressed in the most supportive and humane manner.

I am disgusted Labour can let this horror show go ahead.

The governments own page on this has the nerve to say

“As with all clinical trials, the MHRA’s top priority is the safety and wellbeing of the trial participants.”

www.gov.uk/government/news/update-on-the-pathways-clinical-trial

An 11 year old cannot give informed consent to this.

It’s like the government haven’t had any major health scandals recently so have decided we really need another potential major lawsuit to pay compensation out of the public purse. I just can’t think of any other reason for this madness than to keep Keir’s lawyer pals in cakes and ale.

Agreed. Anecdotal but a boy in my DS’s year wanted to be a girl right throughout secondary, insisted on being called a girl’s name and everyone using she/her pronouns. Now at the end of year 11 he’s reverted back and decided he is in fact a boy. Imagine if he’d been given these.

Keir seems to think they can...

It's a big problem to have a Health Secretary in James Murray who can't decide whether men can become women or vice versa. Fucking idiot reminds me of Alan Partridge

"Fascinating creatures though. Looks like a lady, but really it's a man. I don't find them attractive, it's just confusing....."

Would have made no difference overall. Puberty blockers do what it says on the box - delays puberty and has been used for years in children with precocious puberty.

Forgive me but why is this being attributed to Starmer? The decision was made by the MHRA, which is an independent regulatory body and not a political party.

Starmer has nothing to do with this.

Not without significant oversight! And to delay puberty by maybe 2/3 years, not indefinitely and followed up with cross sex hormones.

It's a trial looking at puberty blockers in young people who are approaching or at puberty so the participants need to be around that age. The protocol describes inclusion and exclusion criteria and robust recruitment procedures. An 11 year old is too young to consent (legally), so will give informed assent. Informed consent is taken from their parent or guardian.

Read the trial information PATHWAYS TRIAL | King's College London, rather than headlines. I'm gender critical but the only way we learn things is through trial and error or research, and it's far better for this to be done in a monitored way. I'm also open-minded, so open to learning more about this and perhaps being wrong.

Of course there is oversight - and the young person involved is free to change their mind at any time

As someone who has severe osteoporosis for the last few years, I would not like to inflict it on anyone! I’m lucky in that mine is reversible as it’s caused by high parathyroid hormone levels pulling my calcium out of my bones and I’ve had successful surgery a few months (after unsuccessful surgery in 2017) ago to remove the overactive parathyroid glands and my blood calcium levels are normal for the first time in ten years possibly longer! Which means the calcium is now going back into my bones where it should have been all along!

Sorry I sort of thought he was the PM, silly me.

That comparison with precocious puberty is exactly the problem.

Using blockers for precocious puberty is not the same as using them for gender distress. In precocious puberty, puberty has started abnormally early. The treatment is used to pause an early pathological process so the child can develop at a more normal age. It is not being used to stop normal puberty in an otherwise normally developing 11-year-old.

For gender distress, you are blocking the child’s normal puberty, during the very period when puberty is meant to drive bone development, brain development, sexual development and maturation. That is not a trivial pause button.

And in practice it is not simply “a bit more time to think”. The concern is that blockers often become the first step on a medical pathway: blockers, then cross-sex hormones, then lifelong medicalisation, with known risks around fertility, sexual function, bone density and general health.

So no, “they’ve been used for precocious puberty” does not make this safe or comparable. That is a completely different clinical situation, usually for a much shorter and clearer purpose. Giving puberty blockers to children with gender distress is interfering with normal development without good evidence of benefit, and with very serious potential harms.

That is not neutral. It is not harmless. It is a bad thing to do to children.

Same thing happened with a friends son.

I don’t accept that “it’s a trial” somehow solves the ethical problem.

An 11-year-old cannot meaningfully consent to having normal puberty medically interrupted. Calling it “assent” does not change that. And parental consent is not a magic wand either. Parents cannot properly consent on a child’s behalf to an intervention where the purpose, benefit and endpoint are so unclear.

