BBC interview with Cass. 'Both sides weaponised'

[RedToothBrush]

www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c0k1vkmxgd6o

Asked if children had been let down by an adult-led debate, Cass said "absolutely", adding they "were also caught up in all the issues about single-sex spaces and sports and safe areas for women which were actually not to do with the children but they were somehow part of a football within it".

This woman is proving herself exceedingly stupid and self serving.

Children were caught up in a debate about single sex spaces and sports which aren't about children?!!!

Wtf?

So let me get this straight. Young girls and teenage girls don't need and use single sex facilities. And issues with sports also don't impact on teenage girls.

Is that what she's saying????!!!!

Fuck off. And keeping fucking off some more.

This woman is proving herself to be an idiot and is trying to desperately make herself look better in the eyes of activists. She doesn't give a fuck about children. She's playing politics here for her own sake.

The issues around kids and single sex facilities are some of the most compelling!

I'm just staggered by this shit show.

I don't believe that it's impossible to track some of the former child patients from the Tavistock and get data on their current health. Or else use data from other countries who may have tracked their patient outcomes.
One of Dr Cass' recommendations was a retrospective study of former patients.

But it will be more data than we have now, gathered before and during treatment. We have to start somewhere. If this shows no short term benefit in these children and no significant difference to their level of distress, or significant levels of harm to bone density and cognition, then nothing else is needed.

The belief is that the drugs provide an immediate benefit to mental wellbeing by reducing puberty related distress. That's what's being tested. Do these kids get relief from their distress now, yes or no. Tavistock claimed they did but there's no paperwork to prove it.

Even if their distress goes from loads to none, is sterilising them the correct treatment? What are they treating exactly?

The belief is that the drugs provide an immediate benefit to mental wellbeing by reducing puberty related distress. That's what's being tested. Do these kids get relief from their distress now, yes or no. Tavistock claimed they did but there's no paperwork to prove it

If puberty blockers relieve puberty related distress what happens when the children stop taking them and go through puberty?

Doobeedoop "The belief is that the drugs provide an immediate benefit to mental wellbeing by reducing puberty related distress. That's what's being tested. Do these kids get relief from their distress now, yes or no. Tavistock claimed they did but there's no paperwork to prove it."

When you give kids the thing they really really want they will stop crying and be really really happy when they get it. This applies whether it's puberty blockers or a new bike. So a 2 year test period is highly likely to show relief from their distress, because they got what they really really wanted.

What it won't show is whether they're still happy 10 years later when they're incontinent with bone density issues.

Having watched the interview with Laura Kuennsberg I do think the interview, overall, was more positive than not. The media has jumped on to the 'weaponised' and 'extremist' comments, as you might expect - but the general tone was that far too many children are being led into 'transitioning' with false expectations - led primarily by social media and that most will desist.

The fact that gender clinics ( which she says have been around since the 1970s) used to encounter just a small number of children ( approx 50 per year) and these were all boys who would, left to grow and go through puberty, turn out to be gay, came across strongly.

The most pleasing thing of all for me was how Emilly Thornberry and Billy Bragg clearly felt on the back foot. How could they argue with anything she had said and still claim to have the interests of children at heart? Also, guest Jake Berry asked them if they would be prepared to let their own children be experimented on with PBs ( he would certainly not want that for his own children) - what could they say? And they knew it.

Billy Bragg being very predictable in his responses( " Anti trans activists" and so on)

I do t agree with the point that a trial can’t help generate data that provides useful information about which children - if any- woukd benefit from PBs.

If the trial tracked all children presenting for treatment for 5-10 years (longitudinal study). Outcomes for those who failed to meet the inclusion criteria for PBs due to variables such as autistic traits, SA, gender non conformity, sexuality, could still be recorded against the alternative types of treatment they accessed. This would likely produce useful data/ findings.

Of those who did meet the criteria, 50% couid be assigned to the condition of receiving PBs and the others to alternative therapy. Over 5 or 10 years we could gain some useful data. It is likely that the sample size would be very small, and do tests for statistical significance aren’t likely possible. But it would be something.

