Mick Hartley

The Times – Children as young as 10 to be given puberty blockers in NHS trial. The paper edition this morning has the headline “NHS trial to inject transgender children with puberty blockers” for this article – which, wisely, they’ve decided to change. Transgender children are a social contagion, not a medical category. Anyway…

Dozens of children will be given puberty blockers on the NHS from early next year after a trial was granted ethical approval.

Ethical approval?? Giving powerful drugs to young children which are going to stop their natural progression through puberty, and which we have very good reason to believe cause irreversible harm?How on earth can this be considered ethical? It’s treating children like lab rats. It’s a horror show.

The study by King’s College London will recruit about 250 girls and boys aged 10 to 15 who identify as transgender, and who have parental consent.

More than half will be injected with a hormone-suppressing drug that pauses the physical changes of puberty, such as breasts, periods or facial hair.

Incredible. Who are these parents? Have they been fooled into the old lie about kids killing themselves if they don’t …stamps feet…get their nice new “gender identity” which they’ve been told on social media will solve all their problems?

The team at King’s said the study was vital to provide children struggling with gender identity with the “information that they need to make informed choices about their care”. 

And, yes, of course. the doctors. Vital? To give young children life-changing drugs as part of a trial?

It will be led by Professor Emily Simonoff, a psychiatrist at King’s. She said children would need consent from a parent or legal guardian and would receive therapy throughout.

Simonoff said the trial would assess three main potential risks and harms of puberty blockers: decreased bone strength, long-term damage to fertility and “the impact on brain development and brain function”. Potential benefits include reducing anxiety and depression, and “better alignment between body features and long-term identity”.

Christ. “Decreased bone strength, long-term damage to fertility and the impact on brain development and brain function”. These aren’t trivial side effects. Have these doctors not heard of that “first do no harm” stuff?

It’s worth revisiting David Bell here, the retired psychiatrist and Tavistock whistle-blower. From March (archived) – “It beggars belief that, after the Cass Review, we would even consider a clinical trial for hormone suppressant drugs for children”.

To be clear, the prescription of puberty blockers in the context of a trial would, in effect, introduce a known risk of systemic physical harm to a physically healthy child. To put it mildly, this is a divergence from normal clinical trial practice.