This is very disingenous from SG, about Mermaids, GIDS and puberty blockers (quote below).
- All around the world, as I understand it, children put on puberty blockers because of gender issues almost always go on to cross-hormones afterwards. Inevitable, as their brains have not matured, they've gone through social transition, there is no real way back. The fact that children with precocious puberty take them for a short period and then stop taking them and go through the normal puberty for their sex is therefore not comparable. She also skates over the fact that many of those children do have problems in adult life which are related to the puberty blockers, as do adults prescribed them for prostate cancer or gynaecological problems.
- GIDS staff have testified in the past that Mermaids staff/volunteers have accompanied families to appointments. It's also been obvious that many children and their parents have been coached in what to say to get them referred to endocrinology to get PBs.
- Finally, why is anybody placing any reliance on what SG says about this? She's not medically qualified. She has no science or psychology degree. She's never worked as a health care practitioner. She used to be an IT manager for a branch of the CAB. Her so called expertise is entirely derived from taking her child to the US to get cross-hormones prescribed when said child was 12 (NHS would still refuse to do this, only Gender GP would do this in the UK, which is why Mermaids recommended them for so long). Then she took child to Thailand so the child could have gender reassignment surgery on child's 16th birthday. And all because the poor kid liked playing with dolls as a toddler and his Dad couldn't cope with it.
And it has been accused of wrongly thinking it knows best, including in the area of puberty blockers.
The Times has claimed that staff in the charity’s forum promote puberty blockers as “safe and reversible treatment, despite medical consensus that the long-term impact on teenage development remains unknown”.
The NHS website says little is known about their long-term effects, adding: “Although Gids advises this is a physically reversible treatment if stopped, it is not known what the psychological effects may be. It’s also not known whether hormone blockers affect the development of the teenage brain or children’s bones.”
Green maintains that fully trained Mermaids staff set out the options and would be investigated if they went beyond that. She maintains that puberty blockers are safe, pointing out that, despite what it says on the website, the NHS still prescribes them.
However, since an interim report by Cass was published in the summer, the NHS has determined only to prescribe them in a formal research setting, which Green says is “inappropriate”.
She accepts that the difference between what the NHS website and Mermaids say is confusing, describing it as “frustrating”.
“If you look back, blocking medications were first used in the 1980s for cisgender children to stop them going through early puberty. And it’s been used ever since then, so that we’ve got adults out there who went through that treatment from three, four or five years old. And then when that was withdrawn, normal puberty resumed, and they’re now living their lives like everybody else … I think 1988 was the first time that it was used [for trans children] by the Dutch, again for the same thing, to pause puberty.”
Green insists Mermaids has not influenced Gids to prescribe the drugs in the past.
“It would be really strange if the biggest charity that supported trans children didn’t have a relationship at all with the only NHS service that provides support for kids and young people. But we don’t have any say on how they operate, how they prescribe, what they do in terms of the process.”