Why the NHS puberty blocker trial is appalling

[Soontobe60]

Stella O’Malley from Genspect telling it like it is - that a state endorsed trial of puberty blockers for gender dysphoric children should NOT go ahead.
the NHS are not walking into this nightmare blindly - there are enough experts out there telling them what will happen happen to these children if they’re given these life changing drugs.
https://x.com/genspect/status/1989896741358113127?s=61&t=gKvvk-rWmOlYFGMZN8QVvQ

It wasn't me but my experience of having been on zoladex for just over 6 months about 20 years ago for endo was horrific.

I'm not sure if being in perimenopause at 34 or the spontaneous hip fracture at 45 due to osteopenia were down to it but the physical, mental and emotional side effects at the time stay with me today x

I haven't read whole thread so apologies if this has been linked already, but have just read an interesting article on face transplants in the Guardian. At first glance it might not seem relevant but you might see some parallels like I did.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2025/nov/27/face-transplant-patients-results-outcomes

Archive link for the Guardian article

archive.ph/6ImHJ

Oh, won't someone mention the Samoans? 🙄What a load of piffle.

The hidden rationale for all of this is that chemically castrating a child is easier than fixing the sexist and homophobic culture in which we endure. These children are the Cass sacrifice to society.

Well, that is correct. It is easier, if one looks at it from a crude logistical stance.

Making medical, ethical decisions based on what is easiest is a very scary proposition.

I know I'm a stuck record but: what are they treating? and what would success be?

It seems they are treating irrational psychological distress with a healthy body.

The treatment is to prevent further 'scary' changes to the body but it won't change the body they are distressed with.

So what will success be? Reduced irrational distress with their body? Maybe. Temporarily. But they still have the body they didn't like. How has that been resolved? The only way to resolve that on this pathway is cross sex hormones.

Short term Happiness should not be the successful criteria.

Succes criteria should be: acceptance of your healthy body and resolving body dysmorphia.

How could PB support that? I guess they could give time for therapy which will prepare them for the inevitable necessity of a slightly delayed puberty and help resolve the body dysmorphia before puberty onset.
But no one is saying that.

It seems the pursuit of 'happiness' at any cost, even destroying your own body and health is now a justified medical goal. For children.

We are a sick sick society.

This is where the Olsen and most of the studies just have incorrect premises.

They shouldn't be measuring happiness as the goal, they should be measuring, acceptance of your healthy body as the goal.

Saying that they don't seem to make anyone happier either (what a surprise) but that should not be the goal.

Noting here that Anne Health openly prescribes puberty blockers to children.

'We’ve secured a legal route that allows us to continue offering puberty blockers.
...
Our clinicians follow guidance from the Endocrine Society and WPATH (World Professional Association for Transgender Health), which focuses on development stage rather than age alone.
...
We have a legal route for accessing this safe, reversible and internationally recommended pathway in these circumstances.
Despite the blocker ban being brought into place by our current government, we believe the ban to be politically motivated and is causing active harm. '

https://archive.ph/nNfKH

Why couldn't beauty incongruence be a thing?

There are many or most girls who feel they'd be so much happier if they had bigger breasts, sharper jawlines, smaller bottoms, flatter stomachs, thicker longer hair. They desperately yearn for these things, spend hours on the Internet and in their bedrooms trying to recreate this image of themselves they want, and feel depressed they can never attain it.

They tell us they would be so much happier if they could just get the facial surgery, breast enhancements, lipo suction, hair extensions that they feel would let them move in the world happy and confident.

Why should we deny these girls this happiness? If it makes them happier do it? Where are the trials for these kids?

And this would be less damaging as it wouldn't destroy their fertility or sexual function.

We're not doing trials to modify everyone's healthy bodies to make them happier because we know it's dystopian. And that the route to Psychological stability is acceptance of reality and not ongoing rejection of reality, and living in a fantasy of a utopian future of a new different you.

But we've thrown out that truth for these kids with this pseudo science veneer of short term happiness as an ethical medical aim.

It is a veneer, you are absolutely right. And a very shallow one.

If there was any actual care for happiness then CAMHS would have funding thrown at it for a start. And other groups of children would matter and not just this particular one.

The emotional aspects are just the marketing sell, covering up the very powerful desire for this agenda coming from very powerful and influential adults, and it is dodgier than fuck. But the 'awww bless' marketing works quite well to fool the sentimental Strictly and I'm a Celebrity masses, with the aid of the media to avoid sharing inconvenient information to balance it.

It seems they are treating irrational psychological distress with a healthy body.

Except they seem to have dropped the part of the diagnosis that refers to distress and now just talk about 'gender incongruence'.

And 'gender incongruence' means that one's internal feeling doesn't fit with the external stereotypes associated with one's sex.

That's all there is, my friend ...

It's really not clear what condition they are trying to treat with these drugs. Gender incongruence isn't an illness, so doesn't require treatment.

This is a new paper by Olson-Kennedy, which might be the one which she was reluctant to publish because it didn't have the 'right' outcome.

