Puberty Blockers Trial

[Cismyfatarse]

NHS to launch £10.7 million trial of puberty blockers

www.thetimes.com/article/1a43ff7e-3929-4d78-9ac4-7490b5cc2e2e?shareToken=14e04db1b508819178c480124574cb9b

I really, really hope they are not going ahead with this. I have only skim read the article. But can you trial something where there is evidence of harm?

Are they well known stakeholders?

Fairly we'll established, I think, and international. And that piece makes a very sound points.

Not only will it have to get through an ethics committee, I think the individuals on the ethics committee need to be published. We have seen how TRAs have infiltrated everywhere and everything, including the BMA. Ethics committees are always short of members as it is a huge amount of work without pay.

I wonder who will comprise the board which will investigate the ethics of this trial? I'd they approve it, I would like to see their reasoning.

All of us here are aware of the serious harms, which puberty blockers do. How can medical professionals not know, or brush that knowledge aside?

https://fundingawards.nihr.ac.uk/award/NIHR167530

It says it “will be subject to rigorous ethical and regulatory checks by UK regulators and the NHS ethics committee.” I can’t find a link to the latter. And, as you suggest, I find it unclear as to whether it’s been through ethics assessment yet.

@MalagaNights

The methodology doesn't make sense even if you accepted the premise.Which I don't.

Totally. Even with all things being equal, what does a patient being "happier" tell us? There is plenty of evidence of positive outcomes from homeopathic treatment, not because the pills actually do anything but because they are being validated and listened to by medical staff.

If I were a flat Earther I would "feel happier" to have people agree with me too, which has nothing to say about the validity of the underlying belief.

Who has made the decision to award this funding? Who is on that board?

And 'happy' is a transitory state. You can be happy in the morning and miserable in the afternoon. How are they going to measure 'happy?'

These are v serious drugs to assess with a sliding scale questionnaire.

We know increased suicide risk has been touted as an excuse for using these drugs in children who are physically normal and healthy because there is no other way to justify the damage that these drugs do, but I was my understanding that the data doesn't hold up. Kids who are distressed about puberty (and who have been convinced that if they were experiencing opposite sex puberty all their problems would be solved) don't have a higher suicide rate.

So what does a good outcome look like?

What are they going to measure?

Isn't the whole, crumbling edifice of transgenderism upheld by this concept of everything being worthwhile if it makes the individual happier? Affirming an individual's desires may make them happier in the short term, but is not necessarily the best thing for them out for society in the long term. Anybody who has brought up toddlers understands this.

Is the NHS deliberately managing a short term trial that so that the negative outcomes (fertility, brain/ bone impairment, limited sexual function etc) just can't be measured?
That way they can announce - "nothing to see - here's the evidence" and they've bought themselves "proof" to use in all the court cases where young people sue the NHS for the catastrophic damage NHS medics have done to them and their ravaged bodies, minds and lives ?

There was a story in the Guardian a few days ago about thousands of children in the UK being accused of witchcraft:

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/feb/24/thousands-of-children-england-falsely-accused-witchcraft-kindoki-witch-boy

I feel this puberty blockers trial is rather like this. Frontal lobotomies were horrific, and a dark episode in the history of medicine, but they aimed to treat a real condition. Gender dysphoria is more like witchcraft - it's a made-up condition that doesn't need treating.

The irony is that most of us regard the idea of children being accused of witchcraft as an unfortunate relic of backward and superstitious cultures. Yet this idea that a boy could be born in a girl's body, or vice versa, is the product of a supposedly more rational and enlightened society. We don't even have the excuse of it being a longstanding belief of a less educated culture. We have come up with this entirely idiotic idea all by ourselves, in one of the most educated countries in the world.

Thanks for that link.

Once again, they are talking absolute nonsense. From the abstract:

For the purposes of this abstract, we are defining gender incongruence as characterised by a marked and persistent incongruence between an individual’s experienced gender and assigned sex.

Without a definition of what constitutes "an individual’s experienced gender", this is completely meaningless.

The Plain English Summary is no better:

Gender incongruence is when a person feels their gender identity differs from the sex that they were given at birth. Some people with gender incongruence want their bodies to be more like their gender identity.

What is a gender identity? Without a definition this too is meaningless. And saying that children are given a sex at birth? In a medical document?

