Maker of puberty blockers funded original study that led to 'gender-affirming care' for minors

[NecessaryScene]

Now, this was news to me, but apparently it shouldn't have been.

Dutch newspaper NRC published a report about the Dutch protocol a few weeks back, and it didn't get a huge amount of attention from the UK, largely because it was a review of stuff we knew. Good that it was published in a mainstream paper though. (Possibly the Dutch equivalent of the Guardian?)

www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2022/12/30/ook-transzorg-moet-aan-medisch-wetenschappelijke-standaarden-voldoen-a4152945

Translation linked in this tweet of Kathleen Stock's

twitter.com/Docstockk/status/1609161759415205888?cxt=HHwWgICwgYaG8tQsAAAA

But the Post Millennial has just picked up on something mentioned as an aside there:

thepostmillennial.com/maker-of-puberty-blockers-funded-original-study-that-led-to-gender-affirming-care-for-minors-dutch-investigative-report

The Dutch protocol was the result of a deeply flawed 2006 study which it has now been revealed was funded by Ferring pharmaceuticals, the company that markets the drug Triptorelin as a puberty blocker.

The NRC report isn’t the first time the connection has been made between Ferring Pharmaceuticals and the infamous 2006 study that unleashed this reckless medical experiment onto the world.

In 2018, Transgender Trend, a group that has been at the forefront of campaigning for evidence-based care in gender clinics, published a blog post revealing that the "Amsterdam clinic was financially supported in its experimental project to block puberty in gender dysphoric adolescents by a pharmaceutical company which stood to make commercial gains from their new protocol."

And here's that post:

www.transgendertrend.com/puberty-blockers-safe/

I guess 2018 is long enough ago that we've forgotten. But let's remind ourselves.

Another piece feeding into PM's is this from Stella O'Malley, discussing that Dutch article:

genspect.org/the-dutch-model-is-falling-apart/

Our interview with de Vries and Steensma, on Gender: A Wider Lens revealed strange anomalies in this study. The study began with 70 participants in 2011, and 15 were excluded from the follow-up study in 2014 for reasons such as diabetes and obesity. Why is there no research available to show what happened to these 15 participants?

One of the participants tragically died as a result of what is now called “gender-affirming” surgery – why did this not put an immediate end to this terrible experiment on children?

Why did the researchers switch the questionnaires post-transition – so that biological girls received a questionnaire for boys and vice-versa – and thereby ruin any credible analysis of their efficacy as a treatment for gender dysphoria?

Dr Michael Biggs' review of the Dutch Protocol - this is from Sept 22

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0092623X.2022.2121238

'It has been a quarter of a century since Dutch clinicians proposed puberty suppression as an intervention for “juvenile transsexuals,” which became the international standard for treating gender dysphoria. This paper reviews the history of this intervention and scrutinizes the evidence adduced to support it. The intervention was justified by claims that it was reversible and that it was a tool for diagnosis, but these claims are increasingly implausible. The main evidence for the Dutch protocol came from a longitudinal study of 70 adolescents who had been subjected to puberty suppression followed by cross-sex hormones and surgery. Their outcomes shortly after surgery appeared positive, except for the one patient who died, but these findings rested on a small number of observations and incommensurable measures of gender dysphoria. A replication study conducted in Britain found no improvement. While some effects of puberty suppression have been carefully studied, such as on bone density, others have been ignored, like on sexual functioning.'

Ah, Ferring...

Ferring also gave the Lib Dems a donation, I think.
www.thetimes.co.uk/article/puberty-blocker-drug-firm-donated-cash-to-lib-dems-cf3x77nh3

They bought the Libdems? The fuckers.

I can't believe I'd forgotten about that poor teenager who died as a result of failed genital surgery.

Abstract

The absence of a functional vagina has a negative effect on the quality of life of women. Multiple surgical procedures have been described for vaginal reconstruction in these patients.

Case

We present a case of an 18-year-old transgender woman, who underwent laparoscopic intestinal vaginoplasty as vaginal reconstruction, and subsequently developed septic shock and multiple organ failure on the basis of an extended-spectrum β-lactamase-producing Escherichia coli. A severe progression of the necrotizing fasciitis was lethal, despite repeated surgical debridement, intravenous antibiotic use, and supportive care at the intensive care unit.

Summary and Conclusion

Although vaginal reconstruction has a positive influence on the quality of life in transgender women, physicians and patients need to be aware of serious complications that might arise.

JPAG Online

Thread about that article (from 2019)
www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/3762937-libdem-funding-own-thread

Evidence of donations to LibDems.

I wonder if there is any evidence of cash going into the pockets of American or canadian democrat/liberal governments? Need to knooooowww. I will be furiously Googling in the mean time! Will get back if I can find an article.

Wonder if they’ve made a donation to the SNP? Greens?

Take a look at this deep dive into the governing parties of South Dakota.

National Review

I just read this Dutch article and was impressed they are finally covering it...but the lede was buried, I believe. Ferring Pharma funding a study that has never been replicated by independent research should have been the beginning....but I suppose they needed to gently raise the alarm.

You wouldn't happen to have an archived version of that National Review article, would you?

Here you go

archive.ph/a3Xcx

I read the article by the Dutch journalists when I stuck it in the break it down thread.

The other concern, which is valid too, is that the Dutch Protocol research was done by the same groups as was doing the treatment if I remember correctly. (Happy to be corrected).

Meaning that the same groups doing the research then continued the practice. How is that going to work, which one is going to admit - hey this doesn’t really work???

The absence of a functional vagina has a negative effect on the quality of life of women. Multiple surgical procedures have been described for vaginal reconstruction in these patients....Although vaginal reconstruction has a positive influence on the quality of life in transgender women, physicians and patients need to be aware of serious complications that might arise.

One of the things that took me over the top of the hill was reading an article where a surgeon desribed the vagina analogue he had surgically created for a trans woman as "fully functional".

Given it doesn't lead to a womb and is not linked into a female body's various control and montoring systems that would allow it to react to hormonal changes, changes to natural flora and so forth, the only one of an actual vagina's many "functions" it could perform is to be fuckable.

That the surgeon performing the surgery considered fuckability is both necessary and sufficient for a vagina to be "fully fuctional" is a telling demonstration that underneath this ideology and the concept of GRS is an obscene reduction of women's bodies to fuckable holes.

Thanks Ingenieur

Some more on Ferring/pharma/biotech political links.

'...Kezia Dugdale, founding director of the John Smith Centre (JSC) at Glasgow University. Despite Dugdale’s open support for the bill in the Times nine months earlier, and links to high profile transgenderist politicians such as Lisa Nandy, there has been no serious examination of the JSC, and its corporate Pharma and biotech backing. For this piece, it took me five minutes on Google to find a link to Ferring Pharmaceuticals, the puberty blocker manufacturer notorious for its donations to the strongly transgenderist Liberal Democrats, via a member of the JSC board: former Tony Blair aide Matt Carter has worked for PR firm Burson-Marsteller, although he left before they announced their Ferring contract. Other JSC board members have worked for public relations giant WPP, which has a direct financial interest in Pharma/biotech advertising and PR (while presenting such interests as “authentic representation and inclusion of LGBTQ+ people”), Facebook and Google.'

savageminds.substack.com/p/2022