Mental and Emotional Health of Youth after 24 months of Gender-Affirming Medical Care Initiated with Pubertal Suppression - PMC

If I have understood this correctly, 72% didn't have symptoms of depression at the start of the study, and 75% had no symptoms of depression at the end. They speculate that because there was little change, the treatment had a positive effect because they believe that older children are more likely to have symptoms of depression.

They seem to be using the drugs to pre-emptively treat depressive symptoms which might be present at a later date without treatment.

The paper has not yet been peer reviewed.

Just dropped in - haven't read the full thread so my apologies if this has been posted already.
https://x.com/KevsTribulation/status/1994420664141238738
According to this X poster, Wes Streeting has been reported to the Met Police by a group of concerned parents for facilitating the pb trial. Under the Female Genital Mutilation Act 2003, s2.

Edited to add name of Act

That's interesting.

'U.K. Puberty blocker trial.

The researchers argue that RCTs (randomised, controlled trials) produce ‘gold standard’ data. They fail to mention they are not doing an RCT for the question everyone thinks they are asking. The question Wes Streeting
@wesstreeting
seems to think will be answered.

There is NO CONTROL GROUP to test whether PBs improve outcomes over and above psychosocial therapy alone. The proposed comparator are kids who are not eligible for the trial - this means they are fundamentally different in mental health, physical health and/or behavioural status.

Without a control group - and why, BTW, is there no randomised control group? - they are not testing whether the drugs do something positive, they are testing the difference between the effects of Drugs Now versus Drugs Later. And the researchers know that a massive, unmeasurable amount of any positive effect is placebo effect.

They are literally proposing a trial that fails to answer the right question, and fails to control for the very effect any ‘gold standard’ RCT seeks desperately to minimise. They know the kids will benefit from being told they are on PBs immediately, well before any physical changes manifest. This is trial of the placebo effect.'

https://x.com/FondOfBeetles/status/1994466876181934425

An important intervention about safeguarding the countless autistic chilkdren caught up in all this. Transgender Trend have shared a letter from Janey Galloway, the Director of Evidence Based Autism challenging the failure to understand the range of of issues autistic children will face in relation to consenting to such life changing outcomes from this experiment on them:

https://www.transgendertrend.com/autistic-children-puberty-blockers-trial/

That comes across as a bit unhinged. Puberty blockers do not mutilate female genitals and we are talking about a trial designed, led and approved by a regulated profession.

There lots of reasons to object to the trial but this seems on par with some of the WPATH nonsense.

The reason they claim for not using a placebo is that the children will become aware if they're taking a placebo; if their normal growth is stunted or not. They won't know immediately though. Arguably, could they put them all on a placebo and see how their mental health improves or not after a couple of months.

Although as pbs aren't antidepressants any short term improvement in mental health has to be a placebo effect.

I'd be interested to hear a legal argument about whether the administration of puberty blockers does constitute genital mutilation - they certainly affect normal genital development. Even if a court found they did not meet the threshold to be considered 'mutilation' it would be an illuminating discussion of what exactly gender affirming care does to normal genital development.

It seems illogical to expect drugs known to cause depression to have a beneficial effect on mental health - the whole premise of puberty blockers as a mental health treatment is stupid.

Longterm puberty blocker use in females will keep genitals in a pre-pubertal state - arguably that achieves a similar aim to surgical genital mutilation.

“You only hear from the complainers,” one delegate told me earlier this year, after I spoke at a talk to face transplant surgeons at an international conference in Helsinki. “The happy patients are quietly living their lives.”

Such claims are meaningless without accurate data. And patients are often scared to tell surgeons the truth; even without the power imbalances of healthcare, people feel ungrateful or worry about being a “bad patient”.

This is a really really important quote from that article.

We are talking about children in a situation where it's already acknowledged there are parents who are behaving in a manner like Munchausen by proxy AND there is significant peer pressure not to detransition otherwise you have let everyone down.

The cult like elements of Transactivism and the age of the participants make the above point even more potent.

We ALREADY have extensive information about why women don't complain - yet the NHS as an institution seems unable to grasp this.

Take Bounty - the NHS response was 'no one has complained so there's no problem' despite mountains of evidence on MN and the circumstances being totally unethical and falling foul of illegal high pressure sales tactics. This is the same but with way more vulnerable patients and way more serious consequences.

There is an institutional issue with understanding how consent isn't consent if it's under undue pressure. And ultimately I fear, that in time, this is where legal claims WILL eventually succeed because they will demonstrate that the children involved were conditioned to pass tests to get on the trial and conditioned to give certain responses and were unable to understand risks and were generally under so much undue pressure that it should never have occurred in the first place. Unless someone wakes up and starts to actually listen to what was said by staff at the Tavistock and in all these other cases where 'but there was no complaints' as a line was trotted out despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary from none institutionalised sources.

Sarah Ditum in the Times with another good article pointing out the countless flaws with this experiment on children:

https://www.thetimes.com/comment/columnists/article/puberty-blockers-trial-learn-nothing-5qtg9tzmj

https://archive.ph/XpsKe