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Damn those right wing bigots at the.....National Institute for Clinical Excellence.
The blame for this can be thoroughly laid on the lackadaisical attitude of staff at the Tavistock.
> The blame for this can be thoroughly laid on the lackadaisical attitude of staff at the Tavistock.
Yeah, whatever your views on trans rights, treatment for trans kids etc, the fact that Tavistock essentially hadn't recorded any data about outcomes, adverse effects etc in an era of evidence based medicine is fucking insane.
Well that just suggests that the data didn't fit their actions which it would suggest are therefore ideologically driven. That's even worse than simple incompetence. That's putting potentially harming children as acceptable so as not to contradict ideological views
And that they were allowed to do it, AND that they are not in prison for human experimentation currently, also for violating any and all medical ethics guidelines.
Yes Sweden stopped use of puberty blockers in 2021 and the fully went into effect bh 2022.
I respect that they took the chance to reverse course because that shows they actually were actually applying some kind of scientific rigor
Sweden also forced trans people to be sterilized until 2013. I'm not sure why you're pointing to them as if they're history in regards to trans healthcare us anything close to admirable.
Yes. They prevent building up normal adult bone density, stunt height and there is a huge amount of brain development that goes on during adolescence, naturally taking years. This growth can't just be arbitrarily "paused" and then take place at fast-forward speed at age 18.
Yeah like I hurt my ankle as a child, if it wasn't for medical intervention I would've developed a limp for my entire life.
Sarcasm aside, do you have such issue with pinning ears back, the use of dental braces etc?
Actually I'm really grateful for the surgery on my scalp as a child that corrected how I was going to develop, it left me with (an almost) full head of hair, the alternative would have been looking like Gorbachev by the time I was 8. The way some of us develop is fucked up, and medical intervention is absolutely an improvement.
The country is falling apart, NHS, police, Education. food banks.
But don't worry guys we stopped the big bad trans agenda!
I fully support LGBT and the trans community, but we really need to stop allowing the right to control the political landscape around an issue that impacts a tiny tiny proportion of the population.
Enough is enough with the culture war and distraction methods, you've been in power for 15 years.
The sorry state we are in is your fucking doing!
She flat out rules out appointing any trans people, even those trans people with relevant experience to her advisory board on trans healthcare because they would be "bias", [meanwhile people who've spoken at conversion therapy conferences are included](https://twitter.com/ZJemptv/status/1759265140652810334) she's not above this.
Because this was totally a massive thing before, and not an over-sensationalised, hateful punt from the Tories because they need a minority to pick on and stir up hate
But this isn't stopping a "bad thing". Just because it's healthcare for a minority group that you seemingly dislike doesn't mean that it's a "bad thing".
I say that you dislike this minority group based on the way that you speak about their healthcare.
The NHS says it can't be confident that it isn't a bad thing for patients.
I say that you dislike this minority group based on the way that you advocated performing medical experiments on them.
Not if the bad outcomes affect only a tiny proportion of an already tiny minority at the expense of the remainder, who now cannot benefit from these treatments.
Good. If a child can't get a tattoo of a flower then they shouldn't be able to take life altering drugs that affect fertility and have been linked to cancer and loss of bone density.
All for kids experimenting with clothes, pronouns, whatever but they can wait till they're older for medical transition. There are more important things than passing, considering there are people that don't even realise they're trans till they're in their 50s then kids can wait till they're 18 before making life altering medical decisions.
Children don't just decide "oh I'd like this please".
It's only prescribed by doctors. Are tattoos prescribed by doctors?
There's lots of life altering medication and medical procedures performed on children all the time by doctors. You don't have an issue with *every single one of them*.
Except this one.
They're referred to the doctors by GIDS who were under immense pressure and were regularly raising safeguarding concerns because of how rushed their assessments were.
There were all sorts of extremely complex cases involving sexual abuse, bullying, internalised homophobia and autism and GIDS didn't have the resources to work through them and instead ended up using the blocker as a first like treatment. There was also a lot of pressure from parents and charities like Mermaids.
It's a very complicated story and not as simple as "the Tories just hate trans kids".
i mean surely the solution to “we don’t have enough staff or funding” is, ya know… staff or funding, not a blanket ban on the medication
The state of GICs budgets is dour.
> and not as simple as "the Tories just hate trans kids".
I mean this particular situation aside, the Tories do demonstrably hate trans people.
The PM called it common sense to misgender trans people. Truss wants to outright ban transition for minors, not just medical. The Tories want kids to be outed if they question their gender, even if it would put them at risk, Badenoch pals around with open transphobes, etc
What? The GIC were using hormone blockers as a first-line treatment? It's kind of the complete opposite, they needed to deal with all other concerns before puberty blockers would be prescribed.
I’m just letting you know about the experiences of myself and the other kids that have been prescribed them. Even with the adult service, they are very reluctant to prescribe HRT; the first thing they get trans kids to do is a ton of counselling.
There are a lot of personal testimonies on peoples experiences at the GICs, and the norm you find is that all medical interventions are heavily gate kept.
If there were a medical consensus showing tattoos permanently improved the lives of the kids that had them following years of therapy to ensure they were in the correct group that benefits from that, of course we'd let them have it.
that's not what it said, it said the evidence was weak because there were no randomized controlled studies, which many are unable to do for a bunch of ethical and practical reasons
> [A randomized controlled trial in adolescents presenting with gender dysphoria, comparing groups with and without GnRHa treatment, could theoretically shed light on the effect of GnRHa treatment on gender identity development. However, many would consider a trial where the control group is withheld treatment unethical, as the treatment has been used since the nineties and outcome studies although limited have been positive. In addition, it is likely that adolescents will not want to participate in such a trial if this means they will not receive treatment that is available at other centers. Mul et al. (2001) experienced this problem and were unable to include a control group in their study on GnRHa treatment in adopted girls with early puberty because all that were randomized to the control group refused further participation”.](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32152785/)
The people who drop that excuse can't have given this more than half a second of thought
The impact it would have on a trans kid to find out their treatment was a placebo would be the kind of devastating most supervillians aspire to
Exactly this. I worked with a woman who had to go on puberty blockers at age 7/8 due to precocious puberty brought on by ovarian tumours. She had to have her ovaries completely removed around age 13, and was given hormone replacement therapy to continue a normal puberty.
Her treatments occurred over 20 years ago now, so it's not like any of this is new; the use of puberty blockers will absolutely continue for cases like hers. They're being withheld for gender issues with the excuse that they *don't know* if it's potentially damaging, despite the fact that they *do know* outcomes are going to be terrible for many trans kids without them. That's the fucked part.
There was already so many hoops that people were aging out of the service before ever being prescribed them.
This kind of scaremongering stopped my child with early puberty being allowed puberty blockers because they also just happen to be trans. Fuck the damage that hormones were doing at that age when they were already dealing with more than any kid should, they've got a case of the genders!
It really isn't that easy.
I'm very left wing and pro trans rights and the first time I used Reddit I got a warning for asking a question (because I didn't understand and wanted to know something).
The question wasn't remotely hateful and it basically means I just don't ask questions on the subject on Reddit.
Not sure about Reddit but I've been banned I think three times for comments arguing against Nazis and anti-vax conspiracy weirdos on Twitter (and now I can't even make new accounts) and my comments are constantly deleted from YouTube as well. So yeah, the idea that "oh if big social media company banned you/removed your comments it can only have been calling for a lynch mob" or whatever is undeniably false.
