Puberty Blocker Trial Paused

[CrocsNotDocs]

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

Good start. Now shut it down.

The point at which they were discussing the children being rendered infertile and harvesting gametes should have been the point at which this nonsense was brought to a halt. It’s completely unethical. Children cannot consent to sterilisation.

God that's awful. It's like reading about a drug addict pleading for drugs.

I imagine this is the kind of thing Cass was persuaded by.

Apparently that's 'too difficult' - largely because the adult gender clinics are trying to avoid scrutiny and refuse to cooperate. But somehow a new trial (which is remarkably similar to the previous trial the Tavistock ran) will magically be able to follow up their participants longterm, despite it being impossible to find out anything about the previous Tavistock participants.

Let's give a would be addict drugs because they're mentally ill.

If that persuaded Hilary then I despair.

Not sure if this is old news but the petitions UK website now has a date for parliamentary debate for the puberty blocker petition:

9th March 2026

Agree.

I can't fathom how she can see this trial as 'essential otherwise they will get their drugs elsewhere' unless she has been sucked into this.

Well, I'm struggling to fathom Cass at all tbh.

Thank you, that is what I thought. Schrodinger's patients that simultaneously do and don't exist. But why hasn't there been a national campaign asking for those patients to step forward, bypassing the clinics themselves. Surely a first hand experience (albeit without medical or scientific data) to see a general outcome is better than experimenting on new bodies. But maybe I'm just too dumb to understand.

Even should this 'trial' go ahead but with no children younger than 14 - everyone involved will now know for certain that they are under the microscope.

There was a big campaign by TRAs to get people who were being treated in adult clinics (which presumably would have included some ex-Tavistock patients) to preemptively refuse to participate in a data collection exercise.

Their argument was “the data would be weaponised against them.” This was the same argument that was used by Olsen-Kennedy in the US when she blocked publication of a huge study that showed extremely unfavourable results for so-called “gender affirming care.”

Half of the trial participants were due to wait a year before they were given PBs so would be 15 years old.

Hope it's cancelled entirely.

What is the point of starting at 14 years old? Most girls have already gone through puberty by that age.

Not that I want them have these drugs, but the outcomes and harms would possibly be reduced if they started at a later age.

It might make it seem less harmful than it really is to these children.

She's as susceptible as anyone to the pressures of ideological group think.

Yes, maybe she needs to remind f herself if the core principle. “First do no harm”.

If your trial anticipates sterilisation, bone density losses, cognitive impairment etc then it should have been a non starter.

Why on earth they would allow children to stay in the program for up to 12 months if they start seeing bone density or cognitive impairment I can’t fathom.

Surely, the minute ANY of those issues start that child should be out of the program - once those drugs start affecting bone density, it’s not going to get any better unless they stop taking the drugs. As this is a known and worryingly common side effect (see the Lupron class action in America) it should be a major red flag.

But then the whole ‘study’ is a giant red flag so I guess that level of medical sanity is too much to ask for.

Lupron puberty blockers have harmed vast numbers of people in America. Surely the study designers should have looked at these first?

Quite, though the parents and activists pushing this will be very displeased indeed. Maybe now the real reasons for blocking puberty will come to public consciousness.

Yet now they'll probably be susceptible to the claims of increased suicide ideation made by the 'responsible adults' around them.

This is a very good point. I think any ‘trans kid’ should be a child protection issue.

Phillipson’s disastrous school guidelines allowing kids to be transed at school gives zero protection from activist teachers or transhausen parents. We know that these people exist and have seen first hand how unhinged and out of touch with reality they are. Kids that are with these adults and being guided by them don’t stand a chance.

Who is the trial sponsor?

This is exactly what trans Reddit are bothered about from the opposite angle. They see less dense bones as a feature, not a bug.

Trans Reddit quote
“Worrying to me is the suggestion that participants will basically have to have started puberty (14 yo minimum) and with any decrease in bone density or a "serious" reduction in height velocity could be removed from the trial. This would likely be most of the MtF participants, because AMAB have naturally higher bone density and growth rate/height during puberty.”

Rather than start at 14 they should drop it entirely.

Eho on earth in good conscience even discussed 8 plus. Streeting? Wth

Unconscionable.

I think we are on the same page. If you don’t work in the field, I expect we might look at it from different perspectives- but I think there is strength to this. You benefiting from balance that comes with distance and me from balance that comes with proximity.

I’ve worked with 100s of children who have made sense of their distress as arising in full or in part from ‘gender incongruence’. Of these, there a 2 boys who stood out as their issues could not be made sense of in the same way as the 100s of others. Both were very young when they started expressing distress at being boys, neither were socially transitioned up until their teens, and whilst both gay or likely to be gay, they weren’t concerned about their sexuality. I am not saying that these boys are evidence of a stand alone condition, but it does give me pause for thought about one existing. If a specific condition does exist, I imagine it to be very rare and not to account for 99% of what is currently labelled ‘gender distress’ or ‘gender incongruence’. I interpret Cass as having concluded the same, but may be misinterpreting her work because of my own.

Some clinical trials are conducted with fewer than 50 participants worldwide. I can imagine something akin to this to be possible for PBs - but only once we have established if there is a specific condition and how we would identify those with the rare condition from those whose symptoms are often misunderstood as being linked to the condition (diagnostic overshadowing).

Kings College London - basically the research group that’s carrying out the study.

Yes, once the social credit has disappeared to be replaced with concern and suspicion the attraction will soon wear off.

It would be interesting to know which clinicians are involved and why they were comfortable with being involved.

But even if there is such a condition (in which non-abused children develop a fixed belief that they are or should be the other sex) somebody would still have to make an argument about why it was plausible that giving them puberty blockers would be an appropriate treatment. We seem (heave!) to have reached the point where the law accepts that humans cannot change sex, and that will apply to humans with the newly-tightly-diagnosed condition, too. They won't be an exception to the argument that men can't be in women's spaces, sports, etc. So any boys with the condition are in for a very tough time, but since there isn't a future where they grow up to be women, puberty blockers would seem to be a long way down the list of possible treatments to trial. Indeed it has the big disadvantage that if they are someday cured of their condition, they will be worse off, rather than better, than if nothing had been done.

Has anyone, anywhere, ever, made any serious attempt to develop psychotherapeutic interventions for these children? If they have I haven't heard about it, and I feel that avenue should be explored extremely thoroughly before anyone even considers giving these children life-altering drugs.

I think the elephant in the room is the lack of clarity about good and poor outcomes in terms of treatment for ‘gender incongruence’. For me:

Good: Patient fully reconciles their sense of self with their sexed body and their sex. They have no symptoms of gender related distress.

Moderate: Patient is accepting of their sexed body and their sex. Some symptoms of gender related distress remain but below clinically relevant thresholds.

Poor: Patient’s symptoms remain clinically significant and in need of physical intervention.