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

Indeed.
I mean, can you imagine the sheer cognitive dissonance on the part of doctors, specialists, surgeons...where the decision to have irreversible and life changing PBs, and in many cases surgery, is absolutely driven by the children themselves, a cohort that even in straightforward circumstances should not be able to enforce these decisions, even less so in these totally unstraightforward and exceptional circumstances...whom after being put thru the biggest wringer they're ever likely to undergo...are then in so many cases left to fend for themselves, the medical establishment having "done their job", their families, friends and wider society (long term sickness benefits, escalating unavoidable medical needs and costs etc)...showing zero interest in the outcomes of radical medical intervention...despite their decade-long constant bullish championing of such diagnoses and the power of medicine and surgery to absolutely create favourable outcomes?
Yet today, when we'd like to see those outcomes instead of a totally unnecessary need to place another 1k at risk, suddenly the data on that previous set is not forthcoming, the NHS won't release it, the doctors and surgeons aren't proud of their outcomes to happily release outcomes, indeed the bullish propaganda is suddenly silent.
Is this what happened with lobotomies and recovered memory syndrome? Did doctors, surgeons, therapists not reveal long term outcomes ahead of new cohorts of younger patients going forward to new trials?
What about less controversial medical/surgical/therapy interventions? Was data from previous cohorts also kept secret as new younger cohorts were put forward for trials?

I mean, can you imagine the sheer cognitive dissonance on the part of doctors, specialists, surgeons...where the decision to have irreversible and life changing PBs, and in many cases surgery, is absolutely driven by the children themselves,

I don't think that's how they see it. The adults all rely on each other rather than the children. The surgeons rely on the mental health specialists to assess the children and determine whether they should go on to surgery. The mental health providers rely on the surgeons to inform the children about the risks and consequences of surgery. The doctors rely on the parents to know what the children want, and the parents (are told to) rely on the doctors to know what the children need. I don't think any of them ever has a moment when they feel they depend only and entirely on the children.

In fact, we know for sure that parents, at least, don't feel like they have much of a say in the whole matter, like they must agree or they risk being considered abusive to their child. I have a feeling that it's probably much the same for doctors, that each at their individual stage feel like it's not up to them to stop being "gender-affirming", to delay the process, let alone stop it.

I'm not saying this to defend the doctors involved, or to relieve them of their responsibilities. It's more a matter of better apprehending the scale of the problem, where each doctor is only a cog in a big, monstrous machine, so that none of them feels responsible for the workings of the entire machine- though they are absolutely responsible for choosing to become a cog in the first place.

That's a brilliant post.
I'll summarize it as a circular firing squad, with the child slap bang in the middle.

Isn't it that the gender clinics identified/diagnosed the children, and sent them along to the endocrinologists, who prescribed PB.

The gender clinic only diagnosed the condition, not the treatment. The endocrinology department had nothing to do with the diagnosis, just prescribed based on the development stage of the child.

Basically, it more than just the gender clinics who dont want the orginal data disclosured.

Edit: i didnt see the post above.

I total agree. Every department played a small part and relied on other departments to make the appropriate checks. Now its a big 'oh, fuck' moment for so many.

You could almost say there's plausible deniability all 'round. Yet the child at the centre of this, where in 2025 should naturally expect maximum protection and best care, and not being in any position to make any clinical judgement (tbh, parents are still choosing what breakfast they eat on the day of final assessment), has to rely on these adults, the poor beleaguered parents, under pressure from their kids, 101 opinions coming their way, and the suffocating social pressure that they're JUDGING their kids and TRANSPHOBIC if they don't take the path of least resistance, again let down by the professional firing squad of therapist/councillor/GP/endocrinologist/surgeon all finding they miraculously agree with each other on the same diagnosis and same need to irreversibly and irrevocably intervene on every kid.
This echo chamber must be deafening.