Which insurance company underwrites the trial?

Cass interview discussed on BBC Newscast, with Laura K. From 20:00 mins:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p0n189bq

In the Newscast LK talks about Cass saying that the majority of children will desist and LK says she cannot imagine anyone else in public life being that candid about the issue.

LK really hasn't been listening to what people who oppose puberty blockers have been saying for years - there are numerous people who have said most children would desist if left to go through puberty

I've been listening to Newscast for 10 years. They have generally done everything in their power to ignore any 'trans' related issue. This is them reverse ferreting. They have to pretend that no-one was telling them.

I haven't read the full thread so apologies if this has been pointed out already.

The most concerning point from the article is that Baroness Cass states that only a tiny minority of gender questioning children will have persistent gender dysphoria in adulthood, but also says that the clinical trial of puberty blockers is 'vital'. A trial which takes exposes gender questioning children to harmful treatment when Baroness Cass herself acknowledges that most of these children would simply grow out of their issues if left alone. The puberty blocker trial is grossly unethical. The safety of research participants is paramount, and always more important than any wider benefit to science or society from the research. My opinion of MHRA & the REC process is already at a very low ebb, if this trial goes it makes a total mockery of UK research ethics procedures.

@Brainworm, so, let’s do a little mental research planning exercise here.

In order to undertake a piece of research, you need to have a hypothesis - something that you can test. It is fundamental to every aspect of the study, from the way you choose your subjects, to the way you analyse your data. Also, you don’t just randomly choose a possible treatment - you have to have a reason for choosing it, otherwise we would be testing things like “eating ground up glass for breakfast,” or as a pp suggested “cutting off your big toe.”

Let’s look at the possible hypotheses that this study might be examining. We have pre-pubescent children who have expressed some degree of gender distress, being given puberty blockers, for a set period of time.

We know that the hypothesis cannot be “do puberty blockers stop children from going through puberty?” because the answer to this is already known: yes, puberty blockers stop children from going through puberty.

So the hypothesis must be based around what stopping children - particularly those who are going through gender distress - from going through puberty buys for those children.

One hypothesis is that stopping puberty for these children may give them a longer period of time in which they, and their carers (including therapists and doctors) can determine whether they are likely to be in the group of children who will not desist from their gender distress, and will therefore benefit from wrong-sex hormones.” However, we already know the answer to that, which is no, close to 100% of the Tavistock paediatric patients who took puberty blockers went on to wrong-sex hormones. The use of puberty blockers did not allow for a filtering of supposed “real trans” from “not-real trans” kids.

So, is the hypothesis “does stopping children from going through puberty alleviate their gender distress?” Unfortunately that hypothesis needs unpacking. In particular, why would we think that stopping a child’s puberty would alleviate their gender distress? What previous research points to the possibility that this would be the case? There really isn’t any. In fact, we already know from pre-puberty blocker research that just letting a child go through puberty will in and of itself alleviate gender distress. The brain development that happens in puberty is one of the biggest “cures” for gender distress.

In addition, if the proposal is “stopping children from going through puberty will alleviate gender distress,” what is the necessary follow-on hypothesis for the point at which children must stop taking puberty blockers and therefore go through puberty (or potentially not, if they are too old for that to happen naturally, which is a possibility)? Is the hypothesis that they will be mature enough by that point to cope with their gender distress? Well that cannot be the case, because we already know that children who have not gone through puberty will be absolutely no different, maturationally, than they were before they started the puberty blockers.

I cannot personally see any other possible, falsifiable reason for giving children puberty blockers if you are looking only at alleviating the problem of paediatric gender distress. And neither of those hold any water, from a purely research point of view. If someone can tell me of another possible hypothesis that this study might actually be testing, I’d be glad to hear it.

Now, if you have done any reading about the history of the use of puberty blockers in children with gender distress, you will know that there is one other reason to give children puberty blockers, and that is the reason they were originally given by the researchers who developed the Dutch Protocol: to keep little boys from developing irreversible adult male secondary sex characteristics - Adam’s Apple, enlarged chin, deep voice, body hair, adult-size penis - so that they would be more convincing as women when they are adults.

