"Pausing Puberty" on Radio 4

[QuaterMiss]

This programme on hormone blocking drugs is on R4 at 11am this morning.

(I won't be able to listen til later.)

Thanks should be interesting

"The blocker is a physically reversible intervention "

This is misleading; I think there's a time limit to this.

Ooo interesting to see how this goes. R4 ha been particularly woman focused this morning with an interesting interview about getting on in the workplace and having children and WH is good about feeding babies atm.

Once you've passed the age of natural puberty or started taking cross sex hormones its no longer reversible.
Puberty blockers are being used off label. They should be careful about the claims they make, and warn people that the outcome is they will be sterile.

It’s not reveversible in the sense that almost all ‘trans’ children put on them will continue on to hormone therapy when normal puberty would have directed out their dysphoria naturally.

Sorted out.

That's heart-rending - the child who thinks s/he'll be able to grow up and bear children because 'science will change and you don't know what they'll be able to do.'

Very hard to answer that as a parent when trying to keep a child's mental health steady.

FFS they've just quoted the dodgy suicide stats

Totally unquestioningly too. Swallowed whole.

Well that was entirely shit as expected

It was better than I expected but I was left with the overwhelming impression that puberty blockers are all about passing. It is a cosmetic treatment.

There was was a message that treatment of puberty blockers then cross-sex hormones actually turns a male-sexed person into a female-sexed person.

There was no discussion whatsoever about detransition. What happens if a male or female person takes puberty blockers till 20 and then desists? What happens to their sexual development then? What other problems might they then be left with?

Dodgy suicide statistics were repeated without question.

And Diane Ehrensaft was on peddling her take on the ideology.

On the positive side there were voices saying that all of this is not based on scientific evidence. (Although the narrator seemed comfortable that the research was currently being carried out. Very complacent.)

I heard that, and thought, as I often do, maybe we are wrong and need to check the stats. After all, the fact that one study is demonstrably crap is absence of evidence, not evidence of absence.

So I had a quick browse through PubMed, and the stats are bad in both senses - studies are hard to do, because of the woolly definition of trans, but also they nearly all show a higher, sometimes much higher, rate of suicidal ideation than the norm.

Mostly, the studies start by talking about LGBT people, then somehow slide into treating this as 'trans-only' rates, which is bloody annoying.

From BMC Psychiatry:
'Little research has compared prevalence of suicidal behavior in trans-gender people to other population groups. One study using a nonclinical sample of over 40,000 largely U.S. volunteers who completed an internet survey found 73 individuals who identified themselves as transgender. This group's responses related to suicidal behavior were compared to those reported by six other groups: heterosexual males and females, homosexual males and females, and males and females who matched the transgender individuals on nationality, age, sexual orientation, relationship status, and population size of the area in which they resided.

Transgender respondents had a higher rate of reported suicide attempts than any group except homosexual females.'
'Suicide attempt rates ranging from 19 to 25% have also been reported among clinical samples of transgender individuals seeking surgical gender reassignment (Dixen, Maddever, van Maasdam, & Edwards, 1984). More recent data from nonrandom surveys of self-identified transgender people found that up to one third of respondents report making one or more lifetime suicide attempts'

It would be enough to worry me as a parent, but it's not 50%. And I've yet to find much info broken down into how the outcomes improve/worsen after social or physical transition.

There are a couple of other threads on this. Can someone link to them?

(Can’t do it as posting from inadequate technology)

One of the (many) things about the programme that enraged me was the implication that if 'transgender children' (as if there were such a being) and young people have poor mental health, it's a RESULT of poor treatment, rather than the other way round - that young people with mental health issues latch on to trans as a way of believing their inner discomfort can be 'cured'.

And of course, while they are being 'validated' by all the 'so brave, so wonderful' stuff and getting lots of attention, they will feel 'better'. But that doesn't mean that trans is the ultimate reality for them - they will eventually be left with the same mental health issues they had before they did puberty blockers, started on cross-sex hormones etc.

There are no studies on this either. Correlation == causation.

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/3493220-Radio-4-now-Pausing-puberty

One of the other threads

My comment on that thread, reposting as this seems to be the thread that has taken off.