Imagine the grand inquest
Surgeon/endocrinologist "but the therapist/councillor said..."
Therapist/councillor "but the parents said..."
Parent "but our kid/extended family/greater society/social media/experts said..."
Streeting "but plausible deniability said..."
Kid "but I relied on all of you to not put me in harms way"

I think there may be some number confusion- the estimated number put on Pbs that i have seen was 2k, whilst 9k were seen by GIDS. I have no written sources but these have been quoted by GIDS sources who were close to the action.

All the points still stand though, whether 2k or 9k!!

Good analogy from Kathleen Stock https://x.com/i/status/1992237933332664808

I’ve been troubled for sometime about the impact that Politicians and senior journalists and broadcasters who have trans identified offspring have. How can Starmer, Streeting et al have an open discussion about the issues when they have at least two cabinet colleagues for whom this is a very personal issue?

How many journalists and broadcasters who rightly challenge politicians and CEOs on any other issue, hold back on trans issues for fear of causing upset to colleagues?

I don’t want to see the young people involved named, but I wish this aspect of influence was acknowledged as a concern.

As correct and helpful as Lord Warner’s interjection is, (about the Health Sec’s longstanding legal powers to force the NHS to release what data there is of the already experimented-on kids, using the appropriate legal grounds he has stated ..) and as grateful as I am to him.. this is all just a political will thing.

We were talking and posting about UK health secretaries having these legal powers over NHS data on here back in 2021 or 2022. Right back when Sajid Javid was the health secretary under Boris Johnson. And it’s about to be 2026, and this data still hasn’t been released and used.

Worse still they’re talking seriously about repeating this live ‘experiment’, but this time keeping records consistently. Gross.

ALL Health Secretaries already know about these powers. This is absolutely not an arcane bit of health law. It’s on basic training about NHS data law.

It’s just that ‘trans’ is still such a political hot potato that nobody in power wants to touch it. It’s infuriating that those with the power to stop this are so squirming and pusillanimous.

Tough luck on them that using some data will piss some powerful people off and make everybody in the NHS and the massive charities who egged them on look really bad and that some angry men in skimpy dresses will turn up to picket their offices with bottles of piss. Which they will then pour over themselves and photograph themselves doing in their wet dresses.. leaving the office cleaners to clear up their many bottles of piss (note for mods- this is not me being transphobic, it is exactly what has already happened as ‘protest’)

Honestly it is politically easier than it ever has been to order access to this data, as Streeting is not of the same political party that presided over this shitshow for the last 14 years. Streeting could easily be the Health Sec that signs the order and releases this data.

And He's obviously uncomfortable going ahead- would he really rather skip this data gathering stage? Why on earth didn’t Cass recommend that the Health Sec should start with the transitioned and detransitioned patients the NHS has already made? They could do this by following up existing data and commissioning new social research to speak to transitioned and detransitioned young people who went through medical and surgical treatments via GIDs and the NHS and/or privately, as children and then as young adults?

Would Wes streeting really rather blow millions of taxpayers’ NHS money sterilising and drugging kids and young people, who would mainly have changed their minds anyway and also pointlessly harvesting tissue from their gonads in hopes one day it could form a viable sperm or egg… just to call that ‘healthcare’ ? The results will likely be so shocking that the only ethical course would be to stop the trial anyway and that will cause further heat into why it ever went ahead in the first place on Streeting’s watch. He can’t delegate his own responsibilities to Cass in this way.

Instead Streeting could access the figures legally, get some analysts on those figures, and then be quickly able to evidence that there has been a terrible scandal and fuckup very recently here, one that must never be repeated.

Or not! In the extremely unlikely outcome these treatments were a great success, (and let’s all hope for the GIDS patients’ sakes they were), then we should be pushing for all distressed kids who mention gender to have these treatments. It’s strange though that these adults aren’t proactively and in number, coming forward to say how immensely happier and healthier they are now. But we must still see the evidence.

I do want evidence based and compassionate NHS healthcare. So let’s look at this evidence (regardless of how aware we can be already what the stats will reveal). It must be the first step.

