Letter to NHS England and Wes Streeting about puberty blockers trial

[Harassedevictee]

From X

Sex Matters, @AllianceLGB, @Transgendertrd and @genspect have written to the Chief Executive of @NHSEngland to urge that the puberty blocker trial is cancelled.

@wesstreeting @karinsmyth

After UKSC, no promise can be made that medical treatment will enable a person to use opposite-sex facilities. The use of these drugs on children too young to understand this is ethically untenable.

https://x.com/sexmattersorg/status/1917630079427043428?s=61&t=W8z-NdrPTYy21FuiQuezcw

Letter added as photo so may take time to appear

This doesn’t make any sense. You can’t advocate for no clinical trial and complain about unproven interventions at the same time.

I hope NHS England listen!
The only thing we know for sure is that prolonged use of puberty blockers harms children. It's not worth it. Or if they think it might be, they already have ex-patients whose outcomes they can try to trace.

The problem is using children below the age of consent to potentially give up their future fertility, brain and body development and a whole host of other medical issues.
They're highly vulnerable children in the grip of a mental illness / social contagion believing that their bodies are wrong but a sex change will cure them.
How can they give informed consent to such enormous life long risks?

Why has no medical/scientific institution that has prescribed PB in the past not got (or is not prepared to publish) longitudinal data of the impact of PB? There should be no need for a further trial as globally many children have been prescribed PB.

Of course you can, just because they’re unproven doesn’t mean they have to be proved.

I don’t completely disagree. There needs to be a stringent process in place for the most severe cases to access treatment. My concern is going down the route of not being medically competent leading to a restriction of other healthcare for otherwise gillick competent under 16s

Thanks for posting.

Until there’s a medical trial theres no way to stop craziness so I can’t see how we avoid it. There are so many people in the cult they won’t accept it being banned otherwise. Ive heard MPs stand up in parliament and ask for the ban to be lifted with apparently no interest in any evidence base at all. Scary!

I don’t like the idea of this trial at all , but if all the participants are voluntary - Presumably half will be allocated treatment and the other half control - and they are prepared to offer themselves up as human Guinea pigs knowing the risks, then maybe we should thank them for their service. I know we should keep an open mind but I think we all know that it’s a bad idea to mess with hormones like this if you don’t have to…

Or is this giant ruse to demonstrate that once the risks are explained no one in their right mind will sign up to this?

Do we know how long the follow up is? I hope it’s like a long long study? Into mid life at least surely?

I was under the impression that issues of consent for children, say with cancer, trying experimental drugs, is highly regulated with ethics committees and significant multi disciplinary evaluation?
It's only this branch of "child healthcare" where it's been a wild west with disreputable political activist groups / adults able to influence the treatment of children for their own ends? (see Hannah Barnes' book Time to Think for details of the groups).
Why would the health treatment of other ill children be affected by how this this group of seriously mentally vulnerable children are treated?

I suppose it depends on how the trial is to be set up. I’ve not read all the NHS England text but they mention

”a risk acknowledgement form should be developed for use with patients and/or parents or carers”

Those signing up for puberty blockers in recent times were allegedly seen twice for affirmative care before being waved through to the endocrinologist. That’s all quite warm and fluffy….

But this is a proper trial and ethics requirements. So let’s say that the current trial states that they will exclude anyone with autism or a history of sexual abuse/trauma? And then they put all the risks on the consent form about bones, heart attacks, fertility etc etc That you as both a parent and child both have to sign…

Might the idea of this trial disappear when they rule out 90% via autism/abuse and then the remainder chicken out?

It’s not possible to keep secret who is on the active drugs as they definitely stop puberty and this would become apparent.

The research question is not whether these drugs stop puberty, but whether they cause physical damage, developmental and cognitive damage, prevent brain maturation, or cause children to become concretised into an identity they would have otherwise grown out of, or whether in the long term children would do better with watchful waiting and psychological support. (By better I mean they learn to cope with their life without a lifetime of medical treatment and surgery of variable quality). It needs very very long term study to see if sterility and/or inability to breastfeed and/or reduced pool of potential partners is regretted later in life.

It’s a very difficult study to design, and it’s beyond irresponsible that clinics have not kept follow-up data on all the patients they have treated so far.

I am like you in that we need evidence of the harm to justify the ban but I hate the idea of experimenting on children potentially causing irreversible harm.

