Puberty Blocker Trial Paused

[CrocsNotDocs]

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/gift/e0a6d8e8751dbca8

Good start. Now shut it down.

They arrested the gender confused man who hack FSU, he claimed he isn't with Bash Back, but hopefully the investigation into him has led the authorities to others involved in this demented criminal organisation, so more arrests might be made very soon.

Yes - all this twee talk about pausing implies that the children are just too fragile to go through puberty right now, but the goal is castration.

It surely wouldn't take much detective work to establish the identities of those behind BB?

I sincerely hope that hacking the FSU / Lord Young is the very definition of fuck around find out.

The cohort of children and young people I work with are unlikely to be fine if their ‘gender distress’ is ignored or dismissed.

Those I work with are vulnerable and mentally unwell. Some believe or hope that their problem can be explained and fixed via ‘gender affirming care’. Most parents who are supportive of this idea come from a place of wishing that this is the solution and that soon their child will be well.

I am already seeing a decline in ‘the gender narrative’ coming through my clinic doors but I am not seeing a decline in numbers of unwell children and young people.

Far more investment and joined up research is needed to better understand why so many young people are struggling.

If/when the ‘gender madness’ abates, there will likely be different presentations and manifestations but the same old problems sitting underneath.

As many posters have said the medical issues have been well known for ages so why are they only being used now to question Streeting's Puberty Blockers trial?

My hope is that Wes Streeting totally underestimated the unpopularity of the Puberty Blocker trial with voters and has (working behind the scenes with MHRA) concocted a "we're listening to the science" way to stop the trial that doesn't sound like a U-Turn.

Fingers crossed that his ultimate plan is now to stop the trial.

Have just finished listening to an article on Times radio, where the two interviewees were Professor David Bell and a GP Alice ?Hodkinson? - both against the trial taking place.

It made a change to hear an interviewer give the interviewees room to answer properly; indeed it kicked off with the interviewer, Nick Wallis, asking Prof Bell to give a brief description to the listeners of what the trial was about, the background, how we got to where we are now. When Prof Bell stopped speaking, Wallis sounded totally aghast.

Any Times Radio listeners who came into the subject cold will now be well-briefed and - as Wallis was - totally aghast that this has happened.

Nick Wallis has the bit between his teeth with this - I think he’s identified his next “post office scandal.” More power to him, frankly - he seems to be a pretty determined, old-school journalist - he is willing to put in the elbow grease.

I didnt appreciate my fertility until I was 30 and found out I couldnt have children.

How can anyone under the age of 18, a child, grasp what they are giving up.

I’m curious - has anyone in the UK properly started looking at the effect of smartphones (etc) on youth mental health? I know Jonathan Haidt in the US is pulling the numbers and data (and digging into the motivations of the tech designers) but is anyone looking at that here?

I'm of the opinion, and the stats are slowly coming in to back this up, that it's all our mental health, not just youths this is affecting.

Always being "on" leaves us always wired for threat, we never feel safe and secure because any second a news alert says that there has been a terrorist attack, a text message saying something has happened, an email your hind brain worries about being unresolved.

We were not built for this. It's screwing with us on a very core level.

Unfortunately we have built the world in a way where it is near impossible to not have a smart phone and still function - you can barely use a car park or eat in a restaurant without one.

What you can do is turn off ALL the notifications, remove every single piece of social media and news, and have a dedicated period where you go and look at your texts, your emails or whatever if you need to - and preferably on a desktop computer in a specific room.

Putting your smartphone on a shelf, a hardish to get to one, maybe the kitchen, so you don't just pick it up every time you have a mental itch of discomfort, can do huge things for underlying stress levels as well.

You can do all of those things.......I do, and have never had a phone; but when you do have a phone your perception of what you can and can't do changes, and you are programmed to start thinking that having everything instantly to hand, without any personal effort, is somehow 'easier'. People lose their ability to be alone and also the necessity of relying on their own resources.

I do have a desk top computer, but no lap-top - so when I go away, or on holiday I am totally screen free...which is so enjoyable. You can really be in the moment and enjoy where you are.

There are some PhD/ small scale studies, nothing large scale that I am aware of.

There are some interesting hypotheses about the increasing complexity of the social worlds that young people live in (linked to social media and online behaviour) intersecting with increased prevalence of ‘autism’. Here, they are suggesting that clinical significance of symptoms wouldn’t previously have been reached in ‘simpler times’. So autism isn’t increasing, nor are we getting better at spotting it, it’s more a case of functioning within ‘normal’ levels is no longer sufficient.