This is why I come to MN Towers. To get the best takes.
The very fact that thousands of medicalised children are already out there and the data on them should be accessible.
The fact that Streeting cannot be "happy" doing this trial.
The fact that such simple things as "harvest the data and talk to the patients already gone thru this" and "roll out the clear and precise ruling that the SC came to unequivocally" are not options, that a health secretary cannot choose the simple, least harmful and ethical path, women's/equalities/education secretary cannot choose the legally compelling path, their boss, the countries PM cannot do the thing we need of our leader, overrule and make the ethical argument for the right things, shows how captured they all are.

'Would Wes streeting really rather blow millions of taxpayers’ NHS money sterilising and drugging kids and young people, who would mainly have changed their minds anyway'

It just occurs to me that while one can 'change one's mind' about the sacred inner sense of gender identity, it is quite literally impossible to 'change your mind' about 'transitioning'

Once you have removed body parts, you can't grow them back. And cross sex.hormones have irreversible effects. If puberty is blocked, it's blocked. Sterilisation is forever. Jazz Jennings will never have children.

'Transition' as a term doesn't adequately convey the unidirectionality.

Wasn't Cass given permission to link old nhs numbers to the new ones given? I know those with GRC weren't happy because they assumed they could never be linked.

So there must have been a plan, at one point, to analysis existing data?

Yes.
I think that Cass hoped that by locating the new services in Children's hospitals, they might force the gender loon medics to adopt the fundamental principles of ethical child healthcare that's the basis of child medicine. What she failed to appreciate is how deeply these disordered and dangerous beliefs are embedded in the NHS to the very top.
Just look at the transactivist trope that she uttered recently - "I’m concerned about the impact on trans women who have been using women’s toilet completely unnoticed for many years and it would be completely unacceptable to expect they should now be using male toilets”

That's a nonsense claim straight from that transactivist playbook yet she says it as if it's true - completely ignoring all evidence of the intimidation of women in & outside the NHS - who dare to object to men in women's spaces.
Similarly Phillipson utters the nonsensical transactivist claim that women taking a 6 month old baby boy into the women's changing room must result in every middle aged man being given the same right.
Trans ideology is so deeply embedded in the powerful echelons of society that many people spout the deluded tropes with zero idea what they reveal about their lack of critical thinking and lack of care for the vulnerable.

the other factor that lays on my mind is the witness statements/ submissions to parliament I remember reading about children’s altered nhs records, stating they were the opposite sex. It’s quite possible some have been completely lost in the system

it is strange that there isn’t been a large collective group of these kids coming together (all 2K or 9K of them) and using the GLP to help them demonstrate how life changing it all was for them, for the better.

That's why DeTransitioners makes more sense as a word than eg Reverters or Reversers.
All one can do is stop driving, one can't reverse the car back in the space you were parked in.
There was a push a while ago for DeTransitioners to be replaced with Desisters.
A gruesome irony, trans as a mental state is likely trans-itory.
Medicalisation and surgery are permanent, the very opposite of what "trans" as a prefix suggests.
Didn't Susie Greene Gender GP in her recent car crash interviews go full-on Mary Harrington's worst nightmare in suggesting that medicalisation and surgery were inherently adaptable for DeTransitioners, get plastic surgery for new breasts or penis, 101 commercial solutions to infertility, any number of funky walking sticks for early onset ostetoprosis...

Maybe not.
As this mass hysteria decade plus period peaks into its pathological jump the shark period that could last another several years, so many mind blowing concepts will come to light.
That already highly medicalised young vulnerable people were not followed up on.
Their data is hidden, or worse, lost, or worst of all, never even collected.
That Streeting feels compelled to run this trial, knowing another 1k vulnerable kids will be sacrificed, for purely political reasons.
That the law has been set out by the SC in terms that a 7 year old could implicitly understand, yet our beneficent educated elites seem strangely befuddled despite their PhDs and impressive CVs into...checks notes, not carrying it out.

