Puberty Blocker Trial Paused

[CrocsNotDocs]

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

Good start. Now shut it down.

But none of this helps if the larger societal elephant in the room cannot be named, discussed, and addressed as part of this.

It is still making the mistake of focussing on individual distress without holding it within the larger, holistic context.

A 'how did we get here' exploration (like our thread on here)- full acknowledgement of how we got from tiny numbers of almost exclusively young boys suffering with gender distress to the current cohort. Then, what do we do with that understanding now that the a massive cultural shift and embedding has happened around GI?

The distress children feel will be ongoing as long as the cultural narrative is what it currently is. The culture bound nature of it will continue.

How do we separate managing the distress from the cultural element? How could research address that? Genuinely interested.

Exactly. And this trial will do nothing to prevent the illegal supply; anyone not accepted on it will just get the drugs elsewhere.

I think HC has been badly affected by the sob stories she has heard and wants to ‘be kind’, i don’t think it’s fear of TRAs, it’s misplaced sympathy.

Once infertility is acknowledged I can’t see how any trial of children is allowed to go ahead. 14 year olds MAY have retention of fertility after blockers and wrong sex hormones but :

• no one knows
• fertility will be definitely be reduced

It’s true that adults who have transitioned can sometimes have fertility return after they stop cross sex hormones (if they haven’t removed testicles or ovaries) but there’s been NO research on what happens if children are receive blockers and cross sex hormones at 14 plus.

I think this is it, I really do. Not the end obvs but things are accelerating. Tick tock, Telfer. (And yes, I know she’s not the head of the gender clinic at RCH, but it’s her baby).

Thanks for this.

Honestly, it just boils down to 'these kids want them and therefore we must find a way to give them to them'. Which Cass pretty much admitted this week with the whole 'otherwise they'll get them illegally ' nonsense.

And I'm not blaming the kids for wanting them. I'm blaming the adults who put this ridiculous idea in their heads to start with.

Thank you too!

Sorry, double post!

The Pathways study has many flaws but it isn’t a replication of the Tavistock/UCL study.
The Tavistock study project wasn’t a trial at all, it was an uncontrolled observational study where every participant received blockers and there was no comparison group.

Pathways, as it stands, is a randomised controlled trial with an immediate‑treatment group, a delayed‑treatment group, and a large external comparison cohort. It uses matched allocation to balance key characteristics across groups.

The Pathways trial was designed to be able to produce causal findings e.g. participants in the PB condition showed no improvement in anxiety or depression scores after a year, while the matched treatment group did show improvement over the same period. The Tavi study could only report what was observed with individual participants.

I agree that important data from people now in their 20s and 30s who took PBs as treatment for gender distress during puberty is valuable and should be collected where possible - but it can’t produce robust evidence such as that obtained through a trial.

I am not in favour of the Pathways trial, I think it is/ was unethical. My point was that it’s important that research is conducted to inform how best to treat young people with the condition or symptoms of gender distress.

Agreed, they need to start investigating the 'community' where they're getting the information on how to get their hands on illegal drugs.

Country Lines is a criminal organisation that uses vulnerable kids to move their 'product', the 'Trans' Lines who are feeding vulnerable kids to those who are supplying PB's need to be investigated in the same way.

Start at the top with the suppliers like Webberley.

I'm so pleased this has now been paused in England and was very surprised to see NI had paused it first!

I've not been following this closely but has anyone been actively chasing up all those who went through the Tavistock originally see their outcomes? Has there even been a national campaign asking them to get in contact that I've missed or have all those patients been a figment of our imaginations? Surely that is where you start first before pushing more vulnerable children through another half arsed trial.

I'm guessing the MRHA are extremists and are weaponising ethics then. Aren't they Hilary?

Sorry you don't recognise that 8 - 14 year olds might lack the capacity to consent and these drugs might have significant side effects to the point that it's deeply unethical to even trial these drugs.