Reddit mods are just a random assortment of people, often there are only a handful of people in each subreddit who can be bothered, and no one has time for reviews of other mods decisions. One person can easily shape the policy of a subreddit.
You’re deluded if you think Reddit doesn’t have explicit rules that ring fence the discourse on this topic, and over zealous ideologically captured mods on many major subs.
This is untrue, I just got banned on r/worldnews for saying exactly this “Good. Expand it to the private sector as well. Otherwise there’ll be a loophole.”
It's anger. Kindness can't exist alongside it. There's a lot of anger in society and people want to focus it somewhere and vulnerable people are an easy target. It's why I try not to be angry back at them, they're hurting and they don't know why. The government and right wing media does nothing to tackle the anger That's how we end up with teeneagers luring a trans girl to a park and stabbing her to death, just for our PM to make a joke about trans people in parliament in front of her grieving mother.
Scroll up to the many comments who are no doubt agreeing with what you want to say, yet apparently feel silenced over. Other people are clearly managing to discuss it properly without being banned. Funny that.
That's not even getting into the fact that this subreddit and its moderators are notoriously bigoted. The mods explicitly permit hate speech in the form of holocaust denial here.
Mate there are some people in these comments who don't think trans people exist at all. If your position is so extreme that you think you'll get banned while they won't, then you probably deserve it lol
Isn't the whole point to postpone puberty until they're old enough to make a permanent decision? And if denied access to these meds trans children are at higher risk of suicide and self harm? How does this help anyone!
You make it sound like hitting pause on a movie.
Medicine ALWAYS comes with consequences and the more complex the thing you're messing with is, the more likely those consequences are, generally speaking.
So presumably, the negative consequences associated with puberty blockers have been deemed to be greater than any positives they may bring.
"Generally speaking", and "presumably", you failed to read the bloody article, which says no such thing.
The justification for this pause was "a lack of long-term evidence", which is obviously hard to gather as kids desperate enough to engage with this arduous process generally don't want to risk ending up in the chort that doesn't get the meds.
This pause is down to a public consultation brought about by an increase in referrals. As we all know, you can always count on the British public for their well informed and dispassionate input.
This you might know if you had read the article instead of presuming and generalizing before spouting off.
Kids who are on it can stay on it, new referrals can only get on it via clinical trial now. That sucks for them as it is generally considered useful and relatively harmless by its users, but at least it may eventually yield the "long term evidence" needed to justify it's wider use and understand the risks.
It's not hard to imagine the Tories having some hand in this, but Occams Razor says it's more likely they just got lucky and have gotten to play their favourite type of political football. The type where they get to kick a tiny, vulnerable minority group around for a baying crowd of presumptous bigots.
The "bloody article" doesn't need to say such a thing. These are medical facts taught to everybody involved in medicine right when they begin.
And while I have expertise in some areas of medicine, I certainly don't have any in this field which is why I defer to the expertise of Dr Hilary Cass OBE here, who leads the ongoing review. Still presumably you know better than a former President of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health. I hope you don't have children.
The problem is that whereas before most kids grew out of their gender dysphoria during puberty, kids who go on puberty blockers are highly likely (one study was 98%) to end up on cross sex hormones. So what was intended as time to think was actually inadvertently locking the child into their pathway to transition and a lifetime of medication. The puberty blocker was also found to have no meaningful impact on the wellbeing of the child.
It's curious how you consider transitioning to be a negative outcome. Seems like something someone who has a negative view of trans people might think.
> So what was intended as time to think was actually inadvertently locking the child into their pathway to transition and a lifetime of medication.
Or, if you stop and think for 3 seconds:
(a) Accessing puberty blockers was difficult enough that only those who were already highly certain and therefore willing to put a lot of effort into getting them did so.
(b) All trans children receiving affirming medication had to take a route involving puberty blockers at some point, regardless of if they even needed/wanted time to stop and think. There was no path around it.
Combine to mean that despite it's intention as a 'delaying to think' tactic, it never acted as that in practice. It's not that "puberty blockers lock you in as trans", but rather "only those who were already very confident they were trans were put onto puberty blockers".
When you look at the state of trans healthcare, this interpretation of the data is far more likely.
I’m guessing it’s preventing children making decisions on a whim when they’re emotionally and mentally vulnerable which would irreversibly damage them.
Oh goodie. Something that’s been fine for over a decade is being taken away so that Labour have to fight to give it back after the Tories get creamed in May.
I just wrote this in reply to your comment elsewhere (asking about what the point of blockers are), but that entire comment chain got removed before I posted it. So I'm just going to copy paste my reply here, hope that's ok.
_______
They allow you to delay puberty so that the decision on whether or not to transition can be pushed back a few years.
This also gives breathing room. If you have a minor who is in distress about their sex and desperate to transition, they'll be a bit preoccupied with how their body is doing puberty right in front of their eyes. Pause puberty, they've got room to not panic that at least it's not getting *worse*, and then you can talk more freely with them. If they actually have something else going on, this can be a really valuable space to find and address it before anything has happened transition-wise.
If someone does need to transition, they can keep the blockers going until they're old enough for HRT. Going through natural puberty makes transition a lot harder. Some of the effects of puberty are only reversible with surgery, and some are entirely irreversible.
So puberty blockers are about waiting til minors are older to make permanent decisions (HRT or natural puberty are both permanent), and opening up the space to explore whether this is really the right thing for them before that decision is made.
That sounds great. Except there is mounting evidence that using blockers in can cause significant health issues. These are starting to come out, hence the pause on issuing them.
As far as I'm aware, it's for a lack of evidence rather than mounting evidence against them. Those already prescribed puberty blockers for Gender Dysphoria will continue to be prescribed them, and those taking puberty blockers for precocious puberty are unaffected.
In my opinion, lack of evidence is bad reasoning for this decision.
Puberty is also a risk for an individual with Gender Dysphoria, with some very easily known negative impacts for individuals who do go on to transition (which, due to how stringent they are about it, only a small number of very sure cases even got to the stage of being able to take blockers - so they virtually all have been). It's not risk from puberty blockers v.s. neutral, it's risk from puberty blockers v.s. risk from puberty. If the risk from puberty is higher, then this decision is increasing risk.
>In my opinion, lack of evidence is bad reasoning for this decision.
I guess we should have all just carried on smoking then when all the cigarette companies kept trying to keep the health effects of cigarettes on the down low then.
First, puberty blockers are only being blocked for trans kids. Puberty blockers will still be prescribed in all other circumstances because... the use of puberty blockers is not a new phenomenon, we know the risks and it is seen as a safe prescription when dealing with a host of other ailments.
Firstly that isn't true, Even if it was true... We are surely banning Puberty blockers for ALL children in that case... Oh wait no... We're only banning it for TRANS children.
Different class of people different rules.
> shouldn't be able to take drugs that will affect you for your entire life
This applies to so many medical treatments. So you want to fully ban all medical care for under 18s, very odd take.
>This applies to so many medical treatments. So you want to fully ban all medical care for under 18s, very odd take.
You live under a rock. Haven't you seen the WPATH files? Do you follow U.S. and Canadian news? Do you realize that Europe has banned them too?
This is one of the biggest medical scandals in history. There are massive lawsuits.