This sounds promising! Can Cass not comment on what she thinks should be done about this data problem, so that the Health Sec can hide behind her as he seems to need to do and the government can at least get access to this data? I mean it’s embarrassing for him to not be able to do this normally and independently but we are where we are. Embarrassing for her to be handwringing about how we all used to mistake men in dresses for women but she is where she is on her own journey with this stuff.

There are routes to legal access to identifiable patient data. The government just need to know what data there is and what it says. And then they need not to run this additional trial of PBs.

I’m really hoping that a comment from Cass will somehow freshen Streeting’s resolve if he can’t find it any other way and has committed himself to following her guidance..

This is yet another example about the impotence of the modern British state. What is the point of someone "in charge" (apparently) in high office if he or she can't exercise power and authority?
Of course, if Streeting knows the data doesn't exist, and that gets revealed, awful.
If it gets revealed that gender activism has driven policy, awful.
Maybe Streeting knows that turning over the rock of previous medicalisation will turn up so many creepy crawlies, that he dare not.
"Better" (?) to sacrifice a fresh cohort with apparent clinical competence (?) and no baggage (?), find out in a few years, oh, this was indeed a terrible idea, and put things to bed.
Streeting sees this as less politically contentious than just harvesting current data.
If you thought you couldn't hate politicians more than you already do, you're wrong.

Just a few minutes before saying that nobody had noticed transwomen using women's toilets for years, she spoke about the reasoning behind the original Dutch experiment which introduced the idea of medicating children. It was because many males were unhappy about their transition, and this was put down to them not passing well enough, and the Dutch doctors thought that it might help to prevent puberty so that they 'passed' better as adults.

So either they pass really well, so there's no need to medicate children, or they don't pass, which means it's a lie to say they do.

She said all this in a prepared talk with slides, it wasn't something she came out with on the spur of the moment as a result of an unexpected question in an interview.

How could she prepare and give this talk without seeing the obvious contradiction?

Link to thread about the talk with transcript.

Leaked Cass interview | Mumsnet

Maybe I'm gonna be deleted for saying this, but you can draw a straight line from the Harriet Harman/Patricia Hewitt support, sympathy, whatever word you wanna use, for PIE in the early 70s, and their demands, objectives, aims, by extension the men within it, and the ethos of radical gender ideology today.
All the progressive left care about is crashing every barrier, every facet of safeguarding. Society will not be permitted to express disgust, disquiet, anxiety etc, about any "marginalized" (as they see it) group.
We're all blank slates for the great Marxist class outlook to program us.
Sure, some marginalized groups needed saving and bringing in to society.
And some should be barricaded and the key thrown away.
AGPs are one, keep it in your basement.
Activists educating kids are another, lock your gender animations away.

It honestly seems to be the new poliitcal thing to stare people in the eye and say utter batshit in the face of obvious evidence. I don't know what the underlying plan is supposed to be; that people are supposed to be hypnotised into believing you or something, or just that they don't know what to do with such outrageous lying and madness and give up on you/stop bothering. A child could see the issues.

Apart from anything else; if it's all about 'poor men who have been using the women's spaces for years and no one knows' -

is it ok to use women and break their boundaries so long as they don't consciously know a la Giselle Pelicot? Seriously?

what happens if a woman shouts 'man!' and points - does that mean the man's access ends on the spot because now someone knows?

If there are supposedly men that no one knows are men then what about the men who identify as women who do not in any way pass? Who is going to be making the decision as to who does and doesn't? Will there be some kind of pass issued that the man keeps on hand? And again does that pass end the day someone says 'that's a man' if it relies on 'no one knowing'? Who stands on the door to tell the six foot four guy in the pink leggings, wig, beard and obvious erection that no, he can't come in here?

And (I swear I say this now in my sleep in the hope eventually it successfully dawns on someone in Westminster) what would she like to do with the women who cannot use or access mixed sex spaces because very inconveniently, and so very sorry about this, but the female half of the human race are also entitled to 'inclusion', it's not a man-only thing, and they pay taxes. You can give those men a third space to produce equality of access. Those men won't let the excluded women have anything at all.

