Transgender Documentary on BBC2 Thursday 2100 "Transgender Kids: Who Knows best?"

[ItsAllGoingToBeFine]

Looks like an interesting watch, that does not just accept the trans children or they will kill themselves rhetoric. I just hope the BBC actually do show it and aren't bullied into not showing it.

www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b088kxbw

The blurb:

Around the world there has been a huge increase in the number of children being referred to gender clinics - boys saying they want to be girls and vice versa. Increasingly, parents are encouraged to adopt a 'gender affirmative' approach - fully supporting their children's change of identity. But is this approach right?

In this challenging documentary, BBC Two's award-winning This World strand travels to Canada, where one of the world's leading experts in childhood gender dysphoria (the condition where children are unhappy with their biological sex) lost his job for challenging the new orthodoxy that children know best. Speaking on TV for the first time since his clinic was closed, Dr Kenneth Zucker believes he is a victim of the politicisation of transgender issues. The film presents evidence that most children with gender dysphoria eventually overcome the feelings without transitioning and questions the science behind the idea that a boy could somehow be born with a 'female brain' or vice versa. It also features 'Lou' - who was born female and had a double mastectomy as part of transitioning to a man. She now says it is a decision that 'haunts' her and feels that her gender dysphoria should have been treated as a mental health issue.

Just a few points on the science...
Hundreds of thousands of women take norethisterone as a contraceptive or to manage their heavy periods without "masculinisation" occurring.
Functional MRI and structural anatomy,including at postmortem, show that there is no statistically significant difference between male and female brains beyond male brains being around 10% larger.
NICE and RCOG have said the role of progestogens in the management of miscarriage is lacking in evidence and is not routine practice.
Intra-vaginal progestogens are sometimes used in the management of preterm labour occurring between 24 and 29+6 weeks gestation. This would therefore mean only a very small number fetuses exposed to antenatal progesterone.
Even if we assume the hypothesis regarding the use of DES or progesterone does cause a male fetus to develop a female brain is correct DES has not been used since the 1970s so does not account for children presenting with gender dysphoria now.

The point I'm trying to make is that doctors are happily giving women synthetic female hormones as treatments for preventing miscarriages and premature births, when if you were to give exactly the same drug in exactly the same dose to an adult man, his androgen production would be profoundly suppressed.
Doctors give women synthetic female hormones to treat lots of conditions including acne, menopause, PCOS, heavy periods and of course as a contraceptive. I'm not sure why it's a surprise that synthetic female hormones would have a negative effect on an adult male? And I'm not sure how that's at all relevant to transgenderism. I'm sure you will explain your theory however I don't believe it's backed by evidence.

Hugh, could you explain why a male baby who is exposed To progestin in utero would become a male baby with a female brain, instead of a male baby with a male brain in his male body who perhaps had a lower than average testsosterone level? And why this would mean he would need to have his penis removed and wear dresses? That's the bit I struggle with.

Ach well- if Zack Ford said it, it must be true.

Poppyred85 "Hundreds of thousands of women take norethisterone as a contraceptive or to manage their heavy periods without "masculinisation" occurring."

Evidently, doctors and the pharmaceutical industry made the same assumption when they rushed the first progestins to market more or less as soon as they could be produced in bulk, and despite warning signs during the clinical trials. Yes, norethisterone is only weakly androgenic in adults, however, if taken during pregnancy, it act as a strong androgen in the foetus. I've attached the first page preview of one of the papers I've found reporting on the phenomenon. Let me quote from it:

"An infrequent but growing clinical literature has accumulated on the occurrence of masculinization of the female fetus in cases of recurrent and threatened abortion treated with ethisterone. Although norethindrone, its 19-nor analog, is of more recent vintage (year of introduction, 1957), its widespread use in obstetrics has been associated with an increased number of published cases of fetal masculinization ... During the course of evaluating the efficiacy of norethindrone in the management of abortion, a clinical trial among 385 consecutive private obstetric patients revealed a high incidence of maternal and fetal virilization. More than 5 per cent of treated women manifested masculinizing side effects, but of greater significance, more than 18 per cent of the female infants born to mothers given this compound during pregnancy manifested some degree of masculinization of the external genitals, viz., clitoral enlargement with or without partial fusion of the labioscrotal folds."

