In a meeting with 20 teachers and pastoral staff at Newman University in Birmingham last December, a trainer for the transgender lobby group Mermaids said giving puberty blockers to gender-dysphoric children gave them “immense relief” and was “completely reversible”.
The trainer, recorded by an audience member, said: “Puberty blocker medication doesn’t make any changes, so [is] completely reversible. What it does is put a pause button on the pituitary gland and freezes puberty where it is. Not growth, just puberty. Take the blockers away and biological puberty will recommence.” She added that using blockers “does provide immense relief from the dysphoria” and argued that arrested development meant less need for physical intervention later “if they decide to go down that path”.
This weekend the advice was attacked as “misleading and potentially dangerous” by an Oxford academic. The session is believed to be a blueprint for training by the group in schools nationally.
Michael Biggs, associate professor in sociology at St Cross College, Oxford, says the guidance could push children towards medical intervention. He cites research which found that most children prescribed blockers at a young age progressed to taking cross-sex hormones and surgery, which damage fertility.
Biggs says he has unpublished evidence that after a year on blockers “children experienced increased psychological problems, including self harm. Mermaids is not giving pupils a choice that they may just be gay or lesbian. Instead, it is diverted down a drastic path that ultimately ends in surgery. To be propagating such information to schools is disturbing.”
Michael Conroy, who taped the footage and has worked in pastoral support in schools for 15 years, said he believed Mermaids was encouraging young people to think that they were “born in the wrong body . . . It’s putting children at risk.”
www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/news/transgender-lobby-group-mermaids-urges-puberty-blockers-for-12-year-olds-b96zqbh2k
It seems that Mermaids continue to provide misleading guidance despite the number of professionals who have questioned their training and advice. So long as it is only the Times that reports on this issue, and so long as the establishment pay lip service to the trans activists agenda, there doesn't seem to be anyway to stop them spreading their dangerous ideology.
And so many schools seem to be buying into them