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Feminism: Sex and gender discussions

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

264 replies

SingleSexSpacesInSchools · Yesterday 13:28

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.

James Esses (@JamesEsses) on X

🚨Breaking🚨 Last night, in what is significant overreach for a backbench Peer, Hilary Cass sent a document to every single MP and Peer, justifying and defending the puberty blockers trial. I have posted below the full document for people to read. He...

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

OP posts:
BettyBooper · Today 12:09

NullaEffugium · Today 11:51

No that’s not a better way because depending on self reporting can’t replace the controlled medical environment of a clinical trial. That would be like an opinion survey and utterly useless at proving whether puberty blockers in general are unsafe.

Why would you need to rely on self reporting?

You can look at medical records for a start.

And this PB trial only tracks for two years. It's completely useless in terms of assessing long-term risks.

AskingQuestionsAllTheTime · Today 12:10

"Children who had been transitioned at Jo's age or younger" says Cass of her hypothetical case.

No suggestion there that the children had agency in the matter: this was clearly a decision made by someone other than the child.

Why on earth would a scientist not observe this and ask questions about it? Why on earth would a scientist assert it and apparently not realise what she was saying?

NullaEffugium · Today 12:11

NotBadConsidering · Today 12:06

THC (cannabis) for children with seizures that were arrested for Class A drugs trafficking until the UK did the clinical trials and then legislated a medical exemption. Because it was proven safe.

THC isn’t safe for children at all 🤨

It’s approved for use on children and adults with a severe form of epilepsy
https://www.nhs.uk/medicines/medical-cannabis/

This is a recent change because of the issues I related above where parents were smuggling it in because their children would have dozens of seizures a day and this was only substance that could control the epilepsy.

nhs.uk

Medical cannabis (cannabis oil)

Information from the NHS website on medical cannabis.

https://www.nhs.uk/medicines/medical-cannabis

ScrollingLeaves · Today 12:11

It may not be proven unsafe because I think the follow up period is too short a time in which to find out.

BettyBooper · Today 12:11

NullaEffugium · Today 11:53

As recorded in medical files. I doubt parents are going to be truthful about any illegal usage. In addition, for these children if they were not enrolled in a clinical trial, I am 100% convinced their parents would then get the illegal ones and give them to their child.

Well all that goes to show is that the PB trial will be even more unreliable as you can't trust that the cohort has been honest about their medical history 🤷

NotBadConsidering · Today 12:12

NullaEffugium · Today 12:11

It’s approved for use on children and adults with a severe form of epilepsy
https://www.nhs.uk/medicines/medical-cannabis/

This is a recent change because of the issues I related above where parents were smuggling it in because their children would have dozens of seizures a day and this was only substance that could control the epilepsy.

Cannabidiol, not THC.

NullaEffugium · Today 12:13

BettyBooper · Today 12:09

Why would you need to rely on self reporting?

You can look at medical records for a start.

And this PB trial only tracks for two years. It's completely useless in terms of assessing long-term risks.

So medical records are going to record illegal drug use in detail? Come on. That’s not realistic.

I think it’s 2years because clinical trials usually start short and then long term ones are authorised or not based on results.

NullaEffugium · Today 12:15

NotBadConsidering · Today 12:12

Cannabidiol, not THC.

Sorry my mistake. Still it was illegal and parents were smuggling it in.

NullaEffugium · Today 12:15

BettyBooper · Today 12:11

Well all that goes to show is that the PB trial will be even more unreliable as you can't trust that the cohort has been honest about their medical history 🤷

It will be more reliable than what we have so far.

NotBadConsidering · Today 12:18

NullaEffugium · Today 12:07

I don’t agree with your conclusions. A medical team can monitor the health of the children in ways no parent can. They can stop the trial if children are losing fertility, it doesn’t have to be a case where you carry on until everyone is sterile.

We know the suicide risk is exaggerated, but it’s not a total lie.

We don’t have rock solid proof of cause and effect. We have correlations and risk factors based on studies of adults who took PBs in the past.

Edit: Can I ask if you are against the trial and is it purely for ethical reasons?

