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.

The data linkage trial might also give us information about how many children/now adults are still taking cross sex hormones. Depending on the quality of the data, it could be very valuable information.

It is reassuring to know that it's not just me, but it's annoying for both of us now. Grrrr.

The data linkage trial might also give us information about how many children/now adults are still taking cross sex hormones. Depending on the quality of the data, it could be very valuable information.

Agreed. Just tracing & following these former Tavistock patients can give very valuable information. Are they still alive? Are they still taking CSH? Are they happy? If they just traced every patient & asked those three questions there would be a mountain of valuable data.

They can't contact them - for that, they would need prior consent. My understanding is that they could have access (obviously anonymised) to their records - it would be theoretically possible to know if they are on cross sex hormones, if they are on other prescription drugs... I don't know how good NHS records are. From this point of view I agree with @noblegiraffe, the quality of the data won't be great. Still, as @AmaryllisNightAndDay said, it's worth having the linkage study done before the puberty blocker study, as it can inform the trial design, the consent form, even the opportunity of the trial, if the data are of relative good quality.

What I’m curious about, is how Baroness Cass can be so certain that encouraging them to think more flexibly about their identity is rarely successful, regardless of what their natural trajectory would have been … if there’s no data on this? No clinical trial has been conducted. Is it okay to strongly assert some claims on little evidence but not others, if so why?

For me, her doubling down is most likely professional ego. She put it in report, ergo it ought to be done. Suggestions of not doing it, is felt as a professional slap in the face. Even the most intelligent of people can be driven by emotion.

encouraging them to think more flexibly about their identity is rarely successful, regardless of what their natural trajectory would have been

This sounds like one of the TRA assertions which is always stated without any evidence, that someone's "gender identity" can't be changed, which is why changing the body to "match" the "gender identity" is favoured over psychotherapy to help the person accept their body as it is.

But in this case, the child's gender identity has been imposed on the child by the parents, making it an example of conversion therapy by the parents. And if it has already been externally imposed on the child, surely the reverse process is also possible.

Very true. Also, even the many of the most intelligent people can be manipulated by an appeal to their emotions.

I'm increasingly wondering if all the "Jo" children (i.e. the "real" children that Jo represents) are actually autogynophilic males who have shared their sob stories of when they were younger during the research that she did,, with the (self-described) framing that they truly believed themselves to be the opposite sex from a very young age.

If the child is fictitious then perhaps the parents are too. Perhaps that's why Baroness Cass wasn't concerned about multiple examples of abusive parents. Perhaps instead she's met multiple examples of autogynophilic males who have successfully persuaded her that they never knew themselves as anything other than a girl..... and she decided that the easiest way to make that make sense to the MPs was to create a single persona who had grown up knowing "she" was female, regardless of how that happened..It certainly explains the plot holes regarding how this child (who apparently represents many children) became so convinced, yet the situation that the child was in wasn't seen as concerning by any adults.

Edited for clarity.

There are definitely kids turning up at secondary who have been treated as the opposite sex all through primary.

@BonfireLady, this was posted on another thread:

Thingybob · Yesterday 13:38
There is an interview with A WellBN mum on the latest Whats the Trans podcast, Episode 159 at just over an hour in. I found the story of the true believer mum and her child incredibly sad and it does highlight what an impossible task it will be trying to help these families.

The timeline as I understand it from the interview.
Mum realised her son was trans at between 18 and 24 months old.

This child was absolutely one of the children that would kill themselves if they didn't get the necessary treatment.

It is not clear when he was socially transitioned but he had an awful time in and out of school due to 'transphobia' and 'hate crime' and never completed a full year.

The mother did what she had to do to save her child, including remortgaging her house for £40K, by taking them to GenderGP when the child was around 10.

They were put on PB's and then CSH a year or so later.

Around spring 2024 when access to PBs was getting difficult she briefly went with Anne Health.
She transferred to WellBN later in 2024 and Dr Sam Hall took over the prescribing of PB's and CSHs. Treatment that was life saving and the child briefly thrived.

In Spring 2025 the stress caused by the investigation of WellBN resulted in the child developing Anorexia.

The child is currently still getting PB's and CSHs but has dropped out of school and has spent the last 15 months in their bedroom becoming emaciated. The child has recently gained weight but scans have confirmed osteoporosis and they are now unable to weight-bear.

The child is still 16 months away from their 18th birthday and the mother doesn't know how her child will survive. She wonders if she will soon be arranging a party or a funeral.

I think the MPs are only too relieved to drop any highly worrying issues and just leave it to her.

I think this ‘fictional’ child should not be dropped. We know parents do this to young children not just from what @noblegiraffe has just said, or the odd news report or experience, but also from Dr Azeem Hakeem formerly at The Tavistock and Portman.

Doctors and teachers should be asked to look out for it, not endorse it.

@TwoLoonsAndASproutnot quote posting due to length but Christ on a bike to that WellBN parent.

In a way though it just shows the waters we are all swimming in. That parent will have been supported by schools, MH services, social workers, gps, friends and family to do this.

Parents who don’t want to walk this path with gender distressed children have to fight against all of it. They are isolated and their stories rarely told. The agencies above treat them as bigots.

It is a mess. In such waters it’s hardly a surprise that the PB trial is being waved through.

I wish I believed that there would be consequences for these people, but I don’t think there will be. I hope someday it is clear that transiting kids is a massive medical scandal but I expect it to be met with a “oops” and a shrug

How do you realise your child is trans between 18 months and 24 months? And think they'll hurt themselves if you don't do something? This is madness. This is what happens when no one says anything. I bet lots of people around that mother were whispering about how strange it was but never did anything. It's child abuse.

