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

Look, I agree with you but that is not the way it is going and it's important to see that clearly.

The new clinics are staffed by WPATH clinicians.
Cass left open the possibility of medical pathways being right for some children.
The trials are being planned.
Wes today is saying they need evidence.

You can be as right as you like on here, but we need to see clearly whihc way this is heading next if we want to protect children from continued harm.

I'm not afraid of anything, personally, and I suspect that what would be found is what actually tends to occur, even in the most "successful" transitions. Namely that trans identified people spend their lives totally consumed by 'being trans', and by having to be continually on guard, or aware, that their sex may be identified by other people. Plus having to fight to access the spaces that other groups ( mainly women) want to keep for their own use.

Lots of examples of people who end up detransitioning - even decades later;and of those with deep regret for the surgeries they have undergone. Others for whom the dsyphoric feelings simply shift onto another body part or aspect of self; or who eventually realise and come to terms with the fact they are not the sex they have tried to be.

Others for whom marriages break down under the stress and who are alienated from wider family, including from their own children ( see trans widow experiences)

That's without talking about the physical and damaging side effects of surgery and hormones...on bones, heart, urinary system etc

Indeed. The best outcome is for the child to decide to accept themselves as the sex they are. Which will certainly not happen if they take puberty blockers and are constantly told that they are the opposite sex but oppressed and vulnerable and everyone hates them and wishes they didn't exist.

Yes, this is what we need to push for.
Absoulte transparency on these trials, and then challenge to thier legitimacy.

At the momemnt it's all clouded and we're been given what looks like a win with this 'ban', which is good, but also dangerous in that the public (and even many on here it seems) to think 'job done' children are now protected and move on.

Brilliant

Please clarify:

Are you saying a) it's likely to happen but obviously shouldn't, because murder is not justified or b) that Wes Streeting and Hilary Cass are at fault, so if they get hurt that's their responsibility (not the responsibility of any would be murderer)?

Whichever answer you give, I find your post concerning.

You're seeing the desperation of activists watching their influence over children being removed. The tantrums are epic but responsible adults and parents completely understand what's really happening.

Anyone on here still beleiveing these trials won't be happening because they wouold not be ethical needs to read this response from Genspect which critques the study designs which have already been proposed.

One extract:

"The proposed study designs apparently aim to overcome these difficulties by prescribing puberty blockers to all participants, as though health authorities have not even considered treating gender related distress with the promising non-medicalised approaches identified by the Cass Review. Only one of the three designs includes a control group who would nominally receive no treatment. However, the NHS has pledged to provide psychological support to all study participants so, as discussed further below, even the control group will actually be in receipt of treatment. Under the remaining two designs, all participants will ultimately be prescribed blockers in the course of the study.

Rather than confronting misconceptions about puberty blockers with a robust public health campaign highlighting their harms, these studies are designed to exploit those misconceptions by offering participants access to blockers as a kind of incentive. This speaks to cowardice on the part of health authorities, researchers and politicians. They lack the courage to confront the lies of so called ‘gender affirming care’ head on, by calmly and compassionately explaining to the public that the evidence simply doesn’t support the view that puberty blockers are a safe and effective treatment. Instead, they will medicalise thousands more healthy young people, putting off for another day the need to come clean with the public and admit that the medical profession has made a terrible error in popularising these dangerous interventions."

We need to stop pretending this ban is the end of puberty blockers, taht these studies won't be happening, that ButterflyHatched point was theon out by Cass, and instaed support Genspaxt et al in fighting it.

genspect.org/call-to-action-help-genspect-uk-stop-the-nhs-puberty-blocker-study/

So you've been an autistic biological female who started to develop breasts, got a period for the first time and hated the change, the sensory aspect, how it impacted the way that boys and men looked at you? You've been that same girl who is trying to make sense of what teachers in school are saying, through the lens of autistic cognitive and language processing?

No. You haven't.

You've got experience of you.

You're not a 4 year systematic review. You're one person with an opinion. Albeit a valid opinion about yourself. I've got valid opinions about myself. Sometimes I look back and laugh at my younger self for those opinions, sometimes I'm glad that I held true to them. But to claim that we already know the answer on what a trail would find is as laughable as it is wrong. Even if this trial gets off the ground, I wouldn't say I already know what it's going to find. I have an idea, but I don't know. That's why hypotheses get tested. Science isn't just guesswork.

Edited to add: I'm not dismissing your feelings of distress about your body. If you believe you have a gender identity and that yours doesn't match your body, that sounds awful. I can see why that would be completely debilitating and why anyone who feels this way seeks treatment to address it. My lack of belief in gender identity doesn't stop me empathising with how awful this situation must be.

Just poking around other parts of Reddit to see the reactions to this and stumbled across the Labour UK subreddit. The juxtaposition here says it all really.

Wes Streeting spoke in parliament about how he'd met people who'd used pb with successful outcomes. Fortunately, he took what was said and politely called it 'lived experience'. Opinions such as these are known otherwise as anecdotal evidence. One or two or ten people's experience, however glowing, is not a substitute for a scientific study involving 100s/1000s.

Hard evidence got supplanted some time ago with lived experience. I don't know why but it started in the US. It allowed this slide into feelz etc and suddenly proper medical safeguarding got thrown out the window.

Just look at the terrible comments

https://www.reddit.com/r/LabourUK/comments/1hbtwg4/puberty_blockers_for_children_with_gender/

Utter hyperbole. Wow.

We listen when you tell us.

These are the lies and misunderstandings that need to be addressed by the NHS.
This comment was the most down rated - and answered by a complete untruth

Nobody hates you, everyone is literally trying to do the best thing for you.