Edited

They can stop the trial if children are losing fertility, it doesn’t have to be a case where you carry on until everyone is sterile.

But that’s not how it works. The children don’t start off with sperm/fertility and lose it. They never develop it because of the treatment. So you can’t “stop it if they become sterile or infertile” because the decision to start it has rendered them persistently sterile/infertile. The only way to fix that is to allow puberty to resume, which we know won’t happen. And even then it’s not 100%.

We know the suicide risk is exaggerated, but it’s not a total lie.

It is a total lie. There has never been a proven suicide solely because of an inability to get PBs. If suicide was a problem, there would have been an epidemic of suicide that PBs solved. But there wasn’t. So it IS a total lie.

Can I ask if you are against the trial and is it purely for ethical reasons?

Yes, it’s entirely unethical to knowingly inflict known harms on these children just to prove it is unsafe and not helpful to treat a diagnosis based on sexist stereotyping of children’s behaviour.

NullaEffugium · Today 12:19

Why are people against a trial?
Is it ethics combined a fear they’re not as harmful as you assume?
(I am firm in my belief that a trial will be a nail in the coffin of PBs, so I think it would prevent harm in the long run, although I’m on the fence because it will mean children are going to be harmed although I am telling myself probably not as much than if they weren’t in the trial because their stupid parents are likely to force illegal, potentially adulterated, versions on them behind closed doors with no medical monitoring. Other days I’m like this is ridiculous, why are they even arguing, there’s enough evidence to show a high likelihood these are unsafe, why are they clinging to straws, why should we allow this to continue)

AimsAndObjectives · Today 12:20

NullaEffugium · Today 12:02

What claims? This is basic behavioural science and there are historic precedents. If you can’t get treatment x that you are brainwashed into thinking your child needs, you will try and procure it from the black market. Look at all the parents sneaking in THC (cannabis) for children with seizures that were arrested for Class A drugs trafficking until the UK did the clinical trials and then legislated a medical exemption. Because it was proven safe.

The exact opposite will happen here, imho, it will be proven unsafe and any parent with common sense is going to not get any version of PB for their child, they will begin to be open to other options like counselling.

I imagine that previous, recent pb use will show up in blood tests.

I think it is likely that at least some of the parents involved in the trial will have steadfastly held out against the demands of their children to procure blockers online and would not do this under any circumstances. Your 100% claim was a bit too dogmatic for me.

AskingQuestionsAllTheTime · Today 12:21

AimsAndObjectives · Today 10:41

This is the 'Time to Think' theory comprehensively addressed in Hannah Barnes's book of the same name. There was no evidence that it achieved anything other than locking the children onto the pathway to cross-sex hormones.

I have always regarded puberty blockers as having a similar "feel" to them as the discovery that led the well-attested treatment for brain-damaged children who had lost the ability to walk (sorry, this was a long time ago and I can't find the report but I remember it well: I had an interest in it because of a friend of one of my children who was helped as a result of it). It was found that in order to learn to walk, infants had to go through a progression of stages in the right order, with what the author of the study called "creeping" and "crawling" both being necessary for an older child, who had been put back by injury or other trauma, to be able to progress to relearning the skill of walking.

If a natural progression is interrupted, in other words, you have to return to the beginning and go through each stage to arrive back where you started.

How is it proposed to take children, who have been "blocked" at the age of eleven or twelve, through the necessary stages of puberty for them to develop thereafter along what I will carefully call standard lines?

NotBadConsidering · Today 12:22

Forget the harms of puberty blockers.

It is not even clear what is even being treated.

What is the condition that needs PBs?

BettyBooper · Today 12:23

NullaEffugium · Today 12:13

So medical records are going to record illegal drug use in detail? Come on. That’s not realistic.

I think it’s 2years because clinical trials usually start short and then long term ones are authorised or not based on results.

Eh?

No. Medical records will show eg. Any increased cancers, bone deficiencies, overall health etc.

It might not be perfect, but it's a lot better than experimenting on healthy children, for an undefined condition because otherwise their parents will buy them illegal drugs off the black market...

