Mick Hartley

From the Telegraph – How the Dutch experiment with puberty blockers turned toxic:

The deliberations of the Dutch parliament rarely make waves in the UK, but a motion passed by its MPs last week may have a profound effect on the way the NHS treats children seeking gender reassignment.

In short, the Dutch government has been told to conduct research into the physical and mental health outcomes of children given puberty blockers, which tends to be the first step on the pathway to changing gender. Cross-sex hormone treatment and surgery often follow.

The reason this is such a big deal is that the Netherlands pioneered the use of puberty blockers, using guidelines known as the Dutch Protocol, which has been copied in the UK and around the world since it was first published by a clinic in Amsterdam in 1998.

The fact that the Dutch are now having doubts about a practice they effectively exported to the rest of the world has obvious implications, not least for the NHS….

Campaigners against the use of puberty blockers believe the Dutch parliament’s decision to order an investigation into them could represent a major turning point in what they refer to as the “Wild West” of gender dysphoria treatment.

“The house of cards has started to fall,” says Stephanie Davies-Arai, the director of Transgender Trend, a UK organisation which calls for evidence-based care for children with gender dysphoria. “Country by country, this whole area of healthcare has been examined and found wanting.

“It’s hugely significant for the UK because the Dutch Protocol was used as a kind of template for everybody else….

Critics of the Dutch Protocol have long complained that it was based on flawed research, that clinicians prescribe blockers as a way of pausing puberty when in fact they cause irreversible physical changes, and that data on their long-term effects is at best patchy and at worst shows that they cause more problems than they solve, including reduced bone density.

When the paediatrician Hilary Cass was asked to conduct an independent review of GIDS, she said in an interim report published in 2022 that the “unquestioning affirmative approach” to children who were unsure of their gender overshadowed the need to look into comorbidities, such as poor mental health.

In other words, children who may be struggling with physical changes to their bodies for all sorts of reasons are being given irreversible medical treatments when in many cases the real cause of their unhappiness may involve autism, depression, ADHD, anxiety or abuse.

With the power of social media now, though, you don't need anything more than an entirely normal apprehension, and the lack of confidence that comes with puberty – especially perhaps for young girls – to believe that puberty blockers might just be the answer. Your body changes; your social world changes, and it's all a bit scary. And these youngsters pick up on the latest trends, and the fashionable concerns that dominate the world they're immersed in. Perhaps they really were "born in the wrong body". Then, instead of letting puberty run its natural course, these unhappy teens are subject to serious and irreversible medical intervention – where the long-term effects, disgracefully, have never been properly researched. Puberty blockers are powerful drugs, and we know that their use will almost certainly lead on to hormone replacement therapy, and possibly to surgery.

Davies-Arai believes we are now at the beginning of the end of the widespread use of puberty blockers.

“At some point we will look back in horror at this, as we look back now on lobotomies,” she observes. “It might take a long time because this generation of children has been indoctrinated, but hopefully younger children will now be spared.”