Sorry that you don't recognise that parents getting blockers off the blackmarket will be doing so for prepubescent children - it won't be the children themselves getting the drugs cos they are so young. Sorry that you don't recognise these parents should be prosecuted for abusing their children rather than enabling them with a fucking trial.

I do await your reasoned response qualifying how the MHRA isn't weaponsing but all the people who have the exact same reasoning as the MHRA somehow are. I do look forward to your reasoned response as to why the people you've smeared about this trial for reasons which have been upheld by the MHRA are somehow wrong on single sex spaces and schools too when you've been shown up as wrong on puberty blockers.

Hey Hilary, how IS this working out for you on that fence which isn't in the middle at all but has still given you splinters whilst firmly supporting the abuse of children?

Honest to god, I find it astonishing that she grasped so many of the issues then got to a point where she seems to have given up on the evidence and ethics stuff and veered into woowoo land without realising she was doing it.

No we were never ideologically extreme Hilary. We just saw the inevitable outcomes and harms and went "No this doesn't meet the threshold for safe or ethical conduct and raises a whole pile of safeguarding issues which were already in the open due to the Tavistock scandal which you seem to have read, acknowledged, agreed with and then instantly forgotten"

I just can't fathom what's going on in this woman's head at all. She so very nearly grasped it. Then she floundered and bottled it.

Here come the menz…

Yes it’s adults pushing gender ideology. So painful to watch how badly people have done on this.

She posted a long threat on X.
https://x.com/hannahsbee/status/2024940290050535563?s=61&t=gKvvk-rWmOlYFGMZN8QVvQ

My point was that it’s important that research is conducted to inform how best to treat young people with the condition or symptoms of gender distress

Yes, but hormonal manipulation resulting in impaired fertility and sexual function in children needs to be removed as an option. Children cannot consent, it can never be ethical.

Anyone here or in the media or politics arguing 'but we need to know what the drugs do' or 'children will buy them illegally' is ignorant of basic medical ethics.

The safety of study participants is more important than any benefit to science or society.

That is fundamental to research ethics.

There are many areas of medicine we don't have much information on. That's not a reason to do badly designed, high risk studies on vulnerable groups.

I just can't fathom what's going on in this woman's head at all. She so very nearly grasped it. Then she floundered and bottled it.

It's a mystery. But I do think this is the beginning of the end for child transitioning, at least in this country. Very few people will want to actually break the law for their child by obtaining drugs illegally. In fact, an important component of parents who have Transhausen's Syndrome, in my view, is the validation they get from authority: the fact that proper medical people with important-sounding titles are taking their child's gender dysphoria seriously, prescribing them drugs and offering them surgery, while at the same time other authoritative figures (teachers, social workers and so on) are going along with the pretence that the child is the opposite sex by using opposite-sex pronouns, the child's new name, the child's desire to use the wrong changing room etc.

Once that stops, once you don't have the validation from either doctors or teachers, then the boast of "Look at me, I have a trans child" becomes much less attractive. Instead it just becomes a nuisance, I imagine. So I think soon if a child starts saying "Mum, I think I'm a girl," the parent will say, "No, you're not, Malcolm - now be a good boy and eat your dinner up." Just like the olden days.

The first step is to remove their access to the internet, and the next step is to stop schools / parents / Social workers / therapists from taking an affirmation approach to their mental illness.
As many have said on here, if a child was anorexic and believed they were obese so were starving themselves, no one in their right mind would affirm that delusion.

One of my issues with the trial is that how do you assess the mental health of a child when is having a treatment ‘delayed’ when they have been educated through messaging from support groups, well meaning adults and from peers in that group that if they are delayed in taking those chemicals they will not achieve their dream of changing sex and that their life will be harder for it.

If those children had never come into contact with anyone pushing the PB agenda, there wouldn’t be this confounding issue.

I have other issues with the trial of course but in structuring it in the current political environment it a
will be very hard to filter out the increase in anxiety of those in the delayed group. (Or filter out the euphoria of getting the drugs). I also question how many children will feel like they have to bias their answers and under report poor health and poor outcomes.

