Telegraph: Oxford puberty blocker study issues

[WarriorN]

www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/10/01/taxpayer-funded-oxford-study-puberty-blockers-hardline-trans/

Does anyone know what this is about? How has this been co-opted.

Also, the telegraph is suddenly churning out a lot on all this!

They got £700k to interview 50 kids and 20 parents? Bloody hell. You could've done an actual scientific study* on puberty blockers for that.

*probably small and probably retrospective, but still

That was my thought. Where did the money go?

This looks scandalously sloppy. I can't believe it was peer reviewed, which makes it almost worthless.

Except...I wonder what Nuffield Health could possibly hope to gain from investing £700,000 in a research project at prestigious Oxford University that, surprise, surprise, supports the use of puberty blockers for teenagers?

I took a closer look at the photos. Okay, got it.

I've been reading through the transcripts of the participants' responses. And so far most of the testimonies seem to involve excessive concern about conforming or not conforming to stereotypes and histories of online indoctrination and social contagion.

this isn’t my area and I know things always cost more than you think, but this does seem a lot of money

to produce something so biased it’s worthless

£700k of public money and they didn’t look into the negative effects of puberty blockers?
They should be investigated for defrauding the taxpayer because they are obviously just shilling for the gender medical industry and it is clearly negligent.

£700k of public money and they didn’t look into the negative effects of puberty blockers?

That would have involved a risk of finding unwanted information that did not support the desired conclusion. Which would then prevent it being useful enough to manipulate law makers.

it doesn’t matter if they are the experiences of people, if the study sought out a very particular group (pretty hardcore TRAs) and is then presenting the findings as more generally applicable to young people who may feel uncomfortable in any way with gender.

Isn't this exactly what the Littman study was criticised for?

Many thanks for linking to the archive version of the Telegraph article. Obviously I don't believe children should be seen and not heard, but when did we start publishing the uninformed views of troubled children barely into their teens, with no attempt whatsoever to correct them on matters of fact, and using them to suggest massive changes to public health policy?

A large section on healthcare includes interviews with Evelyn, a 14-year-old, about using puberty blockers, who said that “hormone blockers are good for trans youth” and that it was “dumb and unnecessary” to have to wait for them while going through puberty.

It also contains an interview with Tom, a 13-year-old who was asked by interviewers to rebut those who are “critical about hormone blockers” and asked “What would you say to people that might actually want to try and stop young kids getting blockers?”

The 13-year-old is featured twice, first describing the “really good” reversal of changes in breast development and then to “describe the positive impacts” of puberty blockers.

As a rather petty aside, I see that the Principal Investigator can't spell Principal.

Indeed.

“dumb and unnecessary” to have to wait for them while going through puberty.

‘Dumb’ as used here is American. Was this a US or heavily US influenced child, I wonder?

I've noticed trans-identified teens in the UK using quite Americanised language like 'gotten', 'dumb', 'smart', 'go get healthcare', 'a bunch of' etc etc. Presumably due to online influence by American streamers/youtubers/social media users.

I listened to a Gender: a Wider Lens podcast in which one of the psychotherapists talked about how therapy with young people (possibly older people too) is taking longer than it used to because the early sessions are spent with young people reciting the scripts they've learned online from other young people. The therapists have to listen to it all and ask probing questions to get to anything deeply personal and authentic. It can take weeks to excavate to discover abuse or eating disorders or other comorbidities. You can see how at GIDS, with long waiting lists and all the pressure to process patients quickly, some clinicians might just take the script at face value and move people on to hormones.

It alarms me that people who are experimenting on kids in the same way as Mengele did for the Nazis are getting taxpayer funding

Yet, apparently there’s no evidence of social contagion… 🙄

If you recruited 50 young people drinking alcohol in the local parks and asked what they thought about drinking alcohol then I imagine the vast majority will be in favour, would say it improved their confidence and social life, and that it was dumb and unnecessary to stop them buying alcohol at the local shop.

If you pay me £10,000 per interview I would be more than happy to spend the next three years doing this.

Good plan. In the meantime I'd suggest there's another fortune to be made proving that a self selected small group of children with severe anorexia will feel strongly that their choices on food limitation is a positive thing, that they're fully able to make informed decisions on their weight and lifelimiting harm, and that parental and medical interference affects their happiness.

Meanwhile, I'll tackle the toddlers who don't want to go to bed when they're told. I feel moderately certain that I could find 50 of those and we all know that children know from a very early age what their true identity is, which in this case would be 'Night Owl and Non-Napper'.

That's interesting.

On a slightly related note, I was talking recently to someone who works in a secondary school and said it's very obvious that many teenagers are far less mature than you would expect and are behaving like kids 2 or 3 years younger would have done before lockdown. So that's something else therapists must be grappling with.

Just echoing Sudocrem’s concerns about the system allowing crappy research through. Surely on this controversial and sensitive topic of all topics, the researchers should be keen to show how methodologically watertight and politically neutral their methods are. And the REC should be able to test that.

Saying that, perhaps someone on here knows and can comment on how university RECs are trained and regulated?

Something I've started to notice (and I know Genevieve Gluck has for a while with WPATH) when I've dug in some educational papers here is that crappy researchers are quoting crappy research so it looks like a cast iron evidence base. They're inventing an 'evidence base.'

This paper is the kind of thing that would be Chinese whispered through other articles (clearly already a book) to become "facts."

Good on M Biggs for reporting it.

many teenagers are far less mature than you would expect and are behaving like kids 2 or 3 years younger would have done before lockdown

Saw this in my own son and his friends; they perpetuated some v childish games way beyond usual. It was the first game they played when we all met up in the park after lockdown. Lots of babyish language too.

I've spoken to so many adults who say they have no memory of two whole years, they have no idea what they've done for two years. I am guessing that's some kind of collective trauma of varying degrees.

I can't imagine how that would impact on a child with far less life experience.

Does this help? hr.admin.ox.ac.uk/academic-integrity-in-research

Oxford’s research integrity policy