AimsAndObjectives · Today 12:23

Tottenhamhotflushes · Today 11:57

I appreciate the challenges of bias provide but I also appreciate that there have been methods in modern times to mitigate scientific bias like peer reviews, transparency, reproducibility, methodological standards & analysis. It's not as if these studies can't be scrutinised & critiqued so its in the interests of those conducting them to act according to acceptable scientific practices.

There's every incentive to produce sound work that serves to build trust in the scientific community.

Sadly, this is not borne out sufficiently in practice, as any trawl of activist sites on the internet will demonstrate.

BridgetYourFortyDaysAreUp · Today 12:27

Tottenhamhotflushes · Today 11:48

Carve outs are not how medical standards work. That's why they are standards. Consistency in standards needs to be maintained across treatments.

Tottenham, a lot of these arguments have already been hashed out in the puberty blockers thread, if you're interested:

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5544415-update-on-the-puberty-blockers-trial

NullaEffugium · Today 12:27

@NotBadConsidering
thank you for sharing your thought process, I will say that starting puberty blockers doesn’t result in instant, irreversible sterilisation. There is risk to fertility the longer they are taken, perhaps the 2 year limit is to ensure that, for example, puberty is only delayed?

Thank you for explaining why you see the suicide risk as a lie. I wasn’t saying suicide risk due solely to puberty blockers because that’s never been studied, what has been studied is suicide risk to trans young people subjected to delayed or refused gender affirming treatments which includes PBs among other treatments.

I agree with the ethics issues. I feel like what is the lesser of two evils.

TwoLoonsAndASprout · Today 12:28

TwoLoonsAndASprout · Today 08:22

No “might” about it - they won’t mature. That is the one sure thing that we do know about PBs - they stop the normal maturation of a pubescent body, which includes the mental maturation that happens during puberty.

There was an interview at a Genspect conference with a man who had a DSD that naturally mimicked PBs. He described his peers going through puberty while he wanted to continue playing with cars and digging in the sandbox. He also appeared - despite doctors having eventually diagnosed him as an older teen, and given him appropriate hormones - to be somewhat developmentally delayed.

Found an article written by the man I referred to above:

I have isolated hypogonadotropic hypogonadism (IHH), a condition in which the brain never sends the signal to start puberty. Without medical help I would have stayed forever pre-pubescent. My story is not just my personal history; it is a warning.

In the 1980s, my classmates shot up in height, their voices broke and they started dating and becoming independent. I did not. My legs grew long but the rest of me stayed childlike. I looked like a stretched-out little boy. I still played with He-Man figures in secret because emotionally and mentally I felt years younger than my peers. The social gap widened every year. I spent my whole school career in special education; reading is still, decades later, brutally hard for me.

At fifteen I remained at Tanner Stage 1, with no secondary sexual characteristics at all. After months of scans and tests at UCSF, the diagnosis was clear: my brain was not producing the hormones needed to trigger puberty. This was not “delayed” puberty that would eventually arrive; it was absent puberty. Without intervention, I would have had a child’s body for life. I would have had brittle bones and no sexual function, as well as the emotional maturity of someone much younger.

Doctors finally gave me testosterone in a bottle. My peers had crossed that bridge gradually years earlier. I sprinted across it as a teenager, clutching prescriptions, trying to catch a train that had already left.

What I’ve learned since is that when the adolescent brain is starved of sex hormones during the critical window, the damage is permanent. Autism is five times more common in people like me, ADHD several times higher, and severe intellectual disability nearly eighteen times more likely. A quarter of us never become sexually active, and three-quarters of us never have children. Executive function, attention, and processing speed are all measurably lower. I live with ADHD and learning disabilities that no amount of therapy will ever fix.

That same biochemical state—profound suppression of the hormonal axis—is now deliberately created in healthy children with drugs like Lupron. The Dutch protocol, on which the entire gender-affirming model rests, induces exactly what my body did naturally.

genspect.org/frozen-in-time-when-puberty-doesnt-happen/

NullaEffugium · Today 12:31

BettyBooper · Today 12:23

Eh?

No. Medical records will show eg. Any increased cancers, bone deficiencies, overall health etc.

It might not be perfect, but it's a lot better than experimenting on healthy children, for an undefined condition because otherwise their parents will buy them illegal drugs off the black market...

