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

The insurance question is probably the one which will have the biggest impact on whether a study goes ahead or not...

The protocol - what we know of it! - sounds horribly unfair on parents. You've got a teen who desperately wants puberty blockers. You've got a clinician who says "yes fine". But now there are parents with doubts who have heard about the downsides in the press and don't believe the suicide narrative and no longer swallow whatever they're told by the gender "experts". So they refuse consent. What will that do to their relationship with their child? Or they unwillingly consent for a relationship with their child, knowing the possible effects on their child's health and that 10 years down the line their child might utterly regret it and blame them.

It seems insurance companies are doing a lot of work in favour of reality 😀

The business of insurance companies is to observe reality not to pretend it doesn't exist.

They'd lose money if they didn't.

Hopefully it will be a bit like the organ donation thing where if you don’t want to be a donor you go along to be ‘tested’ and say you don’t really want to donate and they wrote you a letter saying you’re not a match. They could ask the parents privately then if they say no tell them the clinician has said no for x reason.

I hope so @Stepfordian ! That's reassuring and would be a shift away from some of the earlier practice.

I think the letter is unclear/not that useful in a couple of ways.
'no promise can be made that medical treatment will enable a person to use opposite-sex facilities.' some people might argue that the children don't want medical treatment in order to be able to do this, but just to feel more like the gender they think they are.
'The use of these drugs on children too young to understand this is ethically untenable.' Surely the use of these drugs on children too young to understand all of the side-effects and the irreversibility et cetera is untenable?

I think it's OK in the specific context of the Supreme Court decision. No matter how well they "pass" the decision confirms that these children will never be able to avoid bumping up against situations where they can't deny their sex, and there will always be situations where their sex will make a difference to how the outside world treats them. "Feeling more like the gender they think they are" is quite a fluffy benefit compared to "yes, everyone will always treat you as the other sex if you pass well enough and here's the blockers you need to achieve that level of passing".

Feeling more like the gender they think they are" is quite a fluffy benefit compared to "yes, everyone will always treat you as the other sex if you pass well enough and here's the blockers you need to achieve that level of passing".
Oh I know, I don't disagree! Fluffy or not, though, I'm sure there are lots of kids/parents who find that a good enough reason to take them.

On your first point, while it’s possible that there will be people who might want to transition regardless of whether they pass as the opposite sex, the letter is making the point that this is the current premise on which paediatric medical transition is based. The established idea is that trans people will pass better as the opposite sex if they haven’t gone through puberty.

There’s an interesting point on this made in the new US paediatric gender dysphoria report (p12) (linked upthread) where it acknowledges this aim of medical transition in children:

In many areas of medicine, treatments are first established as safe and effective in adults before being extended to pediatric populations. In this case, however, the opposite occurred: clinician-researchers developed the pediatric medical transition protocol in response to disappointing psychosocial outcomes in adults who underwent medical transition.

I agree with you that other reasons to transition might become the dominant ones now that passing as the opposite sex is off the table. But the currently proposed PB trial would only have been based on current protocols and objectives, which is why this is the only relevant treatment objective here.

Re your second point about it being unethical anyway even before the SC ruling, I think the point the letter is making is that Sex Matters et al had already been arguing all those other points around ethics (as they say in the letter), but that this ‘you shall not pass’ argument is supplementary to all those other objections already put forward, in light of the SC ruling.