Hilary Cass sent a document to every single MP and Peer, justifying and defending the puberty blockers trial

[SingleSexSpacesInSchools]

https://x.com/JamesEsses/status/2075512549248745744?s=20

There are ten images on X, sorry can't add them all here, or upload a file with it all in.

Poorer mental health outcomes according to Cass given she seems to be of the belief 'genuine' trans minors might benefit hence the recommendation for the trials to be held.

Lobotomies are still carried out. It is just rare - a last resort - and the name has changed.

What sort of poorer mental health outcomes? And where does it follow that they happen because sterilisation didn’t?

See the Cass report. Her systematic review pointed her in that direction as did other countries that did the same in Scandinavia.

Different surgery is carried out in incredibly rare circumstances. Lobotomy as it was is not, and remains banned in many countries.

I have read the Cass Review. Where does it say that poorer mental health outcomes result from not sterilising children, which is what you claimed?

You said that sterilising children is the “lesser of two evils” which means that if you don’t do it, a greater evil will prevail. Where does Cass say this?

And what mental health outcomes specifically does the review say will happen as a greater evil?

15.21 on page 184 there was moderate quality evidence that hormone treatment may improve psychological health in the short term.

<a class="break-all" href="https://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ukgwa/20250310143933/cass.independent-review.uk/home/publications/final-report" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ukgwa/20250310143933/cass.independent-review.uk/home/publications/final-report/

So it doesn’t say that withholding PBs causes harm then.

That’s it? That one paragraph is your justification that sterilising children is the lesser of two evils? That’s the best you can come up with to justify that sterilising children with PBs meets standards of care?

And this justifies a trial?

And people wonder why we want such questions answered. Once you pull on a thread things unravel faster than Dougal’s jumper.

Puberty blockers don't sterilise humans. Your claim was about medications that may cause sterilisation & how they were justified.

The studies the Cass report refers to show no change in mental health from puberty blockers. The benefit is no deterioration in mental health so it stabilises mental health & buys time to make a decision. The mental health of adolescents with gender dysphoria often deteriorates significantly during puberty as their bodies develop in ways that conflict with their gender identity. Therefore, the absence of mental health deterioration during pubertal suppression is viewed as a benefit.

Puberty blockers don't sterilise humans. Your claim was about medications that may cause sterilisation & how they were justified.

Why do we keep having to go over the same undeniable facts? If puberty blockers are given to boys at Tanner stage 2, and they never stop them and allow puberty to resume, they don’t make sperm and are therefore sterile. That’s what happens now to children around the world and that’s what this trial is proposing to do. This Is incontrovertible.

The studies the Cass report refers to show no change in mental health from puberty blockers. The benefit is no deterioration in mental health so it stabilises mental health & buys time to make a decision

And has been established multiple times, on previous occasions, as ANOTHER fact we have to revisit, the children also received mental health support in both groups, and a third got worse in that particular trial. So it cannot be established that puberty blockers were the cause of “no deterioration”.

And even if it were true, why is “no deterioration” in mental health a “lesser of two evils” requiring puberty blockers when “no deterioration in mental health” is the sort of outcome that is obtained from the most established of mental health treatments, therapy and support?

It’s all so incredibly weak. It’s remarkable that people have the audacity to stand behind such weak concepts without cringing with embarrassment.

The bottom line is people like you want to puberty block children. You need to puberty block them because you need them to grow up and claim to be trans. You live vicariously through these children and the harms are inconsequential to you.

Short-term psychological improvement isn't the least-worst outcome when the treatment comes with increased risks of learning difficulties, fertility problems, and osteoporosis.

The bottom line is people like you want to puberty block children. You need to puberty block them because you need them to grow up and claim to be trans. You live vicariously through these children and the harms are inconsequential to you.

It's worth remembering why "trans children" were invented in the first place.

It's already been mentioned that the reason for the original Dutch experiment on children was because they hypothesised that the reason for poor mental health outcomes in adult male transsexuals was because they didn't "pass". They decided to create transsexuals who passed better as adults by selecting some children who would possibly grow up to be transsexuals, and prevent them going through puberty to see if they did pass better and if they had better mental health as a result.