Or shall we just fix in law that other women (not the privileged ones making the laws obvs) accept a biological birthright of subordination and having a body that is a resource that men get to use without their consent? And that submitting to this and providing their body in a state of undress to men is the price of access to public spaces and resources and help?

Do they really think there is a difference in experience for a woman based on whether the man has long hair/painted nails/spinny skirts/is knitting at the time/ tells her he has a sincere belief in his head that should create her reality?

Wtf are they bloody smoking in there? And if they're going to continually inflict this batshit on us can they please share? Anaesthesia at this point badly needed.

The Age Of Stupid is upon us.
Yet the bait and switch has been so effective that it's us who are considered stupid, bigoted, uncultured.
What would Christopher Hitchens have made of all this?
Would he even have suspected gender ideology levelling the social landscape two decades ago as he made mincemeat of evangelical Christians and ripped apart sympathisers for harsh Islam.
If he came back today, saw the hold that gender ideology has, the establishment silence around Grooming Gangs, the moves to new blasphemy laws re Islamaphobia definitions, Non Crime Hate Incidents in the hundreds of thousands, he'd be at a loss for words (and Hitch was never short of an opinion or three).

Catching up on this thread so a bit behind the conversational curve here but doesn’t the finding of the Levy Review (that there is no outcome data) wipe out the hope of a meaningful data linkage study looking at outcomes for the 2000 children already given PBs?

https://www.england.nhs.uk/publication/operational-and-delivery-review-of-nhs-adult-gender-dysphoria-clinics-in-england/

Thank you for that link that is a very interesting and very damning report about how poorly provided and poorly led the adult services are and how they need to massively improve in loads of ways including (just for one example) around data collection- I just quickly looked at the key recommendations though.

However I didn’t spot any comment on the specific possibility (or not )of linking up individual child patient IDs at GIDS to the same individual’s adult patient ID at an adult GDC. Nor around linking individual child GIDS patient ID data up follow their treatment elsewhere in the NHS that the individual has been treated, because not all of these children and young people willl attend an adult GDC. (maybe they detransitioned, or didn’t want to do any more physical interventions or sought transition treatment privately etc) however unless they leave the country it’s unlikely they would stop having NHS physical or mental health care completely once of adult age… so surely that is something that could be followed tomorrow without seeking individual consent just by looking at NHS health records (only with appropriate legal permission via Health Sec powers because it’s hugely important for patient safety to get a vague idea very rough speaking how people are doing in the years after PBs.)

Then ar the same time using the individual IDs and last known contacts in their medical records, there needs to be a huge recontacting of the individual GIDs’ patients via these IDs and last known contact details in their child records, because it is so strongly in the public interest to survey them directly about their experiences since having PBs in order to spare any other child from going through this medication unnecessarily. no doubt there will be an immense opposition to this from people saying there are privacy safety and dignity objections to asking previous PBs recipients how they have been doing health and mental health wise since taking PBs and what treatments they are now having, but I’m really sorry I think not unnecessarily potentially harming children has to trump that. Obviously we are where we are with not having sought consent for long term follow up but that’s on the appalling leadership at GIDS and the previous NHS leadership more widely for letting them carry on like that at GIDS for so long.

But the report shows there are two appalling problems for Streeting and everyone else to worry about now:

1. Children receiving PBs weren’t followed up by GIDS (we knew this one already)

2. adults receiving medical and surgical transition aren’t properly followed up byGDCs either, to this day- as this report shows

It’s all been a complete shitshow but hopefully Streeting will come to understand that the ethical and responsible answer to that isn’t for the NHS to re-run the whole shitshow for yet more kids under more controlled conditions.

The answer has to be to find out as best we can, what happened to the now-adult kids who were given PBs over the GIDS’ and associated advocacy charities’ several boom years of giving children PBs (and advocating for that, on the part of the charities).