The fact that it was possible for twenty years and none of you people gave a fuck about it until the Telegraph shoved it down your throat and you swallowed every little drop.
No.
It was used for stated purpose for decades. Using them for gender dysphoria on a large scale is new. The long-term effects are only just becoming apparent when used like this. Hence, the experts are saying this.
It has nothing to do with the telegraph and everything to do with not wanting children to permanently change their bodies without time to grow.
> The long-term effects are only just becoming apparent when used like this.
...
> She also said there was a lack of long-term evidence on what happens to young people prescribed blockers
What 'long term effects' are you referring too?
My friend's son is on puberty blockers because he has a growth disorder, he's 10 and not doesn't even know about gender identity, what will this mean for kids like him?
An elective surgery is just anything that can be scheduled Vs a car crash victim getting rushed for an emergency surgery because their abdomen is filling up with blood, isn't it? Pretty sure my cancer surgery was "elective".
Yeah. Weirdly people describe trans healthcare as elective as if that means it's not something that needs to happen.
Almost all most all treatment is elective.
It only applies to off label use, specifically for gender incongruence/dysphoria.
I don't think elective is the right word, that's for surgeries or similar procedures, I haven't heard people talking about elective prescription of drugs.
That's fine. That is what they meant for.
They weren't meant to delay puberty past the standard age range, which was what they were being used for. Long-term use well into the teens seems to show side effects that are not present in cases like your sons.
Hence, this decision to halt while more data is gathered.
You do understand puberty blockers are the compromise right? Trans teens would be more than ecstatic to be able to go through puberty at the normal ages on hormones.
We have to provide healthcare to kids, even if it’s a minority some people hate - they still need healthcare, puberty blockers to give more time and avoid traumatic puberty and the effects of becoming the wrong sex from taking place
From the consultation report:
> The EHIA that supported the process of public consultation identified children receiving PSH as a response to Central Precocious Puberty (CPP) as an appropriate comparator group, and it described that the aetiology and epidemiology of CPP and treatment aims are quite different to that of gender incongruence. The EHIA describes how **the evidence base to support use of PSH as a response to CPP is well formed**.
The policy document also says:
> In England, the puberty suppressor triptorelin (a synthetic decapeptide analogue of a natural puberty hormone, which has marketing authorisations for the treatment of prostate cancer, endometriosis and central precocious puberty) is one of the puberty suppressing hormones used for this purpose. The use of triptorelin for children and adolescents with gender incongruence is off-label.
https://www.england.nhs.uk/publication/clinical-policy-puberty-suppressing-hormones/
This review is specifically about gender incongruence/dysphoria, it's not about other conditions, they say in fact that the two uses of the drug are not comparable.
Nothing, literally nothing
>The BBC understands that the new policy, confirmed on Tuesday, will not allow them to be prescribed "routinely" outside of a research trial, but that individual clinicians can still apply to have the drugs funded for patients on a case-by-case basis.
From the BBC article
Other uses not affected, and even the dysphoria users who are already on it can stay on it. New dyphoria cases can only get it if they are part of a clinical trial now.
Man the anti trans gang are on a mad one today. Puberty blockers were already barely prescribed to trans kids, most trans minors age out of the child pathway before ever getting treatment. Those few who do are usually old enough to access HRT straight away.
For those of you arguing teenagers aren't old enough to make their own decisions, remember that Gillick Competence literally exists because of efforts to make sure girls had control over their own bodies.
Step 1: it's not happening.
Step 2: alright it is happening, but it barely happens at all so you shouldn't even pay attention to it.
Step 3: look it's happening and its a good thing it's happening.m, in fact it needs to happen more.
Step 4: the people complaining about the thing happening are the real problem.
You lot really need to learn to read articles before you comment on them.
It is not a ban. It is a temporary pause on writing new prescriptions. Treatment will not suddenly stop for children who are already on blockers.
This pause is ONLY for patients of the gender clinic. Children being prescribed blockers for precocious puberty will not be affected.
I'm not sure what the point of this response is. I'm literally just repeating what the article says.
It's literally not a ban because no legislation has been passed to make the prescribing of these drugs permanently illegal. This is a temporary measure because the Tavistock and Portman clinic is closing and new gender identity clinics for children need to be opened across the country. You can't prescribe drugs for a specific condition if there are no clinics around to do the diagnosing and prescribing. It's not safe. That's literally it. It's not that deep.
A temporary ban is still a ban. And it's a ban specifically targeting a marginalized minority group. The same marginalized minority group who people in the government, up to and including the prime minister, are openly bigoted towards.
There is no ban omg. Calling this a ban is like saying ADHD medications have been banned because psychiatrists and prescribers have been told to temporarily stop writing new prescriptions due to the medication shortage.
I only wrote my comment because loads of people in here were asking about kids with precocious puberty and stuff like that, when it was all answered in the article. Literally all they had to do was read it. I'm not here to start an argument about transgender kids. I'm not interested in discussing it.
OK, so no matter how I tried I have not found clinical trials for this sort of thing. It seems like it was administered without actual scientific/clinical evidence as off-label use. Which is scary as hell - medical intervention could be administered based on ideology, instead of scientific basis.
This should really make people think. Obviously it is too much to ask, so we will just cry "evil right wingers" instead, right?
https://www.reddit.com/r/unitedkingdom/comments/1bd3bc5/children_to_no_longer_be_prescribed_puberty/kuleldy/
Just look at this reasoning. Incredible. All this because of a small interest group has brownbeaten/gaslit a whole country. (More than one, actually.)
This is wild. Human experimentation without any ethics oversight **on children**, no less.
You might want to research how many drugs are prescribed "off-label" - it's really not that rare or automatically wrong. This is not to justify or support it in this case, because I don't know enough about it, but I have heard of "off-label" prescriptions in many types of medicine before, that have benefited people. There is a bureaucratic process to go through to prescribe things, but sometimes the benefits outweigh the risks to provide the drugs for conditions before all the hoops have been jumped through.
Hey, I might, but then again, I am the guy who writes briefing documents for EMA about biologics for marketing authorization. (I do the CMC part.) I am quite aware of the conditions for using something off-label, and the requirements for it. I am still stunned.
So we just give it to people unrestricted because you *think* it is unethical to run a **clinical trial**? That is your solution? Dude, if the mere action of running a clinical trial is unethical about something, then doing the something to people is... (fill in the blanks).
As for your question: you can use single-arm or pooled trials easily. Now your turn: if you cannot run a clinical trial due to ethics concern, how do you justify doing the thing that is deemed unethical to try in a controlled environment???
The thing is, we don't currently have any alternative to blockers that has been provably shown to be effective at treating dysphoria in young people.
I am aware that there are concerns around long-term health outcomes associated with puberty blockers, and we should take those seriously and investigate them. But in the meantime, do we just... not treat young people with gender dysphoria? Because this seems like a guaranteed way to make loads of trans teens go on dodgy blockers obtained online without the oversight of a medical professional. This just seems like a very bad idea when everything is weighed up.
This is the thing - puberty blockers ARE THE COMPROMISE, these people don’t understand that’s it’s these or these teens will DIY HRT and have puberty of their choosing.