I sometimes think people talking about children at this age haven't had any experience with them as any sane person who has would know that making such a massive change for them is ridiculous. They can't even talk in sentences at that age. They're in nappies.

They can't contact them - for that, they would need prior consent.

They don't need prior consent. This is NHS data on NHS patients. The government passed a law (OK an SI) to allow the follow up of the data linkage study without obtaining patient consent.

The data linkage study can only look at patient data that has already been collected. The PP suggested tracing each patient and asking them if they were happy/alive/on hormones. This is not allowed. If they don’t already know the answers to those questions they cannot find out.

We know that the adult gender clinics simply lost a lot of patients with no record as to why, and they also did not record whether patients were considering detransitioning or even had detransitioned. So we probably don’t have data on hormones (can be obtained privately) or relative happiness.

This is NHS data. Of course they can find out whether patients are still alive & what medication they are currently being prescribed on the NHS. If there were a possibility that PBs caused cancer long term they would trace every single patient.

What I mean is they can't contact them with a new questionnaire (e.g. about the current quality of life). That's my understanding on how clinical trials work, from an adjacent profession, but I'm happy to be corrected.

yes, we should be able to tell if they are still alive. No, we probably won’t be able to tell if they are happy. We could probably tell if they are on antidepressants but that’s not the same thing.

We know that lots of people have private prescriptions for hormones so a lack of NHS prescription doesn’t automatically mean that they are not on hormones. You’d hope this would be recorded somewhere on the NHS but there’s certainly no guarantee.

I think that you missed your opportunity to rebut this

If there were a possibility that PBs caused cancer long term they would trace every single patient.

I think the linkage study has, from the ethical point of view, to come before any PB trial. We won't know the quality of the data until it is conducted. Adult clinics were not collaborating, but the access to the NHS records should overcome that problem, and highlight other issues (e.g. cancer, cardiovascular problems..).

The PB trial as it stands will again provide low quality data, because the follow up is too short, and it does not consider the cross-sex hormones as part of the treatment; thus it is unethical.

I still can't imagine a PB trial design that is ethical, though, since the PB trial form the Tavistock, the Olson trial in the US (still unpublished, only a pre-print), have both shown a lack of clinically meaningful improvement. Finally, the recent Finnish study (which did not consider PB, only cross-sex hormones/surgeries for adolescent and young adults), which showed an increase in contact with the psychiatric clinics following treatment, is casting doubt on the treatments the PB are trying to bridge.

This.
It's been catastrophic to allow all the male led lobby groups to influence what happens in child care, nurseries, schools and anywhere that children are. They've intimidated and bullied professionals out of safeguarding these children from their at times misled but dangerous parents.
Everyone who cares for babies and toddlers knows that a toddler claiming to be the opposite sex is as reliable as their claims to be a dinosaur or a helicopter. These organisations have openly enabled the abuse of children with all the responsible organisations who should be safeguarding them, instead colluding with their abuse.

If you’re talking about tracing them and contacting them for new data, you’re missing the consent part. The people you trace aren’t actually compelled to comply with any request for new info.

I think there has been a lot of discussion online among the trans community about not co-operating with any of this, originally about not giving consent for their data to be used in the data linkage study. We can assume that that reluctance to help would carry over to this suggestion in a manner that would completely bias any data (i.e. those responding would be a biased sample or give overly positive answers).

It is insanity and it is child abuse.

Child abuse.

And if the self-identified Right Side of History hadn't lost their collective fucking minds, everybody would clearly have seen that it is child abuse.

These parents should have been arrested, not feted and celebrated and platformed to boast about what they've done.

Until an attempt is made to collect the data we don't know how many will refuse to cooperate but these patients need to be followed up. If for example it's discovered that half the patients seen by the Tavistock are now dead then that would indicate that something very serious is going. Likewise if half of the patients are found to have desisted that again is very important data.

It is unclear what you are talking about when you say ‘follow-up’. The linkage study or some sort of phoning them up extra data collection effort.

The data linkage study will show how many have died. What it will be hard to do is to form any conclusions from that death data because of poor prior data collection.

So say you have 10 patients that have committed suicide. That seems bad compared to the general population. But trans patients can’t be fairly compared to the general population for suicide risk because we know they are likely to have mental health issues, childhood trauma, be neurodivergent or all of the above. You need to compare them to a group who would otherwise have a similar risk profile for suicide and see if being trans, or the various treatments are associated with an increased risk. So you need to know about neurodivergence, other medications (e.g. antidepressants can cause suicidal thoughts), childhood trauma and so on.

We know that the Tavistock mostly didn’t collect that data. There’s a hope that it would have been collected and stored elsewhere by the NHS but that’s not definite (e.g. a private diagnosis of autism may not be recorded).

So you’re at the point where you know that 10 people committed suicide but you don’t know whether that’s bad for that cohort or possibly even a positive with any statistical confidence because of the patchy data records.

If the number of deaths is overwhelming then obviously that would suggest that being trans is an increased risk - but how? The drugs? Dissatisfaction with surgery? Lack of acceptance? Fallouts with family? We still wouldn’t know.

We won’t know with any confidence how many desisted because the adult gender clinics didn’t collect that data. It would be guesswork.

It is unclear what you are talking about when you say ‘follow-up’. The linkage study or some sort of phoning them up extra data collection effort.

Both.