Study shows puberty blockers stunt growth

[ErrolTheDragon]

The GIDs study.
Reported in the Times today:

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/puberty-blockers-stunt-bone-growth-of-children-tlv8qmdcd?shareToken=87a2b68398eac1dc855124211ae3e495

The issues around potential impact on frontal lobe development are really concerning.

I learned about this because someone shared the mermaids thread where their takeaway was “puberty blockers make kids happier”

That's... rather weak, from them? I thought they stopped them committing suicide, not just "made them happier".

A PS5 would make them happier and have fewer side effects.

@PlanDeRaccordement

Well of course they do. I’m amazed people didn’t realise this. In boys and girls puberty is what causes the final growth spurts to adult height. You give them puberty blockers, you block their growth (among other things like bone density, muscle mass, etc) puberty isn’t just getting a bit of extra hair and boobs (or no boobs if a boy).

And they were always wrong about it being completely reversible because puberty is triggered genetically by your age and nutrition status. If you take puberty blockers all through the puberty age range you’re going to end up looking like an androgynous 12yr old and there is no fixing that.

I thought it was a real piece of misinformation/false advertising for them to tell kids and parents that they can take puberty blockers and that they’re “reversible” and just give the child “extra time” to decide if they want to transition or not. Anyone with even a basic understanding on human biology would know that this couldn’t be true.

Why aren't trans kids who have used blockers all not now 30 year olds who look like 12 years olds then? Where are all these child like trans adults?

OK, I'm confused. Given the lack of improvement in psychological function and the issues with stunted growth and bone density, how has Dr Carmichael concluded that the "results show patient experience on the blocker is positive overall"? Is it just the research study equivalent of a customer satisfaction survey, and the subjects are just pleased that they aren't developing physically as they would be expected to, and are ignoring the other negative outcomes?

@DisgustedofManchester, this 'therapy' is so new, that there are too few patients in this country to see them.

I'd guess the FTM kids don't end up looking like androgynous 12 year olds because they nearly all end up in 'cross sex' hormones (rather than the natural outcome of most desisting if not puberty blocked). So they will then tend to put on some muscle and grow facial hair.

But what they look like is superficial - the evidence of the internal damage to bones and brains (other studies show IQ reduction) is becoming pretty clear. And the loss of sexual and reproductive function. Not 'sex changed', more like unsexed.

plus a cohort of formerly male now transitioned adults who are not happy when they look in the mirror and think "wouldn't things in my life have been so much better if someone had been able to wave a magic wand and keep into adulthood the very pretty face I had as a child?"

They are chasing a fantasy, a mirage. Each time they change something they realise they are still no closer to their goal so focus on something else that they think will make the magic happen. The reality of course is you can never change sex. A man will always be a man. When they have forced their way into women's spaces, taken women's positions, forced everyone to call them 'her', had endless cosmetic surgery, they will still be no nearer their goal but will probably resent women all the more for it.

Its just a disater waiting to happen. I genuinely feel so scared for these young people, they shoud be having therapy and support to help them come to terms with who they are but from what I can see these hormone blockers and cross hormone drugs do the complete opposite.
Damage to the frontal lobe does not just cause lower IQ, which in itself is awful. Its also the part of the brain that helps us develop empathy and an understanding of ourselves and others. Its responsible for our decsision making, forward planning and personality, its what makes us "who we are".
People with damage to this part of the brain can really struggle with day to day life. The harm is not to be underestimated. Add to that as Errol stated an unsexed body its a recipe for disaster.
A child in an adults body unable to come to terms with who they are when they are already confused about their identity.

Zero measurable benefit, weighed against a huge list of expected and measurable harms

I want to add that the harms are, of course, irreversible. Bone density, height and sterilisation are not things that can be put right, whatever hormones people are dosed with later on.

Why aren't trans kids who have used blockers all not now 30 year olds who look like 12 years olds then? Where are all these child like trans adults?

Three things:

1. Nearly all adult trans people are men who transitioned to trans women in their 20s and 30s. Obviously they would tend to be of typical male height.

2. there has been NO long term follow up with any of the study cohorts for example from the Swedish study referenced by this one. These cohorts were also small.

3. anecdotal evidence does suggest that women who transition to trans men via PB approach are much shorter than men.

It’s a medical fact that Puberty causes growth spurts and growth to adult height. It would be an extraordinary finding were PBs found not to

A PP wondered why kids weren’t just put on Xsex hormones right away instead to avoid these issues.

Of course the problem here is no one is under any illusion that such treatment does anything to buy kids time to decide. It’s a decision point that must be made by age 11-14 or so and is not reversible.

It’s at best a coin flip if kids diagnosed with GD as children will ultimately transition or re-identify as their birth sex. Are we willing to allow 50% of children to sterilize themselves mistakenly? Who benefits?

Btw this study in the US is giving xsex hormones to kids as young as 12 or 13 (Tanner 3). Published Reports from those studies can be found at the bottom of the linked page. Not sure we’ll ever see anything substantial reported about the physical effects.

grantome.com/grant/NIH/R01-HD082554-05

Sorry it’s Tanner 4 when xsex hormones are given in the linked study. Still age 12-14 though.