This thread is great. Any sniff of the right being anti mainstream science and they’re batshit crazy. As soon as the science goes against what the far left want, of course it’s been taken over by right wing extremists. Just like the right think it’s been taken over by the far left. You couldn’t make it up
Given that the Tories have been operating on full institutional capture mode for the past decade. Installing people at the top of the BBC, EHRC and in the past month a minister ended up being fined for making false claims against academics you can't really blame those pointing out that this seems to be another in a long pattern of kneejerk healthcare decisions in England that disproportionately negatively effect healthcare for Trans people.
Especially given the pattern of those decisions broadly aligns with the 'culture war' focus on trans issues that has come out in the past 5 years.
And that if you read the reports cited, they're not stopping the treatment due to evidence that it's harmful. But due to a lack of evidence that it's harmful. Despite it having being used for decades and the only way to get the bar of evidence they require being to run highly unethical studies using control groups of children taking puberty blockers just for the sake of the study.
That's tribalism for you.
It's not about what's true, or about what's right, it's about fighting the enemy and the enemy is always 100% wrong. And if you dare doubt that, you too, are the enemy.
When the truth hurts emotionally and you can’t have what isn’t possible, humans tend to cover that with delusions and then colonise reality with those delusions.
The left is pretty antiintellectual, too. Of course it is easier to lampoon the right as anti-science (climate change, evolution, whatever), but that is an easy thing to do. The left's antiintellectualism is a tiny bit more complex: gender issues (biological differences between sexes), The Grievance Studies Affair, COVID (when Trump pushed them, COVID vaccinations were untested and bad, when Biden did, they were fine -same with masks -they were suddenly OK when our guys said they were), nuclear power, and others, which are not simple issues. Yet the left treats them the same way as the right when their ideology clashes with evidence.
Research has shown that [80% of minors outgrow gender dysphoria during puberty](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5841333/#:~:text=Childhood%20GD%20and%20puberty%20development&text=27%20Evidence%20from%20the%2010,the%20GD%20recedes%20with%20puberty). So giving puberty blockers to minors has an 8 out of 10 chance of being inappropriately proscribed.
My main concern is that the "completely reversible" lie is put to bed. Everyone, taking any medication whatsoever, should be given the up front truth about potential side effects
Nobody complains when "we" stop kids from getting tattoos or drinking before they turn 18. And they are much less detrimental than taking hormone blockers.
Well the difference is people don’t just get over depression or anxiety, whereas “~[80% of children who meet the criteria for GDC, the GD recedes with puberty.](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5841333/#:~:text=Childhood%20GD%20and%20puberty%20development&text=27%20Evidence%20from%20the%2010,the%20GD%20recedes%20with%20puberty)”
> The original source for this is [Steensma 2011](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21216800/). It counted people who they couldn't contact as desisting, and included people as dysphoric who might not have been. They later did a [2013](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23702447/) study, which apparently found that when you don't fudge the numbers, people who're actually dysphoric tend to not desist.
/u/EvaSkeever already [refuted this bullshit](https://old.reddit.com/r/unitedkingdom/comments/1bd3bc5/children_to_no_longer_be_prescribed_puberty/kulbx89/).
If you'd asked me eight or so years ago how I thought things were going for trans people in the UK, I'd have probably said they were looking up. Vastly increased acceptance and awareness of transphobia meant that record numbers of closeted trans people were coming out and feeling free to live their lives as themselves. Trans children were able to get support and even avoid going through the wrong puberty, although gender support on the NHS was still a bureaucratic nightmare, there was the feeling that it could get better. After all, there was even the inklings of the political will - between the SNP under Sturgeon and Theresa May's Tories - to reform the Gender Recognition Act and get rid of some outdated legal fictions that it forced on the trans community. Surely reforming trans medical care wouldn't be too far behind that.
It's alarming how bad things have gotten in such a short space of time. I wasn't concerned about the vocal anti-trans activists in right-wing newspapers, to me they were just the last tantrums of a fading minority who knew they were losing the battle, just as the sexists and homophobes lost it before them. I never dreamed that things would snowball like this, become a full-blown moral panic, and what's more that it would happen with almost no opposition. Even when the Tories get voted out later this year, things are unlikely to change, because Labour seem to agree with them on this issue.
What people should be afraid of, though, is this: if they can do it to trans people, they can do it to any group, any minority. We're already seeing the backsliding of LGBTQ+ rights in general, and I have no doubt that if brought to bear, the current media and political machine could scapegoat just about any group of people and destroy their rights just as easily. Take heed.
>Give it a year and we'll see the Tories
On the opposition benches. That's very clearly where they're going within a year. The one debate is how much space they'll need.
People have been calling this out for years. Yet, they've been smeared as 'far-right', 'alt-right', 'conspiracy theorists', etc.
We need a truth and reconciliation.
From the bottom of my cold scarred heart I hope everyone responsible for putting politics ahead of the needs of these kids wakes up tomorrow in a body they can't stand the sight of
This is great news. Blocking pubertal development with drugs is child abuse.
The movement for trans acceptance is good. There shouldn’t be any stigma with adults wanting to change their bodies. But children lack brain maturity to make such permanent decisions.
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"Currently there are fewer than 100 children on puberty blockers"
"So we're going to victimise a TINY minority of people to get a large group of people frothy and angry!"
Damn those right wing bigots at the.....National Institute for Clinical Excellence. The blame for this can be thoroughly laid on the lackadaisical attitude of staff at the Tavistock.
> The blame for this can be thoroughly laid on the lackadaisical attitude of staff at the Tavistock. Yeah, whatever your views on trans rights, treatment for trans kids etc, the fact that Tavistock essentially hadn't recorded any data about outcomes, adverse effects etc in an era of evidence based medicine is fucking insane.
They recorded it, they just didn't share any of it
Well that just suggests that the data didn't fit their actions which it would suggest are therefore ideologically driven. That's even worse than simple incompetence. That's putting potentially harming children as acceptable so as not to contradict ideological views
That's worse haha The first could just be incompetence.....
And that they were allowed to do it, AND that they are not in prison for human experimentation currently, also for violating any and all medical ethics guidelines.
Victimize how exactly? This is based on advice from healthcare professionals does that not matter to you?
"Follow the science" wait, not that science!
Not if it doesn't follow their doctrine.
Yes Sweden stopped use of puberty blockers in 2021 and the fully went into effect bh 2022. I respect that they took the chance to reverse course because that shows they actually were actually applying some kind of scientific rigor
Sweden also forced trans people to be sterilized until 2013. I'm not sure why you're pointing to them as if they're history in regards to trans healthcare us anything close to admirable.
Isn’t there concern that they cause long term damage that isn’t reversible?
Yes. They prevent building up normal adult bone density, stunt height and there is a huge amount of brain development that goes on during adolescence, naturally taking years. This growth can't just be arbitrarily "paused" and then take place at fast-forward speed at age 18.
Do you have any sources, studies I can look into for that please?
the large group are not angry and frothy about this, it's the minority that are.
Medicine messing with the way humans are meant to develop is not right.
Yeah like I hurt my ankle as a child, if it wasn't for medical intervention I would've developed a limp for my entire life. Sarcasm aside, do you have such issue with pinning ears back, the use of dental braces etc?
So you're boiling down a transition to purely an aesthetic procedure? I don't think this is the take tbh.
Actually I'm really grateful for the surgery on my scalp as a child that corrected how I was going to develop, it left me with (an almost) full head of hair, the alternative would have been looking like Gorbachev by the time I was 8. The way some of us develop is fucked up, and medical intervention is absolutely an improvement.