There's also another reason for the creation of the idea of trans children. Since time immemorial, it's been known that men who indulge in crossdressing, and sometimes progress to transsexualism, are doing this for reasons of sexual gratification. These men want trans children to exist, since, as one of them (Autumn Sandeen) put it:

“I’ve always said there are two groups that are going to make change in transgender legislation and the “gender identity and expression” related language in legislation. It’s going to be trans youth because they take, you know, they demystify it and take the sex right out of the trans experience.”

https://mirandayardley.com/en/a-full-life-uninterrupted-by-transition/

These men see "trans children" as a sort of human shield. The implication is that because it's not a sexual thing for children, nor is it for these male adults. Which is obviously an outright lie, yet so many people seem to have fallen for it.

None of this is really about children. It's all about adult male transsexuals.

And impaired sexual function. Creating a cohort of adults without normal sexual function when it is well known that transsexualism is driven by sexual urges (either homosexuality or AGP in heterosexuals).

But maybe that's the intention. Eventually there will be no more transsexuals actually driven by sex if they've all been chemically castrated as children. Just infertile adults with the brains of children and modified bodies and no interest in sex. Which is probably just as well, as most people like to know the actual sex of their sexual partners, and don't want to be deceived by someone who appears to be one sex but turns out to be the other.

Another thing that baffles me is the lack of a large-scale study on trans adults. It would seem to me that, long before butchering kids' bodies in its name, one would want to study the trans condition as deeply and widely as possible through the eyes of the many, many adults out there who have transitioned, are transitioning, plan to transition, or wish to transition. There are so many things to ask them and to study! Just a few off the top of my mind:

• Do they all feel like they have an inner gender identity? If so, how does it manifest for them? If not, why did they (wish to) transition?
• What do they mean by "transitioning"? From what to what?
• Why do they seek body modifications, whether through hormones and/or surgeries? Is it for better passing (social impact)? Is it for a better recognition of themselves in the mirror (personal impact)? Something else?
• Were they aware of the impact of the various aspects of transitioning on sexual functions and interactions? How do they deal with them after transitioning?
• Did they consider alternative ways to deal with their condition? Would they have wanted access to other possible treatments?

And so on and so forth. There are so many aspects to explore to actually understand this condition known as "gender incongruence", and the consequences of that one pathway to alleviate it. But no, apparently, it's better to stagger in the dark, and to mess up children in the vague hope that somehow it will turn out to be a good thing in the end. This is not proper science, not even close.

Anyone who is still wondering if blockers can cause sterility and inorgasmia - do this simple two minute test to find out for sure:

Type 'Susie green laughing' on YouTube.

You can watch the former head of the UK's largest trans charity admit that her child 'never went through puberty properly' (her exact words) because he took blockers.

His penis never grew so the surgeons removed part of his colon instead to form a 'neovagina' for him. He's permanently sterile. He'll never experience orgasm.

Jazz Jennings is another victim of puberty blockers. He famously asked on tv if 'having an orgasm is like sneezing'.

Children have no idea what they are giving up when they take blockers.

Having read her letter in full, this seems to be the heart of her experiment (see also screenshots below):

• 226 children will have their puberty stopped for a fixed period. Some for one year, some for two.
• during that time, they'll have lots of tests to see how badly and quickly if their cognitive function declines
• they'll stop the puberty blockers after the time period and will resume normal puberty
• many years later, we'll find out if this 1 or 2 year puberty blocking permanently impacted their bone density and brain development, or if both of those things catch up

But Hilary.....

• what about the ones that decide to go onto cross-sex hormones?
• will you stop recording their long-term health and take them out of your data set?
• if you keep them in, how will you separate out the impact of your experiment from the impact of the cross-sex hormones that they go on to take?

She's living in cloud cuckoo land if she thinks that she'll have a majority that don't go on to take cross-sex hormones. The whole point of why these children want their puberty blocked is so that they don't develop secondary sexual characteristics commensurate with their sex, because they have been taught to believe this will make them happier. The myth that they can go through opposite-sex puberty by taking cross-sex hormones hasn't gone away. They'll be left believing that their inevitable cognitive decline will sort itself out with the magic of cross-sex hormones because that is the lie that they are hearing constantly from TRAs.

This tiny little trial is either going to have a massive drop-out rate for long-term follow-up (if participants are told that their data can't stay in it if they go on to take cross-sex hormones) or it's going to find itself in a position where it has to recognise that there is no way to isolate the impact of 2 years of PBs from cross-sex hormone use. The latter position seems remarkably similar to the data linkage study..... which has 9000 records instead of 226. Not all 9000 had PBs but thankfully, as poor as the records are, we do know how many did - and crucially who did (hence the change in law re GRCs and anonymity specifically for this study). I can't remember the exact figure but I think it was around 2,300 who had PBs. Hannah Barnes wrote about it.

