Ban on puberty blockers to be made indefinite on experts’ advice

[IDareSay]

Good news, just released:

“The Commission on Human Medicines (CHM) has provided independent expert advice that there is currently an unacceptable safety risk in the continued prescription of puberty blockers to children. It recommends indefinite restrictions while work is done to ensure the safety of children and young people.”

www.gov.uk/government/news/ban-on-puberty-blockers-to-be-made-indefinite-on-experts-advice

You can bang on as much as you like mate but without any good quality evidence - we’re gonna call bullshit.

The first thing they should do is follow up on all the children who have already had them prescribed, see how they're getting on. I believe there are thousands.

Playing the science angle with this one is a hell of a gamble, and doing so by banning treatment in full knowledge of the devastating impact it will have is astonishingly irresponsible - as has been clearly demonstrated by the cowardly arse-covering statement about targeted MH support. You don't say that if you don't already know what you are doing.

They know exactly what the outcome is going to be. They've talked to us. They've talked to the children who are following in our footsteps. They've talked to field experts. They've read the reports. They've heard the anguish of grieving parents. They know, and they are already in damage control mode.

Absolute ghouls. Sacrificing another generation to placate the reactionary mob.

We will never forget.

I don't consider pretending to children that they are getting treatment that will address the distressing and permanent changes they are seeing from endogenous sex hormones that result in gender incongruence, only to actually turn out to be lying and sacrificing them in a box-ticking exercise to prove an answer we already have known for three decades, to be moral behaviour.

Surely you welcome evidence based medicine?

a box-ticking exercise to prove an answer we already have known for three decades

If that was the case, no evidence would be needed. But it isn't the case.

😮

The first thing they should do is follow up on all the children who have already had them prescribed, see how they're getting on. I believe there are thousands.

TRAs have blocked that from happening.

Actually this policy is saving vulnerable children from the false promise that they can become the opposite sex by interfering with hormones and halting the natural development of puberty.

"They've talked to the children who are following in our footsteps".

Girls are not following in your footsteps. Girls and children are not collateral to validate the choices that adults make.

Responsible adults aim to safeguard children from making choices that will negatively impact on their brain, bodies and potential fertility and sexual experiences. Adults pushing all this at the young are dangerous.

Translation:

I don't see any point in trying to get any kind of reliable data about the effectiveness of puberty blockers in treating children presenting with gender dysphoria, because the results might not be what I want.

You know that there is zero evidence to support the use of puberty blockers in girls, right? Literally, none at all.

But who cares about girls, right?

Not you, that's for damn sure.

Oh I think we can all see who the ghouls are here...and it isn't those of us who want to protect children from making irreversible decisions based on being told they will kill themselves if they don't get a harmful and ineffective drug on demand.

Hilary Cass said in an interview that the cohort of children who could benefit from puberty blockers are the boys who have been socially transitioned very early for whom the prospect of puberty is extremely distressing. She has also said that she wants clinical oversight as early as possible, presumably so as few as possible young boys are socially transitioned and conditioned to fear puberty.

For girls, Cass identified that testosterone will achieve a lot of the desired effects without the need for puberty blockers and if girls don't want periods they can go on the pill.

I think any trial will be very limited in who qualifies. Remember, it has been noted that it is not possible to know who will persist in their transgender identity and who will not but it is known that puberty blockers lead on to other medical steps, hormones and surgery.

Having the puberty blocker ban sends a strong message. Puberty blockers cannot be a first line of treatment. Clinicians will have to justify, why this child? What are the circumstances that make this child exceptional and means they should be exempt from the ban? For parents it's fantastic news if they want to protect their child from the medical route. It makes it so much easier for them to say, no, thank you, to puberty blockers.

They know exactly what the outcome is going to be. They've talked to us.

Well, yes - and we also know what the outcome is from the existing model from talking to people who've been through it, and seeing what it's done for their personal mental health and their ability to interact with others in a healthy way.

It's very hard to see any objective sign that the treatments have worked from the behaviour of those who claim it was a "success" for them.

The problem with all the emotional blackmail is that some of us are older than 15, and we remember all the problems that existed in children re: gender dysphoria before the invention of puberty blockers - there weren't any.

How many kids at your school in the 50s/60s/70s/80s/90s killed themselves specifically because they weren't able to take puberty blocking drugs? If the answer you give is more than zero, you're a laughable liar.

They were indeed. Often by people fully invested in taking an ideological view on this very issue.