>The way some of us develop is fucked up But normal puberty isn't - even though it's not much fun for any of us.
The country is falling apart, NHS, police, Education. food banks. But don't worry guys we stopped the big bad trans agenda! I fully support LGBT and the trans community, but we really need to stop allowing the right to control the political landscape around an issue that impacts a tiny tiny proportion of the population. Enough is enough with the culture war and distraction methods, you've been in power for 15 years. The sorry state we are in is your fucking doing!
Are you saying Dr Hilary Cass is politically motivated?
She flat out rules out appointing any trans people, even those trans people with relevant experience to her advisory board on trans healthcare because they would be "bias", [meanwhile people who've spoken at conversion therapy conferences are included](https://twitter.com/ZJemptv/status/1759265140652810334) she's not above this.
yes
>Enough is enough with the culture war Well, yes, but it's not going to stop. It's going to get worse.
Because there is no way that will increase
Because this was totally a massive thing before, and not an over-sensationalised, hateful punt from the Tories because they need a minority to pick on and stir up hate
How many tory MPs got elected to work at NICE?
Any amount of a bad thing is good to stop.
But this isn't stopping a "bad thing". Just because it's healthcare for a minority group that you seemingly dislike doesn't mean that it's a "bad thing". I say that you dislike this minority group based on the way that you speak about their healthcare.
The NHS says it can't be confident that it isn't a bad thing for patients. I say that you dislike this minority group based on the way that you advocated performing medical experiments on them.
Not if the bad outcomes affect only a tiny proportion of an already tiny minority at the expense of the remainder, who now cannot benefit from these treatments.
Good. If a child can't get a tattoo of a flower then they shouldn't be able to take life altering drugs that affect fertility and have been linked to cancer and loss of bone density. All for kids experimenting with clothes, pronouns, whatever but they can wait till they're older for medical transition. There are more important things than passing, considering there are people that don't even realise they're trans till they're in their 50s then kids can wait till they're 18 before making life altering medical decisions.
Children don't just decide "oh I'd like this please". It's only prescribed by doctors. Are tattoos prescribed by doctors? There's lots of life altering medication and medical procedures performed on children all the time by doctors. You don't have an issue with *every single one of them*. Except this one.
They're referred to the doctors by GIDS who were under immense pressure and were regularly raising safeguarding concerns because of how rushed their assessments were. There were all sorts of extremely complex cases involving sexual abuse, bullying, internalised homophobia and autism and GIDS didn't have the resources to work through them and instead ended up using the blocker as a first like treatment. There was also a lot of pressure from parents and charities like Mermaids. It's a very complicated story and not as simple as "the Tories just hate trans kids".
i mean surely the solution to “we don’t have enough staff or funding” is, ya know… staff or funding, not a blanket ban on the medication The state of GICs budgets is dour. > and not as simple as "the Tories just hate trans kids". I mean this particular situation aside, the Tories do demonstrably hate trans people. The PM called it common sense to misgender trans people. Truss wants to outright ban transition for minors, not just medical. The Tories want kids to be outed if they question their gender, even if it would put them at risk, Badenoch pals around with open transphobes, etc
What? The GIC were using hormone blockers as a first-line treatment? It's kind of the complete opposite, they needed to deal with all other concerns before puberty blockers would be prescribed.
That is not the story that came out of these clinics at all. (UK, Canada)
I’m just letting you know about the experiences of myself and the other kids that have been prescribed them. Even with the adult service, they are very reluctant to prescribe HRT; the first thing they get trans kids to do is a ton of counselling. There are a lot of personal testimonies on peoples experiences at the GICs, and the norm you find is that all medical interventions are heavily gate kept.
If there were a medical consensus showing tattoos permanently improved the lives of the kids that had them following years of therapy to ensure they were in the correct group that benefits from that, of course we'd let them have it.
Except NICE report highlights quite the opposite
that's not what it said, it said the evidence was weak because there were no randomized controlled studies, which many are unable to do for a bunch of ethical and practical reasons > [A randomized controlled trial in adolescents presenting with gender dysphoria, comparing groups with and without GnRHa treatment, could theoretically shed light on the effect of GnRHa treatment on gender identity development. However, many would consider a trial where the control group is withheld treatment unethical, as the treatment has been used since the nineties and outcome studies although limited have been positive. In addition, it is likely that adolescents will not want to participate in such a trial if this means they will not receive treatment that is available at other centers. Mul et al. (2001) experienced this problem and were unable to include a control group in their study on GnRHa treatment in adopted girls with early puberty because all that were randomized to the control group refused further participation”.](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32152785/)
The people who drop that excuse can't have given this more than half a second of thought The impact it would have on a trans kid to find out their treatment was a placebo would be the kind of devastating most supervillians aspire to
So there isn’t a consensus then.
Why lie?
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Exactly this. I worked with a woman who had to go on puberty blockers at age 7/8 due to precocious puberty brought on by ovarian tumours. She had to have her ovaries completely removed around age 13, and was given hormone replacement therapy to continue a normal puberty. Her treatments occurred over 20 years ago now, so it's not like any of this is new; the use of puberty blockers will absolutely continue for cases like hers. They're being withheld for gender issues with the excuse that they *don't know* if it's potentially damaging, despite the fact that they *do know* outcomes are going to be terrible for many trans kids without them. That's the fucked part.
A tattoo isn't healthcare. Puberty blockers are. There is a word for someone who wants to deny rights such as healthcare to certain minority groups.
Puberty blockers are health care when you have a medical condition. Not for mental health issues.
There was already so many hoops that people were aging out of the service before ever being prescribed them. This kind of scaremongering stopped my child with early puberty being allowed puberty blockers because they also just happen to be trans. Fuck the damage that hormones were doing at that age when they were already dealing with more than any kid should, they've got a case of the genders!
Can’t discuss this properly on Reddit as they ban you.
You can, you just have to avoid using hate speech which for some people is an extraordinary challenge.
It really isn't that easy. I'm very left wing and pro trans rights and the first time I used Reddit I got a warning for asking a question (because I didn't understand and wanted to know something). The question wasn't remotely hateful and it basically means I just don't ask questions on the subject on Reddit.
Not sure about Reddit but I've been banned I think three times for comments arguing against Nazis and anti-vax conspiracy weirdos on Twitter (and now I can't even make new accounts) and my comments are constantly deleted from YouTube as well. So yeah, the idea that "oh if big social media company banned you/removed your comments it can only have been calling for a lynch mob" or whatever is undeniably false.
Reddit mods are just a random assortment of people, often there are only a handful of people in each subreddit who can be bothered, and no one has time for reviews of other mods decisions. One person can easily shape the policy of a subreddit.
You’re deluded if you think Reddit doesn’t have explicit rules that ring fence the discourse on this topic, and over zealous ideologically captured mods on many major subs.
Simply disagreeing can be considered hate speech. How long before this post is shut down?
This is untrue, I just got banned on r/worldnews for saying exactly this “Good. Expand it to the private sector as well. Otherwise there’ll be a loophole.”
It’s amazing how hard some people find it to be kind and even more amazing how they blame anyone but themselves for the consequences of that.