I get your point, but I would have thought treating anxiety and depression with anti depressants would be the way forward. Or even better, no screen time and a lot of exercise outdoors (as suggested by Dr P).

As said above, treating 'gender distress' with PB just boils down to 'because the kids want it'. Society has been suckered into believing that there really is something to treat here above and beyond normal teenage feelings. And that makes things worse for everyone.

What for the love of god IS the differential diagnosis of 'gender distress'?

How is it screening out all the other distresses or conditions or ailments or experiences?

What IS IT?

Have you seen what the Fail is reporting today?

It's the run up to the by-election so the Fail is almost certainly out on a smear campaign but none the less, this has been talked about before as potential policy, just not to this extent:

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-15579401/Green-Party-legalise-drugs-crack-cocaine-heroin-date-rape-chemical-GHB.html

Drugs including crack cocaine and heroin should be legalised for recreational use because they 'enhance human relationships', according to the Green Party's official policy.

Zack Polanski's party plans to create a 'direct partnership' between the Government and South American drug cartels to introduce a 'sustainable supply of coca and cocaine' to Britain, it adds.

Newly unearthed policy proposals show the Greens want to see cocaine drinks brought to the high street and Class A drugs including ecstasy and psychedelics sold at nightclubs and music festivals.

The policy adds that children 'starting in primary school' should be taught how to take drugs safely in Personal, Social and Health Education (PHSE) lessons to 'enhance the safety of all who use drugs'.

The plan to legalise drugs comes despite the policy proposing a simultaneous crackdown on alcohol and tobacco - including heaping more tax on beer and cigarettes to 'reflect the cost of harm caused by alcohol use on society'.

The internal Green policy, seen by the Mail, states that heroin and crack cocaine should be legalised because 'adults should be free to make informed decisions about their own drug consumption'.

So clearly there are a bunch of people within the greens who are at least proposing so pretty wild things with regards to drugs, even if it's not official policy.

I mean what could possibly go wrong with the proposal?

Can you imagine schools dealing with parents in Tunbridge Wells in the run up to that PHSE lesson?! "Today we are going to teach your kids how to shoot up and how to make a crack pipe safely".

It's absolutely hilarious and totally out of touch with reality. But I think it's probably a genuine conversation going on within the greens even if it's not official policy.

Look at this post. A clearly very very mentally unwell 17 year old boy is being coached and directly messaged on how to get drugs online

https://www.reddit.com/r/transgenderUK/comments/1r9l7m0/im_probably_not_gonna_survive_until_18/

it’s happening every single day. I can’t understand how it’s allowed to happen in plain sight

@Brainworm:

I am not in favour of the Pathways trial, I think it is/ was unethical. My point was that it’s important that research is conducted to inform how best to treat young people with the condition or symptoms of gender distress.

Thank you for that. I agree with you that good research should be conducted.

My point is and has always been that, from a research point of view, there is not, and has never been, a reason to propose that stopping puberty will alleviate gender distress.

We have historical evidence from all over the world about things that do - the most powerful one being, do nothing (ie, the “watchful waiting” approach that was the gold standard before the Dutch got their hands on things).

So why test this drug as a possible mental health treatment? The only reason it was ever given in the first place was to stop little boys from developing secondary sex characteristics so that they would be more convincing as women. Testing its effectiveness by itself for alleviating gender distress just smacks of trying to justify its use without referring to any of that messy gender reassignment surgery stuff.

Anyway, I think we’re on the same page.

I've been living as a girl since I was 10, and my body has been slowly mutating and my voice has been distorted and I've slowly got less beautiful and I get treated worse and worse by the public as years go by, theres no point in living if its just gonna keep on getting worse and worse and worse and worse. I need estrogen but it is completely out of reach

Estrogen isn't going to stop us all recognising him as a bloke. He's been sold a catastrophic lie.