It’s why I would like an independent review of the medical records of any child prescribed PB, be it for precocious puberty or gender incongruence. Followed up with a current medical assessment of those children (now adults) to see if there are clear trends in the long term impact.

Informed consent to me is the biggest barrier to overcome. Even WPATH have said this is not possible to get ethically.

They need to carry out follow-up studies on the children who've already taken puberty blockers before they even think about giving them to more children

Do we know that the attempt to trace is definitely not part of the study? Again if there were a phased approach which looked at health outcomes in order to develop the risk sheet, the whole thing might self destruct? We can but hope…

Thanks OP

I am watching to see what reaction this letter gets.

I think it's a stretch to say that the SC ruling makes the puberty blocker trial untenable because of restrictions on same sex spaces.

I'm not convinced that not getting into the loo of choice is a bigger loss than fertility and sexual function and these children and parents are already willing to make those sacrifices.

I'm sure they're telling themselves that the 'passing rights' they'll achieve will open all those same sex spaces up anyway.

I think given the problems Baroness Cass had getting data suggests that it either doesn’t exist or people don’t want it to see the light of day.

I would hope retrospective data collection and analysis would be stage 1 of any trial.

Why can't we find out what ALREADY happened to the hundred of children we ALREADY experimented on?

Oh yeah that's right, we can't because it was felt that such a disclosure could be catastrophic to the well being of those, now young adults.

Because that screams 'substantial clinical proof of significant benefit' now doesn't it?!

We should try to find a way to force Johanna Olsen-Kennedy to release the longitudinal research she's currently hiding. That could save much anguish for many children, and do away with running new trials in this country.

I think this is possibly a case of let’s get ahead of the issue and start the dialogue. After years of no debate we now need proper debate on a whole range of issues.

They’re not saying that though - they’re saying that before SC ruling, they already argued that it was unethical to experiment on children when the potential benefits were unproven and the known risks of harm were high.

But now, following the SC ruling, the whole premise of puberty blockers (in enabling someone to prevent puberty and therefore better pass as the opposite sex) has fallen away anyway, because it has been confirmed that a child won’t be treated as the opposite sex for lots of important purposes anyway.

So it would be unethical to mislead children (and their parents) into taking experimental drugs under the false notion that it would allow them to change sex when that’s patently not how the world works.

I applaud every word of the sentiment of the letter, but what will WS do, I wonder? If he were to put a stop to it, all hell would break loose, wouldn't it? Politically, that's a difficult decision.

PoisedRubyLion · Today 21:19

This doesn’t make any sense. You can’t advocate for no clinical trial and complain about unproven interventions at the same time.

What about various salts of arsenic for pulmonary tuberculosis? It used to be fairly standard in the 17th and 18th Centuries; Edward VI was famously treated with it.

Or mercury for syphilis? Used quickly enough, it's acknowledged that it was sometimes effective in preventing it spreading through the body and manifesting in secondary forms.

If the risk of harm was so high there wouldn’t need to be a trial. My understanding of the trial was that it’s looking at outcomes of the child treated with PB.

Even though access to single sex spaces has been returned to birth sex, someone who passes is still going to have a much easier time in life than someone who doesn’t and will experience less discomfort. Having protection under the Equality Act, doesn’t mean discrimination still isn’t common.

"Someone who passes is still going to have a much easier time in life than someone who doesn’t and will experience less discomfort."

That's just a baseless assertion on your part.

There's no evidence that transition has any positive impact in the long term. And that's before we even get to the fact that nobody can even agree on what is actually being treated.

Nobody can actually change sex. Nobody knows what it's like to be another sex. Nobody can demonstrate that negative feelings about one's body are any different than any other anxiety disorders/ body dysmorphia/ body integrity disorders.

And "happiness" with a deception is no evidence of a cure any more than someone who believes in a flat earth might be happier for other people to validate that delusion - it says nothing as to the truth underlying issue.

Gender dysphoria remains a deeply contested diagnosis among clinicians. They should probably sort that out before they destroy more kids' lives, eh?

It seems far too early in the process of implementing the correct interpretation of the EA following the SC ruling to be able to know now whether or not medical transition will produce the best outcomes. Some trans people say their lives are ruined and they will be confined to their homes following the SC judgment, while many others have shrugged and told news outlets that the ruling won’t affect their daily lives at all.

Even if it turns out to be true that someone who passes as the opposite sex in everyday life will have an easier life, regardless of the sex-based restrictions arising from the EA, surely it’s still unethical to experiment on children to test which theory is true?