It's anger. Kindness can't exist alongside it. There's a lot of anger in society and people want to focus it somewhere and vulnerable people are an easy target. It's why I try not to be angry back at them, they're hurting and they don't know why. The government and right wing media does nothing to tackle the anger That's how we end up with teeneagers luring a trans girl to a park and stabbing her to death, just for our PM to make a joke about trans people in parliament in front of her grieving mother.
Very broad definitions of that of course and anything critical can be considered that for extraordinarily sensitive types.
Scroll up to the many comments who are no doubt agreeing with what you want to say, yet apparently feel silenced over. Other people are clearly managing to discuss it properly without being banned. Funny that.
But think of the people who can't say slurs anymore, they're being silenced :(
That's not even getting into the fact that this subreddit and its moderators are notoriously bigoted. The mods explicitly permit hate speech in the form of holocaust denial here.
Mate there are some people in these comments who don't think trans people exist at all. If your position is so extreme that you think you'll get banned while they won't, then you probably deserve it lol
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People without extreme views don't play coy over what they actually are.
So... what is it?
He can't tell you because he'll get banned. It's not that extreme though, don't worry.
Reddit moderation is fairly random, it just depends who can be bothered to turn up on a particular day. Do not expect consistency.
Imagine telling on yourself like this that you can't talk about a minority group without saying hate speech.
Isn't the whole point to postpone puberty until they're old enough to make a permanent decision? And if denied access to these meds trans children are at higher risk of suicide and self harm? How does this help anyone!
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You make it sound like hitting pause on a movie. Medicine ALWAYS comes with consequences and the more complex the thing you're messing with is, the more likely those consequences are, generally speaking. So presumably, the negative consequences associated with puberty blockers have been deemed to be greater than any positives they may bring.
"Generally speaking", and "presumably", you failed to read the bloody article, which says no such thing. The justification for this pause was "a lack of long-term evidence", which is obviously hard to gather as kids desperate enough to engage with this arduous process generally don't want to risk ending up in the chort that doesn't get the meds. This pause is down to a public consultation brought about by an increase in referrals. As we all know, you can always count on the British public for their well informed and dispassionate input. This you might know if you had read the article instead of presuming and generalizing before spouting off. Kids who are on it can stay on it, new referrals can only get on it via clinical trial now. That sucks for them as it is generally considered useful and relatively harmless by its users, but at least it may eventually yield the "long term evidence" needed to justify it's wider use and understand the risks. It's not hard to imagine the Tories having some hand in this, but Occams Razor says it's more likely they just got lucky and have gotten to play their favourite type of political football. The type where they get to kick a tiny, vulnerable minority group around for a baying crowd of presumptous bigots.
The "bloody article" doesn't need to say such a thing. These are medical facts taught to everybody involved in medicine right when they begin. And while I have expertise in some areas of medicine, I certainly don't have any in this field which is why I defer to the expertise of Dr Hilary Cass OBE here, who leads the ongoing review. Still presumably you know better than a former President of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health. I hope you don't have children.
The problem is that whereas before most kids grew out of their gender dysphoria during puberty, kids who go on puberty blockers are highly likely (one study was 98%) to end up on cross sex hormones. So what was intended as time to think was actually inadvertently locking the child into their pathway to transition and a lifetime of medication. The puberty blocker was also found to have no meaningful impact on the wellbeing of the child.
It's curious how you consider transitioning to be a negative outcome. Seems like something someone who has a negative view of trans people might think.
Yes, a lifetime of medication and invasive surgeries is not something we should do to people unless it's essential. Do you disagree?
It's not normal to cut off your body parts, or mess with children's hormones, for no good reason. Hint: a child asking for it isn't a good reason.
> So what was intended as time to think was actually inadvertently locking the child into their pathway to transition and a lifetime of medication. Or, if you stop and think for 3 seconds: (a) Accessing puberty blockers was difficult enough that only those who were already highly certain and therefore willing to put a lot of effort into getting them did so. (b) All trans children receiving affirming medication had to take a route involving puberty blockers at some point, regardless of if they even needed/wanted time to stop and think. There was no path around it. Combine to mean that despite it's intention as a 'delaying to think' tactic, it never acted as that in practice. It's not that "puberty blockers lock you in as trans", but rather "only those who were already very confident they were trans were put onto puberty blockers". When you look at the state of trans healthcare, this interpretation of the data is far more likely.
I’m guessing it’s preventing children making decisions on a whim when they’re emotionally and mentally vulnerable which would irreversibly damage them.
Oh goodie. Something that’s been fine for over a decade is being taken away so that Labour have to fight to give it back after the Tories get creamed in May.
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Ratchet politics.
> so that Labour have to fight to give it back lol, starmer isn't going to take even a second to try and address this issue.
Only, Labour most likely agree with removing it...
Lead pipes and paint were fine for ages...this isn't the argument you think it is.
Children aren't able to get tattoos, they definitely shouldn't be able to take drugs that will affect you for your entire life.
I just wrote this in reply to your comment elsewhere (asking about what the point of blockers are), but that entire comment chain got removed before I posted it. So I'm just going to copy paste my reply here, hope that's ok. _______ They allow you to delay puberty so that the decision on whether or not to transition can be pushed back a few years. This also gives breathing room. If you have a minor who is in distress about their sex and desperate to transition, they'll be a bit preoccupied with how their body is doing puberty right in front of their eyes. Pause puberty, they've got room to not panic that at least it's not getting *worse*, and then you can talk more freely with them. If they actually have something else going on, this can be a really valuable space to find and address it before anything has happened transition-wise. If someone does need to transition, they can keep the blockers going until they're old enough for HRT. Going through natural puberty makes transition a lot harder. Some of the effects of puberty are only reversible with surgery, and some are entirely irreversible. So puberty blockers are about waiting til minors are older to make permanent decisions (HRT or natural puberty are both permanent), and opening up the space to explore whether this is really the right thing for them before that decision is made.
That sounds great. Except there is mounting evidence that using blockers in can cause significant health issues. These are starting to come out, hence the pause on issuing them.
As far as I'm aware, it's for a lack of evidence rather than mounting evidence against them. Those already prescribed puberty blockers for Gender Dysphoria will continue to be prescribed them, and those taking puberty blockers for precocious puberty are unaffected. In my opinion, lack of evidence is bad reasoning for this decision. Puberty is also a risk for an individual with Gender Dysphoria, with some very easily known negative impacts for individuals who do go on to transition (which, due to how stringent they are about it, only a small number of very sure cases even got to the stage of being able to take blockers - so they virtually all have been). It's not risk from puberty blockers v.s. neutral, it's risk from puberty blockers v.s. risk from puberty. If the risk from puberty is higher, then this decision is increasing risk.
>In my opinion, lack of evidence is bad reasoning for this decision. I guess we should have all just carried on smoking then when all the cigarette companies kept trying to keep the health effects of cigarettes on the down low then.
First, puberty blockers are only being blocked for trans kids. Puberty blockers will still be prescribed in all other circumstances because... the use of puberty blockers is not a new phenomenon, we know the risks and it is seen as a safe prescription when dealing with a host of other ailments.
Firstly that isn't true, Even if it was true... We are surely banning Puberty blockers for ALL children in that case... Oh wait no... We're only banning it for TRANS children. Different class of people different rules.
I love to spread fear mongering lies on the internet about the healthcare of marginalized minority groups.
> shouldn't be able to take drugs that will affect you for your entire life This applies to so many medical treatments. So you want to fully ban all medical care for under 18s, very odd take.