From what it says in that quote (and the fact that some of these drugs were definitely still being given to pregnant women as recently as 1969), there must be a lot of affected people - thousands if not more. Nonetheless, you don't hear anything about it today!

One of the papers I've obtained includes photos of some of the affected babies, and their genitals do look very much like a scrotum and penis. Judging by what the authors of those papers say, nearly all of the affected babies will have been operated on to give them normal-appearing female genitals. Genital appearance was the only concern of the doctors writing up these case reports, however, along with genital masculinization, the hormone-exposed babies will have experienced masculinization of their endocrine system and brain (which the surgery won't have fixed of course).

As to why progestins that are only weakly androgenizing in adults can have strong androgenic effects on female foetuses, I found a paper that talks about the foetal metabolism of hydroxyprogesterone caproate. The foetal liver isn't as good at breaking these compounds down as the adult liver, and as its first stage of trying to get rid of them, it produces metabolites with added hydroxy groups, that are still hormonally active. The parent compounds are all highly lipid soluble and can easily cross the placenta, however these hydroxylated metabolites are less lipid soluble and don't cross the placenta so easily. As a result, you can end up with hormonally active compounds building up to a considerably higher level in the foetal bloodstream than there are in the mother's bloodstream. An added problem with the early testosterone-derived progestins is that some of the metabolites might be much stronger androgens than the parent progestin.

"hormone-exposed babies will have experienced masculinization of their endocrine system and brain" will they? Do we know that? If so, what form does this masculinisation of the brain take?

And why would that hypothetical masculinisation cause these females to think they were male?

Females produce low levels of testosterone anyway. It doesn't make them male. This is normal!

So again are coopting a known medical condition/abnormality to hypothesize about causes of transgenderism. In a way that I find quite alarming on this particular website given that the vast majority of women here will have taken synthetic hormones and many of us will even have taken them either during an unplanned pregnancy or during treatment for fertility issues.
It's infuriating. A small number of women given a physical birth defect due to medical treatment in the 60s (when the thalidomide thing also happened) is not an indicator that synthetic hormones taken by the mother during pregnancy cause a mental disorder in children today.
And in doing so, you provide yet another stick to beat pregnant women with Go you.

Thanks for the article it makes interesting reading but I don't think offers much in the way of support for your argument of male and female brains for a number of reasons. Firstly, the paper is from 1962. Medicine and in particular our understanding of the management of threatened or recurrent miscarriage has changed a lot since then. The study itself ( from what I can read from your exerpt) reports only on the cases of 385 women who received some form of progestogen in early pregnancy and in those cases reports on the virilisation of the external genitals of female babies. It lists clitora swelling and some degree of labial fusion as these effects. There is no evidence (again from what I can see) that this supports the female/male brain idea. We recognise that some female babies seem to have enlarged breast tissue, "swollen" external genitals and in some cases even hormone withdrawal vaginal bleeding due to drop in circulating estrogen after birth. There is no evidence that these females go on to be ultra-feminine in their behaviours and we know that the external manifestations of maternal estrogen exposure disappear shortly after birth. This is likely to happen with progestogen exposure too and does not necessarily mean that these babies will have undergone surgery.
Secondly, as I said before this paper is for outdated clinical practice, so even were it true that antenatal progesterone cause feminisation of male foetus or masculinisation of a female foetus it still fails to account for the surge in young people/children presenting with gender dysphoria because they are simply too young to have been exposed to this practice, at least in the UK.

Sorry, my reply was to Hugh - others posted while I was typing! I should also add, as have the posters above me that again, literally thousands of women will have taken some form of hormonal contraception in early pregnancy, before they realised they were pregnant and again there is no evidence to support that this causes any changes to brain function.

poppy it's pretty clear your proofreading skills are better than mine! I need to go slower.....

"Even if we assume the hypothesis regarding the use of DES or progesterone does cause a male fetus to develop a female brain is correct DES has not been used since the 1970s so does not account for children presenting with gender dysphoria now."