What is the drug actually trying to do here?

If the answer is “give the child time to think”, that has not been shown to be a neutral pause. Puberty is not just cosmetic. It is a major developmental process involving bones, brain, sexual development, fertility, emotional maturation and future adult function.

If the answer is “reduce distress”, then how is success being measured? Reduced distress after stopping puberty? Reduced distress after moving on to cross-sex hormones? Reduced distress years later as an adult? Because those are very different things.

And if the real pathway is blockers followed by cross-sex hormones, then this is not just a temporary delay. It is the beginning of a medical pathway that can lead to infertility, loss of normal sexual function and lifelong dependence on hormones.

The obvious first-line response to a distressed child should be whole-child mental health support: careful, neutral, exploratory, developmentally informed care that looks at autism, anxiety, trauma, family dynamics, sexuality, body image, social contagion and ordinary adolescent distress. Not telling a child that they may somehow be the opposite sex and then using drugs to stop their body developing normally.

Research is important, but not all research is automatically ethical just because it is monitored. You still need a coherent therapeutic aim, a plausible benefit, meaningful consent and an acceptable risk-benefit balance.

I don’t see that here. I see children too young to understand the lifelong stakes being placed on a pathway whose best-case “success” is unclear and whose foreseeable harms are enormous.

Oh and Imagine an 11-year-old boy who is terrified of becoming a man because his father is violent. He says he hates the idea of getting taller, stronger, hairier, more sexual. He cries and says puberty feels like becoming the thing he fears most.

Would we give him puberty blockers as an experiment?

Would we say, “This is just research, and his parents have consented”?

No. We would understand his fear. We would take it seriously. We would protect him, support him, and get him proper psychological help. But we would not drug his healthy body to stop puberty because puberty has become the focus of his distress.

Thats not medicine. and nor is this.

Another issue is that the parents need to give consent and my concern is that therapists will scare parents into consenting using their childs mental health situation to emotionally blackmail them: better a living son than a dead daughter. So what is a bit of brittle bone disease? At least your child is still alive, right? No telling what they would do if you challenge a child on how they see themselves

Seems parents who were stuck in the WellBN hellhole are pretty upset about their kids https://www.thetimes.com/article/ec841e0d-ca35-4611-bc5a-94c002a70037?shareToken=1f4c6b3dfdddbe79688da0a32e3f9da0

No, they can’t, but parents make decisions for their children all the time.

I can't decide my 11 year old can have a tattoo - why not?

Yanbu so bad

This is utterly horrendous. Please, someone with common sense, step in and stop the madness.

People can transition all they want after they turn 18.

“The obvious first-line response to a distressed child should be whole-child mental health support: careful, neutral, exploratory, developmentally informed care that looks at autism, anxiety, trauma, family dynamics, sexuality, body image, social contagion and ordinary adolescent distress. Not telling a child that they may somehow be the opposite sex and then using drugs to stop their body developing normally.”

the question with this though, is what then if therapy doesn’t help? working through the feelings in a professional environment ≠ the feelings dissipating. for example, say there’s a girl with both ASD, and gender dysphoria, that gets referred to the exploratory therapy. while we can identify the autism may have a large aspect of why there could be distress over a perceived sex mismatch, it doesn’t make it go away.

unfortunately, not every “trans teen” grows out of their sex dysphoria, so i believe it should all be in a case by case basis

the question with this though, is what then if therapy doesn’t help? working through the feelings in a professional environment ≠ the feelings dissipating. for example, say there’s a girl with both ASD, and gender dysphoria, that gets referred to the exploratory therapy. while we can identify the autism may have a large aspect of why there could be distress over a perceived sex mismatch, it doesn’t make it go away.

Then you help her find ways to deal with the existence of her female sexed body, even if she's not happy with it. Loads of people have to just live with something they are not happy with; she'll just be one of them.

And then when she turns 18, if she still wants to, she can enter another round of therapy to prepare her for the massive changes that hormones and surgery will have on her body and life.