I do, which is why I continue to be horrified by the abject rejection of three decades worth of evidence in order to ban an existing treatment (but only for new patients since it is apparently safe enough to allow existing ones to continue taking it) in order to run a clinical trial that will actively deny a life-saving treatment to half of its participants while pretending they are getting it.

Do you have any idea what that would feel like? Do you understand the inhuman callousness of doing that? What data do they think they're going to get?

Those kids are going to grow up in the full knowledge that they have been callously sacrificed to answer a rhetorical question, not a scientific one.

Just for those who may have missed it, this is the WPATH files which shows some truly irresponsible decisions by clinicians who have been advocating for these treatment plans.

Here is one link to the WPATH pdf

https://static1.squarespace.com/static/56a45d683b0be33df885def6/t/65e64b9e5cbd756da9fbbdfa/1709591479160/Final+WPATH+Report.pdf

and another

https://environmentalprogress.org/big-news/wpath-files

Here are some of the reactions:

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13156695/Trans-healthcare-doctors-exposed-admitting-patients-young-mentally-ill-understand-consequences-treatment.html

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/03/05/wpath-tansgender-hormone-therapy-cancer-links-leaked-emails/

https://sex-matters.org/posts/updates/wpath-the-truth-about-gender-affirming-healthcare/

https://genspect.org/the-wpath-files-revealed/

Here is a summary from Michael Shellenberger.

https://x.com/shellenberger/status/1764800595473686865?s=20
And the first part. Much more of it requires images.

Here is the threadreader version:

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1764799914918490287.html

THE WPATH FILES

Advocates of gender-affirming care say it’s evidence-based.

But now, newly released internal files from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) prove that the practice of transgender medicine is neither scientific nor medical.

American Medical Association, The Endocrine Society, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and thousands of doctors worldwide rely on WPATH. It is considered the leading global authority on gender medicine.

And yet WPATH’s internal files, which include written discussions and a video, reveal that its members know they are creating victims and not getting “informed consent.”

Victims include a 10-year-old girl, a 13-year-old developmentally delayed adolescent, and individuals suffering from schizophrenia and other serious mental illnesses.

The injuries described in the WPATH Files include sterilization, loss of sexual function, liver tumors, and death.

WPATH members indicate repeatedly that they know that many children and their parents don’t understand the effects that puberty blockers, hormones, and surgeries will have on their bodies. And yet, they continue to perform and advocate for gender medicine.

The WPATH Files prove that gender medicine is comprised of unregulated and pseudoscientific experiments on children, adolescents, and vulnerable adults. It will go down as one of the worst medical scandals in history.

Why I Am Publishing WPATH Files And How I Got Them

The written WPATH Files come from WPATH’s member discussion forum, which runs on software provided by DocMatter.

Ninety seconds of the 82-minute video was made public last year. We are making the full video available for the first time.

One or more people gave me the WPATH Files, and my colleagues and I attempted to summarize them as a series of articles. We quickly realized the topic was too sensitive, complex, and large to be dealt with as a work of journalism, and we moved the project to the research institute I founded seven years ago, Environmental Progress (EP).

The Files are authentic. We redacted most names and left only those individuals who are leading gender medicine practitioners to whom we sent “right-of-reply” emails. We know WPATH members discussed our emails internally. No WPATH leader or member has denied that the Files are anything other than what they appear to be.

EP is publishing a 70-page report to provide context for the 170 pages of WPATH Files. Mia Hughes is the author of the report. It and accompanying summary materials can be downloaded at the link below. That link also provides a link to the full WPATH video.

And the only reason those boys could benefit from puberty blockers is because they were unlucky enough to have abusive parents like Susie Green who allowed them to believe they were girls at an age when they were too young to understand that you don't get to choose whether to be a boy or a girl.

In short, puberty blockers can only ever be beneficial to children who have already been irreparably psychologically harmed.

This is really interesting. Thanks for summarising.

Could this mean that girls try to source testosterone from illegal sources? And boys doing the same with puberty blockers?

I'm not sure how a clinical trial will happen but how do you convince these children/young people with access to the internet that these treatments are not going to help them without trial data?

And if the results of a clinical trial wouldn't help convince them, are they not the same people most likely to gain access to drugs illegally?

I'm just not sure what this ban is going to do in reality

I have absolutely no problem with responsible scientific research into this subject. I am not afraid of the findings. Why would I be? I've experienced them firsthand. I know what they're going to find.

Can you please post all the links that you have for the 'three decades worth of evidence' that has been rejected?

Oh oooh do I get to say it? Do I? Just this once? As a treat?

Did you read the Cass Review?

But you object to the idea of a control group?