I raise this because we need to think about the level of challenge our young people have to navigate these days, the different ways (functional and dysfunctional) they navigate this, and the tendency for some clinicians/ adults to readily locate the issues as arising within the young people rather than from the contexts they are operating within.

Oh this is fascinating, and also matches some of the snippets I’ve been piecing together from bits and bobs on the interwebs plus anecdata from young people around me.

If I had the energy (and was preparing lose a few more marbles) I’d be all over another PhD looking at this.

Some children / young people believe that they could navigate this complexity ‘as a boy’ or ‘as a girl’. This type of thinking is attractive because it provides a simple (one factor) solution that is readily at hand. They can find it very difficult letting go of this certainty, or entertaining letting go of it, and being open to exploring complexity…..when the complexity of life is what they are trying to get away from.

@Brainworm / others this is a good repository of the studies I believe https://www.anxiousgeneration.com/research/collaborative-review-docs

and this wider recent article by Cal Newport is well evidenced as well https://calnewport.com/whats-worrying-jonathan-haidt-now/

Thank you @SingleSexSpacesInSchools

Thank goodness, the MHRA doing their job. There’s a great bunch of scientists working there.

For anyone who isn’t clear (the media doesn’t do a good job of reporting it) you need approval from two bodies to get Clinical Trial Authorisation. One is the ethics committee (REC) approval, and the other is authorisation from the MHRA. The MHRA is the ultimate body which decides whether a medicine can be licensed in the UK on the basis of safety, efficacy and quality (NICE decides whether the NHS will pay for it in an entirely different assessment). It is the U.K. equivalent of the FDA in the USA, but by contrast to FDA it is very hands off in terms of setting social policy - MHRA is purely focused on safety, efficacy and quality and whether the potential benefit of the drug (or trial) outweighs the risk.

it sounds like the MHRA have recently been reviewing the clinical trial application, which is the dossier that KCL will have submitted to them in order to get authorisation to run the trial. It is very normal for clinical trials to be paused while MHRA’s concerns are addressed. Less normal for the concerns to be so fundamental to the study design at this stage of the game.

In the normal scheme of things, if you’re going to be running a clinical trial that could be problematic, you would request a scientific advice meeting with MHRA before you finalised your protocol. All these points would be thrashed out well in advance of the expensive business of preparing dossiers for them and the ethics committee (who will have to reapprove any amended protocol).

Now, in recent years, MHRA clinical trial unit have had a backlog of meeting requests and many study sponsors have just said fuck it, submit the clinical trial application anyway and argue the toss during the review period. Higher risk though, as KCL is finding out.

Mumsnet do a kids phone. Or I dreamt they did

The Other Phone. At the top of this page, for me at least.

There are some researchers/ medical academics whose whole career is based on publishing papers, becoming influential, well known in the right circles and so on. I have occasionally wondered if, for a tiny minority of these people, the outcomes for the trial subjects become less of a priority than they should.

I'm curious about the culture bound aspects of "gender distress". Particularly whether the 90-95% desistance rate for children who go through puberty is/would still be true today given how gender identity beliefs have spread and become so entrenched in the culture compared to the period of the original literature on desistance.

Pure speculation, but I wouldn't have been surprised if fewer children desist now after going through puberty simply because of the momentum and traction gender identity has gained in our culture. Possibly this is one reason non-binary identities have increased. Maybe medically transitioning seems less necessary when adopting a non-binary identity means a distressed young person can hold onto their trans identity without the physical toll of a medical transition (although I realise there are some with non-binary identities who do want hormones/surgeries to alter their bodies to be "neutral", although this usually seems to mean not female).

It's interesting that you're seeing just as many distressed children but fewer "gender distressed" children at your clinic.

I think it was Sarah Mittermaier who writes the Genderhacked substack who described gender identity as an idiom of distress. I wonder what new idioms or forms of distress will take its place.

What happens next after the MHRA halts puberty blockers trial? Hannah Barnes

www.thetimes.com/article/3f2d8165-2fce-422b-a496-aae118fc49b2?shareToken=be8dfeab33a2bbda3e2681baaa88e91c

i was just thinking this yesterday.

Later diagnoses of autism and ADHD following difficulties at school are to a point subjective (I’m not talking about more profound autism, I’ve taught children in send for 20 years) as the context of the world the child is growing up in can make life more or less challenging.

At the same time, timely targeted support is vital. The younger a child receives correct interventions, the better they do.

Found this horrifying