Damage to the frontal lobe does not just cause lower IQ, which in itself is awful. Its also the part of the brain that helps us develop empathy and an understanding of ourselves and others. Its responsible for our decsision making, forward planning and personality, its what makes us "who we are".
People with damage to this part of the brain can really struggle with day to day life.

I wonder if anyone has ever investigated - if it's even possible to investigate - the condition of the frontal lobes in people who insist that everyone else see life through their lenses. Because many militant TWs display zero empathy and zero understanding of others. I'm not making a blanket statement about any people who are trans. I'm thinking specifically about those who are extremely aggressive in achieving their wants, without any consideration of others.

Re skipping blockers and going straight to giving testosterone to females, I was being cynical. Genuine question in a way, because there's no coin flip involved with the children who are put on blockers.

Out of 44 children who took part, all except one went on to take cross-sex hormones. In other words, straight onto the lifelong medicalisation path. So much for puberty blockers supposedly giving children a 'breathing space'. They're just a routine step in the transition process.

They're just a routine step in the transition process.

Indeed.

The way puberty blockers reduce the boys' masculinisation is an added 'benefit' (ignoring all the life-long damage they cause and the fact that they make it impossible to construct a neo-vagina).

43/44 suggests that the prescribing clinicians are very good at identifying which children will ultimately go on to cross-sex hormones. So why are they penalising female children by giving them blockers, as in female children the blockers reduce their future ability to resemble their desired appearance, rather than enhance it?

Do the clinicians have...doubts?

I remember a few years ago a few of us wondering whether Polly Carmichael might have been on the verge of regretting what she was doing. She's definitely w£ighed up the odds and gone all in since.

Her name will now forever be associated with an unjustified experiment on children that damaged them for life. That had the worst outcomes for girls. An experiment started only to meet the demands of adult proponents of a quasi-religious ideology. One that dehumanises women and girls.

An experiment where Carmichael stopped collecting evidence from the at least 300 children under 15 treated in the same way as the children in this study. (Michael Biggs mentions this in his comment)

One would hope that all of the data published in this study is routinely collected for all children receiving this treatment. Especially if the treatment has known serious side effects and is apparently indicated and administered to improve mental health issues in children.

I cannot help thinking that if the data was collected, and different from the published data in showing better outcomes, we would have seen it by now. If it wasn't collected, I would consider that gross negligence. And if it was collected but showed worse or similar outcomes, I would consider non-publication unethical, dishonest and an alarming sign of indifference to the children treated in this way.

DisgustedofManchester

The most well known "trans kids" who took puberty blockers are very publicised Mtfs, (one with their own TV show...)
They do look very childlike, and seem very childlike indeed in their mannerisms.

They have then gone on to have plastic surgery to make them look less childlike and more womanly but they still seem childlike.

That's the thing about aiming to look feminine in a very sexist world.
It's all about maintaining that youthful look.

The Ftms on blockers go on to take testosterone, a very potent masculinizing drug, which will overlay the puberty suppression and provide a mask, facial hair, deep voice etc but underneath there is an undeveloped body.

I think I’ve said this before, but what concerns me (well, one of many many things) is that it is fairly well known children and teens have terrible judgment when it comes to evaluating risk.

Teens are overwhelmingly more, likely to crash cars and get into traffic accidents because they are so shit at judging relative risks. It isn’t just lack of experience, it is brain development. Which resolves, more or less at the end of puberty.

So all these puberty blocked young adults... will they have the mental capacity to drive safely? Are we going to see a hefty percentage of that cohort wiped out in tragic accidents. Doesn’t bear thinking about. We are doing these young people such a disservice.

AKA they perform exactly as advertised. Just the smoothest of brains here.

I read a research paper recently that talked about the fact that MTF do not reach Tanner stage 5 when on cross-sex hormones (as measured by breast development, the paper IIRC said something like at the very most stage 4). Obviously it's likely that this is because they are not female and therefore cannot develop the same, so it isn't certain that brain development is equally stunted.

But it makes me wonder how this works regarding puberty. You block normal puberty with PBs. Everything is frozen apart from the development life experience brings. (I have relatives who stayed at a developmental age of about 14 or so. Decades of life experience mean that they can make better decisions now, even though there are simply things that are beyond their comprehension and that will always be beyond their comprehension.)

So, normal brain development, emotional, physical stopped in children on the affirmation pathway. You then proceed to cross-sex hormones, but they cannot restart normal puberty because this is the wrong hormones. There is development, but this does not reach the final stage as normal puberty would. Do we know if this affects the brain in the same way?

And if we know the body doesn't reach the final stage, is anybody even asking about what happens to the brain?

It would seem to me that this is possibly the worst aspect of all. Arresting the brain development of healthy children, never allowing the huge changes that occur during puberty. Asking children to consent to stunting their own cognitive abilities?

For instance, if I'm reading this paper below right, cross-sex hormones do not allow the patient to reach their potential BMD. In actual fact this paper found that BMD decreased once the kids went on cross-sex hormones.