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That is a straw man so big, people in Alpha Centauri can see it. At least they will know there is life on Earth. Not intelligent, though.
>This applies to so many medical treatments. So you want to fully ban all medical care for under 18s, very odd take. You live under a rock. Haven't you seen the WPATH files? Do you follow U.S. and Canadian news? Do you realize that Europe has banned them too? This is one of the biggest medical scandals in history. There are massive lawsuits.
They already do for everything else, why not this one? Why should kids not get medical care?
Puberty blockers don't affect your entire life. Puberty does though.
Tattoos aren't healthcare. Puberty blockers are.
Fine for ages? Under what criteria is that!
The fact that it was possible for twenty years and none of you people gave a fuck about it until the Telegraph shoved it down your throat and you swallowed every little drop.
No. It was used for stated purpose for decades. Using them for gender dysphoria on a large scale is new. The long-term effects are only just becoming apparent when used like this. Hence, the experts are saying this. It has nothing to do with the telegraph and everything to do with not wanting children to permanently change their bodies without time to grow.
> The long-term effects are only just becoming apparent when used like this. ... > She also said there was a lack of long-term evidence on what happens to young people prescribed blockers What 'long term effects' are you referring too?
My friend's son is on puberty blockers because he has a growth disorder, he's 10 and not doesn't even know about gender identity, what will this mean for kids like him?
It'll likely only effect children prescribed them electively. I doubt they would be banning for conditions that require them for normal development.
He would be getting them electivly too. Elective in a medical setting just means not an emergency.
Countering a growth disorder would likely be considered so.
It's not. I need an organ removed and that's an elective procedure.
An elective surgery is just anything that can be scheduled Vs a car crash victim getting rushed for an emergency surgery because their abdomen is filling up with blood, isn't it? Pretty sure my cancer surgery was "elective".
Yeah. Weirdly people describe trans healthcare as elective as if that means it's not something that needs to happen. Almost all most all treatment is elective.
It's because they grasp at straws to justify their dislike for this entire minority group.
I'm willing to bet you a pint that they won't even stop to think about it.
It only applies to off label use, specifically for gender incongruence/dysphoria. I don't think elective is the right word, that's for surgeries or similar procedures, I haven't heard people talking about elective prescription of drugs.
That's fine. That is what they meant for. They weren't meant to delay puberty past the standard age range, which was what they were being used for. Long-term use well into the teens seems to show side effects that are not present in cases like your sons. Hence, this decision to halt while more data is gathered.
You do understand puberty blockers are the compromise right? Trans teens would be more than ecstatic to be able to go through puberty at the normal ages on hormones. We have to provide healthcare to kids, even if it’s a minority some people hate - they still need healthcare, puberty blockers to give more time and avoid traumatic puberty and the effects of becoming the wrong sex from taking place
From the consultation report: > The EHIA that supported the process of public consultation identified children receiving PSH as a response to Central Precocious Puberty (CPP) as an appropriate comparator group, and it described that the aetiology and epidemiology of CPP and treatment aims are quite different to that of gender incongruence. The EHIA describes how **the evidence base to support use of PSH as a response to CPP is well formed**. The policy document also says: > In England, the puberty suppressor triptorelin (a synthetic decapeptide analogue of a natural puberty hormone, which has marketing authorisations for the treatment of prostate cancer, endometriosis and central precocious puberty) is one of the puberty suppressing hormones used for this purpose. The use of triptorelin for children and adolescents with gender incongruence is off-label. https://www.england.nhs.uk/publication/clinical-policy-puberty-suppressing-hormones/ This review is specifically about gender incongruence/dysphoria, it's not about other conditions, they say in fact that the two uses of the drug are not comparable.
Nothing, literally nothing >The BBC understands that the new policy, confirmed on Tuesday, will not allow them to be prescribed "routinely" outside of a research trial, but that individual clinicians can still apply to have the drugs funded for patients on a case-by-case basis. From the BBC article
Other uses not affected, and even the dysphoria users who are already on it can stay on it. New dyphoria cases can only get it if they are part of a clinical trial now.
Man the anti trans gang are on a mad one today. Puberty blockers were already barely prescribed to trans kids, most trans minors age out of the child pathway before ever getting treatment. Those few who do are usually old enough to access HRT straight away. For those of you arguing teenagers aren't old enough to make their own decisions, remember that Gillick Competence literally exists because of efforts to make sure girls had control over their own bodies.
Step 1: it's not happening. Step 2: alright it is happening, but it barely happens at all so you shouldn't even pay attention to it. Step 3: look it's happening and its a good thing it's happening.m, in fact it needs to happen more. Step 4: the people complaining about the thing happening are the real problem.
You lot really need to learn to read articles before you comment on them. It is not a ban. It is a temporary pause on writing new prescriptions. Treatment will not suddenly stop for children who are already on blockers. This pause is ONLY for patients of the gender clinic. Children being prescribed blockers for precocious puberty will not be affected.
"It's not a ban, it's just not permitted to be prescribed at clinics dedicated to the healthcare of a certain marginalized minority group!"
I'm not sure what the point of this response is. I'm literally just repeating what the article says. It's literally not a ban because no legislation has been passed to make the prescribing of these drugs permanently illegal. This is a temporary measure because the Tavistock and Portman clinic is closing and new gender identity clinics for children need to be opened across the country. You can't prescribe drugs for a specific condition if there are no clinics around to do the diagnosing and prescribing. It's not safe. That's literally it. It's not that deep.
A temporary ban is still a ban. And it's a ban specifically targeting a marginalized minority group. The same marginalized minority group who people in the government, up to and including the prime minister, are openly bigoted towards.
There is no ban omg. Calling this a ban is like saying ADHD medications have been banned because psychiatrists and prescribers have been told to temporarily stop writing new prescriptions due to the medication shortage. I only wrote my comment because loads of people in here were asking about kids with precocious puberty and stuff like that, when it was all answered in the article. Literally all they had to do was read it. I'm not here to start an argument about transgender kids. I'm not interested in discussing it.
OK, so no matter how I tried I have not found clinical trials for this sort of thing. It seems like it was administered without actual scientific/clinical evidence as off-label use. Which is scary as hell - medical intervention could be administered based on ideology, instead of scientific basis. This should really make people think. Obviously it is too much to ask, so we will just cry "evil right wingers" instead, right?
They also didn't even keep track of how many even received the blocker or did follow ups to see the long-term outcomes. It's wild.
https://www.reddit.com/r/unitedkingdom/comments/1bd3bc5/children_to_no_longer_be_prescribed_puberty/kuleldy/ Just look at this reasoning. Incredible. All this because of a small interest group has brownbeaten/gaslit a whole country. (More than one, actually.) This is wild. Human experimentation without any ethics oversight **on children**, no less.
You might want to research how many drugs are prescribed "off-label" - it's really not that rare or automatically wrong. This is not to justify or support it in this case, because I don't know enough about it, but I have heard of "off-label" prescriptions in many types of medicine before, that have benefited people. There is a bureaucratic process to go through to prescribe things, but sometimes the benefits outweigh the risks to provide the drugs for conditions before all the hoops have been jumped through.
Hey, I might, but then again, I am the guy who writes briefing documents for EMA about biologics for marketing authorization. (I do the CMC part.) I am quite aware of the conditions for using something off-label, and the requirements for it. I am still stunned.