DES was used quite extensively in Europe throughout the 1970s, and may have continued to be used for miscarriage prevention in some third world countries right up until the 1990s. However, the point I'm trying to make is that it's just one example of a testosterone-suppressing drug given to pregnant women, where there's evidence of high rates of DSDs and transsexuality in the male offspring. There are plenty of other drugs with testosterone suppressing properties that are still in use during pregnancy, in particular several members of the progestin class of hormones (e.g. dydrogesterone, hydroxyprogesterone caproate and, in many Asian countries, allylestrenol).

Due to the way it's prescribed and the high doses used, I think hydroxyprogesterone caproate is particularly likely to be capable of inducing female brain development in male babies. That particular one was withdrawn from routine use in the UK sometime around 2000 because of a lack of evidence of effectiveness, however it's still prescribed in the US and in most other parts of the world.

What is female brain development? Or male, for that matter?

And a lot of these late transitioning transwomen who are so vocal in the movement and who potentially could have been exposed in the right time period don't appear to me to be particularly different to any other men, apart from external presentation. Especially when they have kept their perfectly normal male genitals and have used them to have children with a woman.

Ok hugh assuming your theory is right, what is your suggestion?
Withdraw synthetic progesterones from women of childbearing age in case they have a transgender child?
Don't treat miscarriage/premature birth with progesterone because a dead baby is better than a trans person?
Describe transgenderism as a birth defect caused by medication?
None of those avenues seem particularly congruent with current feminist/trans activist thinking. In fact they seem quite regressive.

And actually, quite strange when you were so up in arms about "beating out the trans"/conversion therapy up thread.

FFS, there is no such thing as a "female brain".

I am right in thinking, aren't I? that the male/female brain thing is cobblers?

I thought that was all debunked forty plus years ago.

Yes Bertrand, it is cobblers.

And doesn't current trans doctrine say that associating being trans with dysphoria - or any other condition - is transphobic?

I wonder if Gina Robbins fancies a political career?

Poppyred85 "...literally thousands of women will have taken some form of hormonal contraception in early pregnancy, before they realised they were pregnant and again there is no evidence to support that this causes any changes to brain function."

The process of sexually dimorphic development doesn't even start until six weeks after conception, when the primordial gonads start to differentiate into ovaries or testicles. With a male baby, by about 8 weeks the testicles will have matured enough to start producing testosterone, and it's then that sexually dimorphic development really gets underway. During week 8 to week 12, the genitals develop their structure. In the presence of high levels of androgens, labioscrotal fusion and penile development take place, and you end up with a scrotum and penis. In the absence of androgens, the labia don't fuse and you end up with a vagina and clitoris instead.

If a woman falls pregnant without realising it and continues to take birth control for the first couple of weeks of her pregnancy, the exposure will occur before the process of sexually dimorphic development has got underway, so it's too early to affect sexual development. However, that doesn't mean it's harmless. In the course of trying to find out what synthetic hormones do to the unborn child, I've found several different groups of people that have been harmed by them in various ways. One of those groups are the Primodos victims. Primodos (sold as Duogynon in Germany) was a high dose combination of norethisterone and ethinylestradiol, two of the exact same synthetic hormones that have seen extensive use in birth control. Basically it caused some of the women given it to miscarry, and others to give birth to babies with a range of disabilities quite similar to the disabilities that were seen with thalidomide. As with the DES feminization of males and the progestin induced virilization of female babies, the whole thing was swept under the carpet.

theconversation.com/is-primodos-the-forgotten-thalidomide-50673

I've also attached a file showing the events associated with brain development. The early stages of brain development involve very rapid cell division to produce the vast numbers of cells needed to form the human brain, and the migration of those cells to where their final place in the brain will be (which is often far distant from where they form). It's not until about 16 weeks after conception that the first permanent connections between cells in the brain start to form, and the permanent structure of the brain to develop (a process which continues for the remainder of the pregnancy). This probably explains why there's a separation of effects from hormone exposure of mainly physical ones in the first trimester, to mainly effects on the brain if exposure occurs later in the pregnancy. Presumably the important sex differences in brain tissue are related in some way to how cells are connected to each other at the microscopic level (although there are also sex-related size differences in certain areas of the brain, and there must be differences in hormone receptor expression too, since male and female brain tissue responds differently to hormones).

What are the important sex differences in brains? How do they manifest themselves in the different behaviour of men and women?

Hugh- why are persisting in talking about sex differences in brains when none exist?