What's missing in the data linkage study is a record of a) bone density, brain maturity and mental health at the start of treatment, regardless of whether that treatment included PBs, and b) a front row seat on watching the impact on bones and the brain during the PB treatment period. But given it's 9000 people, that really doesn't matter. They can simply compare both bone density and brain development to the general population. Likewise with mental health outcomes.

There is no justification for this trial to go ahead. We don't need 226 more children harmed just to get the real-time data experience. There's plenty of data out there already.

They can simply compare both bone density and brain development to the general population. Likewise with mental health outcomes.

The data linkage study can't do this at all. It's looking at records that are held on people who went to the Tavistock, it's not calling them up and asking them to do brain scans and bone density tests.

Thank you @BonfireLady. I do really, really understand the desire for and appeal of a shiny, shiny, new, perfectly controlled study. I am a (retired) human behavioural researcher, I know what it’s like to look at all the shitty studies in your area and say, ffs, let’s just get one damn clean set of data.

But I can also confidently say that as soon as your study leaves the paper the proposal is written on, and hits the real world, you had better be prepared for real world issues. You either need to explicitly control for them ahead of time (as you point out, the PB study does not) or you need to learn how to do the type of research that can pull out information from noisy data (like the data that already exists from the Tavistock etc). The latter is harder, but people do that sort of research all the time, because sometimes that’s the only data you can get.

The people who wrote the PB trial, as you have laid out, do not seem to realise that humans are going to human. They have not written a study that is either remotely rigorous enough, or alternatively remotely flexible enough to accommodate that.

They also have not, as many PPs have said, identified their actual, falsifiable hypotheses. If you cannot say what gender identity is, or name precisely what improvement looks like - is it learning to live with their sexed body? Is it becoming more and more eager to surgically alter their sexed body? If it’s anything to do with improvement or maintenance of mental health, why PBs and not SSRIs? - then you do not actually have a rigorous study. Even the most loosey goosey survey study needs to have clear and falsifiable hypotheses - this study does not.

We know that if we don't intervene the levels of desistance are extraordinarily high.

But the data linkage study can do lots of things.

How many people are still on CSH.
How many have had mastectomy.
How many have had ongoing mental health problems/crises/admissions.
How many have needed therapy for osteoporosis.
How many have pelvic floor problems (94% likely)
And so on, and so on.

And as @BonfireLady points out, with 3000 possible participants, you can then look at population data for your control for things like typical bone density.

(edit to change number of participants!)

Well, that’s another huge concern. They also have to show benefits relative to the risks

Putting aside the problems of a clinical trial focused on a contested diagnosis that cannot be separated from a questionable ideology. Or how more definitive, non ideological clinical trials have resulted in many scandals where data was misrepresented or cherry picked to ensure a preferred outcome.

Here we have a trial that will also rely on self reported impacts. Yes, there will be the collection of hard physical data but @Tottenhamhotflushes mentioned that one benefit trading off the risks is improved mental health. What happens if both child and parents insist that mental health has been improved? And yet negative physical effects don’t surface or become evident until much later?

There is a huge risk of desirability bias for both the children and parents. What parent will want to admit they were wrong to consent to their child being harmed? Plus, when a 12 year old is asked "do you feel happier now", does no one think their answer is not going to be distorted by the enormous asymmetry in power and competence between adults and children? Children’s responses to adult interventions is complex and complicated. It is never simply question-answer.

This trial feels like another tainted blood scandal all over again where children were recruited ‘for the greater good’ and the life damaging and life limiting impacts will only come to light in 20 or 30 years time. And unfortunately, this trial will do nothing to abate the malevolent or damaged individuals grooming young people online. Why would it? They are not interested in evidence.

Fair point, you're right.

Personally, if I had received treatment that could have impacted my brain development and my bone density I'd want to know and would volunteer myself to be tested for both.

Even without additional tests, I would imagine there would be markers in the patients' adult gender service records that would demonstrate how their bone density and cognitive/executive function compare to the average population. At the very least, the data should be made available so that any valuable information can be qualified and extracted from it.

You basically want to conduct a fishing exercise in people's personal medical data....what happened to ethical considerations? You have to be specific in advance about what you are looking for and why.

And if they are having mental health problems but you don't know whether they had mental health issues as children because the Tavistock didn't record it, then what?

What's your interest in this pb experiment on children noble? You seem remarkably insistent that it's a good thing.
I thought from another thread that you were a teacher in a school? Or am I mistaken?