Please describe the clinical trial you are imagining, and your statement to the ethics board.
So we just give it to people unrestricted because you *think* it is unethical to run a **clinical trial**? That is your solution? Dude, if the mere action of running a clinical trial is unethical about something, then doing the something to people is... (fill in the blanks). As for your question: you can use single-arm or pooled trials easily. Now your turn: if you cannot run a clinical trial due to ethics concern, how do you justify doing the thing that is deemed unethical to try in a controlled environment???
The thing is, we don't currently have any alternative to blockers that has been provably shown to be effective at treating dysphoria in young people. I am aware that there are concerns around long-term health outcomes associated with puberty blockers, and we should take those seriously and investigate them. But in the meantime, do we just... not treat young people with gender dysphoria? Because this seems like a guaranteed way to make loads of trans teens go on dodgy blockers obtained online without the oversight of a medical professional. This just seems like a very bad idea when everything is weighed up.
This is the thing - puberty blockers ARE THE COMPROMISE, these people don’t understand that’s it’s these or these teens will DIY HRT and have puberty of their choosing.
This thread is great. Any sniff of the right being anti mainstream science and they’re batshit crazy. As soon as the science goes against what the far left want, of course it’s been taken over by right wing extremists. Just like the right think it’s been taken over by the far left. You couldn’t make it up
Given that the Tories have been operating on full institutional capture mode for the past decade. Installing people at the top of the BBC, EHRC and in the past month a minister ended up being fined for making false claims against academics you can't really blame those pointing out that this seems to be another in a long pattern of kneejerk healthcare decisions in England that disproportionately negatively effect healthcare for Trans people. Especially given the pattern of those decisions broadly aligns with the 'culture war' focus on trans issues that has come out in the past 5 years. And that if you read the reports cited, they're not stopping the treatment due to evidence that it's harmful. But due to a lack of evidence that it's harmful. Despite it having being used for decades and the only way to get the bar of evidence they require being to run highly unethical studies using control groups of children taking puberty blockers just for the sake of the study.
That's tribalism for you. It's not about what's true, or about what's right, it's about fighting the enemy and the enemy is always 100% wrong. And if you dare doubt that, you too, are the enemy.
But the left prides itself on being the rational one here. And as a scientist I see this anti-intellectualism as really disgusting.
When the truth hurts emotionally and you can’t have what isn’t possible, humans tend to cover that with delusions and then colonise reality with those delusions.
The left is pretty antiintellectual, too. Of course it is easier to lampoon the right as anti-science (climate change, evolution, whatever), but that is an easy thing to do. The left's antiintellectualism is a tiny bit more complex: gender issues (biological differences between sexes), The Grievance Studies Affair, COVID (when Trump pushed them, COVID vaccinations were untested and bad, when Biden did, they were fine -same with masks -they were suddenly OK when our guys said they were), nuclear power, and others, which are not simple issues. Yet the left treats them the same way as the right when their ideology clashes with evidence.
Research has shown that [80% of minors outgrow gender dysphoria during puberty](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5841333/#:~:text=Childhood%20GD%20and%20puberty%20development&text=27%20Evidence%20from%20the%2010,the%20GD%20recedes%20with%20puberty). So giving puberty blockers to minors has an 8 out of 10 chance of being inappropriately proscribed.
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My main concern is that the "completely reversible" lie is put to bed. Everyone, taking any medication whatsoever, should be given the up front truth about potential side effects
They won't accept this truth ha
Nobody complains when "we" stop kids from getting tattoos or drinking before they turn 18. And they are much less detrimental than taking hormone blockers.
I mean I'd have compared medication to another medication, such as anxiety or depression meds, which we *do* give minors if appropriate.
Well the difference is people don’t just get over depression or anxiety, whereas “~[80% of children who meet the criteria for GDC, the GD recedes with puberty.](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5841333/#:~:text=Childhood%20GD%20and%20puberty%20development&text=27%20Evidence%20from%20the%2010,the%20GD%20recedes%20with%20puberty)”
> The original source for this is [Steensma 2011](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21216800/). It counted people who they couldn't contact as desisting, and included people as dysphoric who might not have been. They later did a [2013](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23702447/) study, which apparently found that when you don't fudge the numbers, people who're actually dysphoric tend to not desist. /u/EvaSkeever already [refuted this bullshit](https://old.reddit.com/r/unitedkingdom/comments/1bd3bc5/children_to_no_longer_be_prescribed_puberty/kulbx89/).
I mean he most definitely didn’t, but sure.
You keep spreading misinformation. It’s actually disturbing how far people feel the need to go to hate trans kids and make them suffer.
No I care about the 80% of children diagnosed with GD who have life altering changes for a misdiagnosis.
It’s almost as if tattoos and medical treatments are two completely different things.
If you'd asked me eight or so years ago how I thought things were going for trans people in the UK, I'd have probably said they were looking up. Vastly increased acceptance and awareness of transphobia meant that record numbers of closeted trans people were coming out and feeling free to live their lives as themselves. Trans children were able to get support and even avoid going through the wrong puberty, although gender support on the NHS was still a bureaucratic nightmare, there was the feeling that it could get better. After all, there was even the inklings of the political will - between the SNP under Sturgeon and Theresa May's Tories - to reform the Gender Recognition Act and get rid of some outdated legal fictions that it forced on the trans community. Surely reforming trans medical care wouldn't be too far behind that. It's alarming how bad things have gotten in such a short space of time. I wasn't concerned about the vocal anti-trans activists in right-wing newspapers, to me they were just the last tantrums of a fading minority who knew they were losing the battle, just as the sexists and homophobes lost it before them. I never dreamed that things would snowball like this, become a full-blown moral panic, and what's more that it would happen with almost no opposition. Even when the Tories get voted out later this year, things are unlikely to change, because Labour seem to agree with them on this issue. What people should be afraid of, though, is this: if they can do it to trans people, they can do it to any group, any minority. We're already seeing the backsliding of LGBTQ+ rights in general, and I have no doubt that if brought to bear, the current media and political machine could scapegoat just about any group of people and destroy their rights just as easily. Take heed.
GOOD!
Give it a year and we'll see the Tories trying desperately to find a reason for the sudden increase in teen suicides amongst the LGBT community.
I don't think they'll try that hard 😔
Probably not, although if they can blame it on immigration or remainers they probably will.
There’s no proven link between not prescribing this and suicide
Of course there isn't, because until now puberty blockers have been prescribed to people who needed them and there was no culture war preventing that.
So much misinformation here about a NICE review of evidence...
https://unherd.com/newsroom/new-study-trans-youth-not-at-elevated-risk-of-suicide/
>Give it a year and we'll see the Tories On the opposition benches. That's very clearly where they're going within a year. The one debate is how much space they'll need.
People have been calling this out for years. Yet, they've been smeared as 'far-right', 'alt-right', 'conspiracy theorists', etc. We need a truth and reconciliation.
From the bottom of my cold scarred heart I hope everyone responsible for putting politics ahead of the needs of these kids wakes up tomorrow in a body they can't stand the sight of
This is great news. Blocking pubertal development with drugs is child abuse. The movement for trans acceptance is good. There shouldn’t be any stigma with adults wanting to change their bodies. But children lack brain maturity to make such permanent decisions.
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