But I suspect selling that latter reason to the general public would be much harder.

I've just listened and that's not what she said. She said she couldn't imagine anyone in public life being this candid about the fact that most children will grow out of it a couple of years ago.

And then she said it shows how much the debate has moved on that she feels able to say this out loud. So it does seem like a tacit acknowledgement that people haven't been able to talk about this previously.

And yes there was much hand wringing about polarised debate, things being weaponised etc etc. but the aforementioned acknowledgement does feel like progress.

I would go so far as to say that it sounds like LK has had a bit of an epiphany on this issue.

But many people in public life were saying that the majority of children would desist after puberty. They were called bigots for doing so.

Even Mermaids, prior to , Susie Green were saying that.

It’s ridiculous. The question being asked of the child at the end of the two year period is this:

Compared to two years ago, are you happier, just as happy, or more unhappy now that you got the treatment you desperately wanted (and have been led to believe by everyone around you will make you happier), as well as getting 500 quid you spent at Currys, which was pretty awesome wasn’t it?

Science!

🤨

I assume she means someone who is influential enough to be invited onto a mainstream BBC politics show. Nobody in that position would have dared to say this on that platform a couple of years ago.

I doubt in LK''s bubble she has been aware of all the grassroots feminists orgs who have been saying the same thing for years, but I guess the point is they don't have the platform that someone like Hilary Cass has, who LK obviously views as the expert in this field.

I assume she means someone who is influential enough to be invited onto a mainstream BBC politics show.

Helen Joyce is probably influential enough but the BBC wouldn't invite her on shows because she might have said bigoted things such as the majority of children desist after puberty

Helen Joyce is very knowledgeable, but she is not a paediatrician, so I don't think LK would consider her to be an expert in the same way as Hilary Cass. I'm not defending LK by the way. It seems as if she has been asleep for a lot of this debate or thought it was all nasty culture war stuff, and now she has had a sudden realisation that actually there has been a bit of a scandal going on.

And I really like Helen Joyce and how forthright she is, but she is preaching to the converted. We have to be honest that HJ is not for the average BBC viewer who might be on the fence on this issue. I have a friend in this category who I have slowly been bringing around to the GC point of view. I shared a Susan Smith interview with her and she was outraged at what she heard, and it opened her eyes to how women's rights have been undermined in the last decade or so. But then she listened to a Helen Joyce one and it just got her back up. She said although she agreed with some of the things she said, she found her really unnecessarily harsh. I don't think she is, but I think that is how she is perceived by a lot of people "in the middle".

Exactly.

That PBs were introduced as a 'treatment' in an almost whimsical manner to assess whether it would help men to 'pass' has been buried.

Why would this be remotely beneficial to girls (even if you agree with the first idea, which retains massive ethical issues)?

It's so ridiculously shaky and the risk of harm to all involved is massive.

I had similar conversations about another very blunt speaker with friends. They declared she was a bigot. I prodded and asked what it was that they disagreed with and went through each issue raised. They agreed in principle with each point but found the language too blunt and very accurate without emotional softening.

I then had a similar conversation 12 months later and those friends still rejected the blunt and accurate language while still agreeing with what was said. Some people may never cope with an accurate discussion about what they support.

They are conditioned too deeply at the moment to use accurate language. It may be different in 10 years. But for now, some people need emotional softening because their instinct is to be kind and inclusive and accurate language strips that softer approach away.

It is why there is a need for a range of voices. As long as those avoiding blunt language don’t denigrate those who use the accurate terms, there shouldn’t be a problem.

the fact that most children will grow out of it

I saw this and I agree with you. I even think L K was trying to repeat quite strongly, and to effectively quite bravely highlight, this element of what Cass had said.

I saw in this article that the first two years are often experienced as a ‘honeymoon period’.

“Puberty Suppression for Pediatric Gender Dysphoria and the Child’s Right to an Open Future” - PMChttps://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11106199/

They need to be following the children for life. Not 2 years.
Life time studies have been done before. It would only be difficult if nhs numbers were changed...