In the recent past, doctors sometimes used medicines to stop puberty....The idea was that GnRHa might give young people time to think about their identity without worrying about their bodies changing during puberty.

Why? Wouldn't going through puberty enable them to establish their identity as their brains mature? Have they not considered that keeping adolescents in an immature childlike state means that they are still going to be making their decisions as children?

And why is it so important to 'think about their identity'? They can't change sex and children don't understand what it will be like to be an adult man or woman. Children don't have an adult understanding of fertility or sexual function which is what these drugs interfere with.

Children think it's all about stereotypes. Adults are encouraging them to think their bodies need modifying because of their preferences. Doctors want to do more unethical experiments on children.

However, we don’t know if GnRHa are safe and helpful for young people with gender incongruence.

On their own admission, these drugs might not be helpful and they don't know if they're safe, but the proposal is to experiment on even more children anyway.

We also do not know enough about how identity and feelings develop for young people with gender incongruence as they grow up and what treatment is helpful.

Why not? The Tavistock has already done one experiment and failed to keep proper records or follow-ups. Is this going to be any different? Why not try to track down the missing information from the previous experiment instead? I'm sure they could do that for less than £10m and it would avoid more harm being done to even more children.

"Sex they were given at birth"?

FFS!

Some people with gender incongruence want their bodies to be more like their gender identity.

In what way is making that change a function of the NHS?

Puberty blockers cause osteoporosis, reduce IQ and prevent normal maturation. This is known and evidenced.

Why is a trial needed to show whether cosmetic body modification of children is worth these effects?

Surely the appropriate trial is to work out what talking therapies, parenting skills and safeguarding procedures bring about the best result of children maturing into adults with the best physical and mental health outcomes?

Yes there are several psychological disorders based around people wanting to change their bodies.

Why would the NHS support body modification for any of those disorders?

Why would any sane society cosmetically alter children's bodies to address psychological distress??

It's a sign the culture is ill not the children.

It's also a sign that some very bad people are powerful enough to dictate how we mistreat mentally unwell children.

Some people with gender incongruence want their bodies to be more like their gender identity.

I'd rather like my body to be more like my internal image of myself (in which I am still 27, with a 23-inch waist). The NHS can't do anything about the former, and I don't expect them to sort the latter given that the level of increase above 23 is more of an aesthetic issue than a medical one and I could try eating less cake.

When I look at all of this, I cannot shake the feeling that the mental health of the children involved was an excuse, not a justification. A group of doctors wanted to know what would happen if you swap from the hormone pathway appropriate for a particular sex onto the hormone pathway for the opposite sex before puberty has taken place (as they know what happens to adults) and had to create a cohort they could ethically justify experimenting on.

As almost all the children given gnrh analogues were then put on cross sex hormones, I don't think you can talk about gnrh analogues in isolation.

https://www.hra.nhs.uk/about-us/committees-and-services/res-and-recs/research-ethics-committees-overview/

One of these committees?

If the outcome you're measuring is short-term hedonism then you can make all sorts of harmful interventions look good on paper. How about a clinical trial of the benefits of heroin addiction?

I'm sad to feel so cynical, but I agree with you (and @AlisonDonut earlier). The timescale seems deliberately calculated to demonstrate that distressed confused children who have been told lies about how bodies work and how the world is supposed to affirm their whims, are "happier" when surprise surprise, puberty blockers block their puberty for a couple of years.

BUT THEN WHAT? Eh? Eh?

TRSOH will do their usual See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak Only The Catechisms act.

The researchers

Lead investigator(s):
Professor Emily Simonofff_
Joint Lead Applicant:
Dr Michael Absoudd_
Co-investigators:
Dr Julie Aldersonn, Dr Neelo Aslamm, Honorary Professor Indraneel Banerjeee, Dr Julian Baudinett, Dr Jo Begentt, Professor Bryony Beresfordd, Dr Hannah Connelll, Professor Richard Emsleyy, Dr Harriet Gunnn, Professor Alice Jones Bartolii, Professor Grainne McAlonann, Dr Lindsay Neill, Professor Jonathan O'Muircheartaighh, Honorary Professor Ingram Wrightt

Who on earth is going to want to volunteer to allow their children to take drugs that are currently banned over safety concerns and lack of evidence?

Genderists.

You get a sex! You get a sex! Everyone gets a sex!

I feel as if volunteering your child for this trial should in itself be a safeguarding referral.