I would not call an anorexic fat, even though they REALLY thought it was true.

You are the sex you were born. You can't change it. You have to accept that.

So you'll join both Baroness Cass and myself in supporting the provision of treatments for those for whom there is clear benefit and hoping that they will continue to be available in future for this purpose?

When you find good quality evidence of that benefit, I'll campaign for what you're asking, yes.

I saw a discussion today at Genspec which raised something that I didn't know before but makes perfect sense.

Those on long term puberty blockers don't mature as normal (which is kind of the point) this effects bones and mental maturity which most of us were already aware of but ALSO mean that all your other organs don't mature either. Many patients have immature hearts and kidneys and other vital organs.

The idea that you should just continue experimenting on children without knowing the full effects and in the knowledge that even a few of them will change their minds is appalling.

I'm not convinced that even the individuals who would apparently 'benefit' from blockers will do so long term. I don't know how medics can make a risks versus benefits assessment and conclude that continuing as we have been is anything but a disaster in waiting.

I hope that any ethics assessment sees the inherent problems but it entirely depends who is doing the assessment.

I agree that a good starting point should be a decent follow up on any known patience. Unfortunately there will be reporting bias (the happiest transitioners may be more likely to respond then the unhappiest) but it can form a starting point at least. Reporting of side effects long term will be valuable if nothing else to giving information to those wanting to start blockers.

Clearly not.

I'm going to add a personal note to this thread. I have a difficult day ahead of me tomorrow (meeting in school... related to the wider subject of gender identity) and I need to vent.

Why do I specifically need to vent today on this thread?

I'm so fucking angry. Partly about my meeting tomorrow but that's by the by. My meeting is about safety and fairness in relation to mixed sex sports in school. I mentioned on a previous thread that my daughter had been injured by a spiked volleyball that was hit by a boy. She's lucky that the net took most of the impact (she was playing at the front of the court, right by the net) and that all she was left with was a black eye, broken glasses and a cut to the eye from the broken glasses arm. It could have been a lot worse. Anyway. That's not why I'm really angry right now.

My specific anger today is because I came as close to losing my temper as I have so far, but I managed to rein it in. If I can't control my anger, I'll be "proving" that I'm a threat to my daughter, such is the well trodden playbook that so many parents will be familiar with.

My daughter desperately needs counselling. Not for gender identity issues, she's no longer actively gender questioning. She needs counselling because she's really struggling with adolesence. She's autistic and struggling with friendships. She's hurting because friendships go wrong. She gets overwhelmed and sometimes this can lead to a meltdown, especially if her anxiety is already high (which it is because she's baffled by how friendships work) and there is a trigger at just the wrong moment.

Previously she resisted counselling but now she's ready. Annoyingly, she's very specific about which counselling service she wants to go to, but we're working with that as it's better than complete refusal.

I've been trying to speak to the counselling service for a couple of months now to talk about her safeguarding needs around gender identity and autism conflation. They finally contacted me by email on Friday. Telling me that they had a space for her this week on Monday. Obviously we can't take that space until we know that the counsellor who will work with her understands that when my daughter talks about hating her breasts, and that she finds sex based stereotypes confusing and unnecessary, and that there's lots of stuff in school and online about this kind of thing, the counselling is not "neutral" if the counsellor isn't aware of the Cass Report. My daughter will mostly want to talk about friendships, but as she builds a rapport with her counsellor, I have no doubt that she'll share some of the things she still talks to me about regarding breasts, periods and how she hates how puberty has changed everything. She was happy as she was.

They phoned me today. I've been told we risk losing the place if we don't take the counselling now. But what made me really angry is that the lady I spoke to told me that they have lots of experience talking to autistic girls about their feelings (confidentially of course), that the Cass Report has no relevance to their counselling service and had I considered that my concerns were actually related to my own anxiety about my daughter growing up and finding her own identity. They offered me counselling to help with this.

For fuck's sake.

I shouldn't have to work this hard to safeguard my daughter and to get her the care that she needs to help her navigate the twists and turns of being an adolescent autistic girl.

Butterfly, I think you got some of my anger because of what you said about how we already know what the results of the trial will be. You didn't deserve all my anger, so that's why I added the edit. If you genuinely have experienced debilitating feelings of gender dysphoria (I'll take it at face value that you have) that must be awful. But that doesn't mean your experience invalidates the concerns of parents like me. Or of women who don't want TW identifying into women's sports, spaces and services and other similar things that I've seen you comment on.

I bought an electronic sit-stand desk, but I rarely stand. I should have saved my money! It also stops me crossing my legs.

Er, wrong thread 😄.

@BonfireLady I'm so sorry to hear you're going through such a difficult time.

It makes me angry that confused children who know they need counselling aren't getting offered it. I have experience if this myself where gender confused adolescents want the puberty blockers and counselling as they know they are also depressed/ anxious but only get the puberty blockers.

How did we get t this point where the first approach for confused children with mental helath concerns is body altering drugs rather than exploring their feelings and experiences?

Sounds like you may have dodged a problematic counsellor there tbh. I think no counselling is preferable to bad counselling.
Hope things go OK tomorrow at your meeting.

I've just seen this message now.

This is not Baroness Cass' position. But you know that.

I can't even be bothered being angry at your misrepresentation of this.

If a trial paases ethics and proves beyond any doubt that puberty blockers have clear benefits that fully outweigh the harms of unknown, highly likely permanent impact on brain development (amongst other things) I'll support their provision.

Likewise re partial lobotomies for people with depression. And gastric bands for people who are distressed about their bodies and have turned to anorexia as a solution. The ethics of such trials seem pretty similar to me.