That was an unpleasant listen. Parents who were very distressed and understandably swayed by the much vaunted possibility of dire mental health catastrophes for their children if their puberty wasn't stopped. The risks of problems with bone density and the fertility issues were discussed with a curious mix of honesty and dismissal, which ended up being very disturbing to listen to, not least because those were the only consequences discussed.

I actually feel quite sick now.

Did I miss the bit on ROGD? Or did they not question the sudden rise?

Not even covered. All cases mentioned were GNC prepubescents or older people who went through puberty and would have loved hormone blockers.

ROGD not addressed, no discussion of the class action against Lupron in the US, no mention of the fact that blockers are being used off label.

The poor child that thought he would actually become a girl. And his mum told him that wasn't likely so he disappeared off and came back and said 'well we don't know what science will be able to do in future'. At that point, surely you say that regardless of what their mates on tumblr are saying, men bearing children is not going to happen, rather than just agreeing with them?

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/3493220-Radio-4-now-Pausing-puberty
www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/3493244-On-Radio-four-now-Assessment-of-puberty-blockers
www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/3493119-Pausing-Puberty-BBC-Radio-4-at-11AM-TODAY-Tuesday-29-Jan

This could be an important discussion, but then I remember it's going to be on the BBC. Nonetheless, I assume Janice Turner and others will be listening with interest.

Timelady wrote this on another thread. She was right.

I thought it got off to a promising start but fell down the usual rabbit hole.

Just caught up with this. I think if I'd heard this knowing nothing about the subject I'd have been left with a lot of questions but would probably have assumed it was very rare, thanked my lucky stars that my own children had no gender issues and got on with my day.

However, I do know something about this, not from personal experience fortunately, just from what I've been reading over the last couple of years. I was therefore struck by many of the same issues others have already commented on:

1. Why no mention of the fact that as far back as records have been kept, the majority of children, teenagers and adults experiencing gender dysphoria have been male - I believe it was always 2 males to 1 female in clinical settings. But now, for the teenage years, girls far outnumber boys and the numbers coming forward for treatment are rocketing all over the English-speaking world. (And there's another area for investigation - why is this such a big issue in the US, Canada, Australia, NZ, Ireland and the UK but not nearly so prevalent anywhere else, as far as I'm aware.) Links with social media and internet porn all highly relevant, but I suppose ROGD merits a whole programme to itself.

1. Why the unquestioning use of the term 'assigned at birth'? Why not a single voice saying 'actually, sex is fixed at conception, it's observed at birth or in the womb, and no amount of hormone and/or surgical treatment can ever change sex'?

1. No critical discussion at all about the self-harm/suicidal ideation/suicide attempts stats mentioned? At the very least I'd have expected a sentence acknowledging that a lot more research is needed.

1. Why on earth did nobody say 'Yes, children identifying as trans do indeed have very high rates of mental health problems. We don't know for sure why that is, but early studies show that many of them are on the autistic spectrum and/or have experienced abuse in childhood and/or another traumatic event and/or have pre-existing mental health issues such as depression or anxiety. So we need to look a lot more carefully at whether the gender issues are a response to the underlying mental distress or whether the mental distress is purely because of the gender issues. Without some certainty on this issue, it would be ethically very dubious to give these children a treatment that might render them infertile and unable to experience a normal sexual response in adult life.'

1. No attempt to look at the fact that many gender nonconforming children and teens will eventually come out as same-sex attracted.

1. No mention of detransition.

1. And finally, why on earth was there no mention that many children who go through puberty blockers and cross-hormone treatment are left with no normal sexual response, i.e. can't experience an orgasm? There was that deeply shocking segment on I am Jazz where adults asked J about this (on camera! For that alone, Jazz's parents should be brought to justice) and it became clear that J had no idea what an orgasm might be like. 'Something like a sneeze' was the phrase used, IIRC. How many other healthy male-bodied 17yos of normal intelligence would be unaware what an orgasm is like?

So the parents were happy to affirm a male ten year old who wanted to socially transition, and were then taken aback when the same ten year old declared themselves deighted that they'll be able to become a mum?

How is that informed consent, ffs?

One glaring anomaly in all this - how do you actually assess the potential good or bad or this type of medication unless society allows some children to be used as the necessary guinea pigs?

Or is that, in effect, what is going on?