Right and all of these can be caused by multiple factors, you can’t prove much of anything from retrospective study of medical records. They’ve already done this many times and it’s not even enough to convince die hard activists, you and I are convinced, we can connect the dots. But it’s not enough. You know the saying, individuals can be intelligent, but people as a mob are stupid. They will read any old thing on X or Facebook and believe the most bizarre things are facts.

BettyBooper · Today 12:31

NotBadConsidering · Today 12:22

Forget the harms of puberty blockers.

It is not even clear what is even being treated.

What is the condition that needs PBs?

Exactly.

And look who is pushing for it.

This is not just about the harms to the children's health. This would be another cohort of children who become physically and cognitively underdeveloped adults. Adults who resemble children, are compliant like children and yet are over the age of consent.

The safeguarding risks are off the scale.

NotBadConsidering · Today 12:32

NullaEffugium · Today 12:27

@NotBadConsidering
thank you for sharing your thought process, I will say that starting puberty blockers doesn’t result in instant, irreversible sterilisation. There is risk to fertility the longer they are taken, perhaps the 2 year limit is to ensure that, for example, puberty is only delayed?

Thank you for explaining why you see the suicide risk as a lie. I wasn’t saying suicide risk due solely to puberty blockers because that’s never been studied, what has been studied is suicide risk to trans young people subjected to delayed or refused gender affirming treatments which includes PBs among other treatments.

I agree with the ethics issues. I feel like what is the lesser of two evils.

I will say that starting puberty blockers doesn’t result in instant, irreversible sterilisation

If boys are blocked at Tanner Stage 2, and normal puberty is not allowed to resume, they don’t ever produce sperm and are sterile. Currently all children progress onto CSH, so these boys are sterile.

perhaps the 2 year limit is to ensure that, for example, puberty is only delayed?

So will puberty blockers be removed and puberty allowed to resume in this trial? Or will they all continue on them until they are eligible for CSH like currently? I don’t think anyone knows.

what has been studied is suicide risk to trans young people subjected to delayed or refused gender affirming treatments which includes PBs among other treatments.

This isn’t true either. What are you basing this on?

spannasaurus · Today 12:32

NullaEffugium · Today 12:27

@NotBadConsidering
thank you for sharing your thought process, I will say that starting puberty blockers doesn’t result in instant, irreversible sterilisation. There is risk to fertility the longer they are taken, perhaps the 2 year limit is to ensure that, for example, puberty is only delayed?

Thank you for explaining why you see the suicide risk as a lie. I wasn’t saying suicide risk due solely to puberty blockers because that’s never been studied, what has been studied is suicide risk to trans young people subjected to delayed or refused gender affirming treatments which includes PBs among other treatments.

I agree with the ethics issues. I feel like what is the lesser of two evils.

There was a US supreme court case last year (possibly the year before last) where Chas Strangio for ACLU had to admit that there was no evidence that suicide rates in trans people were higher than in comparative non trans people.

BettyBooper · Today 12:32

NullaEffugium · Today 12:31

Right and all of these can be caused by multiple factors, you can’t prove much of anything from retrospective study of medical records. They’ve already done this many times and it’s not even enough to convince die hard activists, you and I are convinced, we can connect the dots. But it’s not enough. You know the saying, individuals can be intelligent, but people as a mob are stupid. They will read any old thing on X or Facebook and believe the most bizarre things are facts.

No they haven't. Cass recommended it was done, the adult clinics refused to release the data. They still haven't.

NullaEffugium · Today 12:34

No “might” about it - they won’t mature. That is the one sure thing that we do know about PBs - they stop the normal maturation of a pubescent body, which includes the mental maturation that happens during puberty.

While they are on PBs. Once they come off them, puberty restarts, so long as they haven’t taken them for too long. In this study, girls started menstruating 1yr after they stopped PBs, and boys had normal sperm production 6 weeks after stopping PBs. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6626312/

It is worth noting that only in a clinical trial can doctors ensure fertility preservation. Whatever illegal, potentially too high dose versions parents are giving children is way more likely to cause sterilisation.

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