They do speculate that this might be because they started puberty blockers when they had already increased some BMD. But all study subjects started before they could have reached the peak, so the fact that they then reduced BMD is not good news.

I found this in a summary paper from 2017 which sought to present the pros and cons of blocking puberty. I followed the two references given for the claim that cross-sex hormones might resolve the BMD issue "theoretically". The first paper had no data on this at all, the second was this one which not only doesn't confirm that cross-sex hormones resolve the issue, but suggests they may make it worse.

If I hadn't checked the references out, I would have been left with the impression that there are two studies showing cross-sex hormones might resolve the BMD issue.

academic.oup.com/jcem/article/100/2/E270/2814818

And if we know the body doesn't reach the final stage, is anybody even asking about what happens to the brain?

Yes, but the only actual experiments I've heard of have been on sheep. (Such experimentation on humans would of course be unethical).

This research was cited as evidence during the Keira Bell case. Which earned Jolyon Maugham's scorn, presumably because anyone who does research on sheep obviously wasn't clever enough (or posh enough?) to do proper research on proper humans.

Threads here by the marvellous Malcolm Clark:

• First thread mentions it in a broader overview

• Thread directly about the sheep trials

8./ The problem is how to examine the mental function of a sheep in ways that might shed light on subtle human brain function. The Glasgow team did something brilliant. They devised a complex maze for their sheep and trained them (using food) to navigate their way through it.

9./ The "teenage" sheep who weren't given puberty blockers when they were reintroduced to the maze after an absence found their way round just as before. Those who took the PBs were lost. This is a very precise sort of memory: spatial memory.

10./ It's the sort of memory that means if you go back to your home town you know you're way around. Could the lack of that sort of memory be suggestive (that's all we can say) of more pervasive identity problems in humans? You can read the paper here. www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5333793/

End of paper summary:

Former GnRHa-treatment altered how quickly the rams progressed beyond a specific point in the spatial maze at 83 and 99 weeks of age, and the direction of this effect depended on gonadal steroid exposure, i.e. GnRHa-Recovery rams progressed quicker during breeding season and slower during non-breeding season, compared to Controls. The long-term spatial memory performance of GnRHa-Recovery rams remained reduced (P < 0.05, 1.5-fold slower) after discontinuation of GnRHa, compared to Controls. This result suggests that the time at which puberty normally occurs may represent a critical period of hippocampal plasticity. Perturbing normal hippocampal formation in this peripubertal period may also have long lasting effects on other brain areas and aspects of cognitive function.

I hadn't actually read the paper that closely before. They're not talking about a small effect here. Average 50% longer to find their way through a previously navigated maze if they had previously had puberty blockers!

I’ve just read the whole paper. The idea that this makes kids happier is just disingenuous bullshit.

Young people experienced little change in psychological functioning across the study. We found no differences between baseline and later outcomes for overall psychological distress as rated by parents and young people, nor for self-harm. Outcomes that were not formally tested also showed little change

They self-reported that life was better, but objective measurements of their psychological functioning didn’t back that up at all. And they were only asked at 24 months. And look at the paragraph explaining this:

Young people’s reports of change in family and peer relationships were predominantly positive or neutral at both time points. Positive changes included feeling closer to the family, feeling more accepted and having fewer arguments. Those reporting both positive and negative change reported feeling closer to some family members but not others. At 6–15 months, negative family changes were largely from family members not accepting their trans status or having more arguments. But by 15–24 months only one young person reported this. Improved relationships with peers related to feeling more sociable or confident and widening their circle of friends; negative changes related to bullying or disagreements at school. Again, at 15–24 months only one young person reported negative change, related to feelings of not trusting friends.

How on earth do they relate these things to the puberty blockers? They were more confident with friends because of puberty blockers? That’s a stretch. It could easily be because they were a year or two older and life changes doesn’t it.

And they only asked this at 24 months. We have no idea whether they’re happy after that.

It’s also notable that they suppressed puberty at Tanner stage 3 for boys and stage 2 for girls. We now know that it happens earlier for boys. The inclusion criteria included those with severe GD, not those we know now whose GD might be mild or questionable.

This paper is clear evidence that this pathway does not provide any improvement in the psychological outcomes for children with severe GD. They would have seen this documented as they went along. They continued anyway. The last patient finished in February 2019.

It’s just outrageous. They could see children weren’t being helped really, yet they kept going and they have shown it doesn’t help while causes harm, yet still argued in court to be allowed to continue. I just cannot fathom how they’re being allowed to get away with it.

They have shown it doesn’t help while causes harm, yet still argued in court to be allowed to continue.

It’s like a cult — nothing shakes their belief.

I just posted this on another thread after a moment of realisation.

The study showed no improvement in psychological functioning with puberty blockers. This also means they had no improvement in their psychological functioning. Full stop. They had no improvement going to a gender clinic for several years, and being referred to by preferred pronouns. And with the therapy they received. They were no better off at the end than they were at the beginning. What was the point of any of it?