The Lifeboat News: Tavistock experiment on puberty blockers

(2 March 2019)

Trans Gender Trend -- IN 2010, Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust’s Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) launched a trial of puberty blockers for children in their early teens with gender dysphoria. This was—and remains—an experimental treatment. These drugs, Gonadotropin-Releasing Hormone agonists (GnRHa), have not been certified as a safe or effective treatment for gender dysphoria by their manufacturers, nor by the National Institute for Clinical Excellence.

The Director of GIDS, Polly Carmichael, was keenly aware of the controversy over these drugs. ‘The question is, if you halt your own sex hormones so that your brain is not experiencing puberty, are you in some way altering the course of nature?’ (Guardian, 14 August 2008). ‘[T]he debate revolves around the reversibility of this intervention—physical and also psychological, in terms of the possible influence of sex hormones on brain and identity development’ (Carmichael and Davidson 2009). Before 2010, GIDS administered blockers to children only when they reached 16; this is the age at which young people have the presumptive capacity to consent to medical treatment.

This cautious approach was vociferously opposed by two organizations devoted to transgendering of children, Mermaids and the Gender Identity Research and Education Society. As Carmichael later recounted: ‘There was a lot of pressure coming from certain group [sic] to introduce it—families were travelling abroad because they knew it was available in Holland and America. As a service, we didn’t have the evidence one way or the other, so the best way to do it was as part of a research study’ (Vice, 16 November 2016).

Tavistock Trust announced the study on its website in April 2011. It stated that GnRHa treatment ‘is deemed reversible’. This assertion contradicted the study’s own research protocol (which I obtained under Freedom of Information from the NHS Health Research Authority). ‘It is not clear [my emphasis] what the long term effects of early suppression may be on bone development, height, sex organ development, and body shape and their reversibility if treatment is stopped during pubertal development’ (Early Pubertal Suppression in a Carefully Selected Group of Adolescents with Gender Identity Disorder, 4 November 2010, Research Ethics Committee number 10/H0713/79). A paediatrician on the study team, Russell Viner, frankly acknowledged the risks. ‘If you suppress puberty for three years the bones do not get any stronger at a time when they should be, and we really don’t know what suppressing puberty does to your brain development. We are dealing with unknowns’ (Daily Mail, 25 February 2012).
[...]
[...]
[...]

The abstract describing the baseline characteristics of the children in the 2010–14 study concluded: ‘Assessment of growth, bone health and psychological outcomes will [my emphasis] be important to assess the medium and long-term safety and effectiveness of early intervention’ (Gunn et al. 2015b). However, GIDS apparently failed to collect any data on its experimental subjects after they turned 18. In a startling admission, Carmichael and coauthors blame ‘the frequent change in nominal and legal identity, including NHS number in those referred on to adult services’—‘to date they have not been able to be followed up’ (Butler et al. 2018). (Transgender activists successfully lobbied the NHS to provide new numbers to patients as well as to change the ‘gender’ on their medical records.)

To summarize, GIDS launched a study to administer experimental drugs to children suffering from gender dysphoria. Between 2010 and 2014, puberty blockers were given to 50 children. This study yielded only one published scientific article on outcomes. It showed no evidence for the effectiveness of GnRHa: there was no statistically significant difference in psychosocial functioning between the group given blockers and the group given only psychological support. In addition, there is unpublished evidence that after a year on GnRHa children reported greater self-harm, and that girls experienced more behavioural and emotional problems and expressed greater dissatisfaction with their body—so puberty blockers exacerbated gender dysphoria. Yet the study has been used to justify rolling out this drug regime to several hundred children aged under 16. Almost five years after the last patient was enrolled in the experiment, there is no evidence to substantiate Carmichael’s claim ‘that the results thus far have been positive’.

TransgenderTrend LINK https://www.transgendertrend.com/tavistock-experiment-puberty-blockers/?fbclid=IwAR044lYsJ2yFK-NJATveJqkRmePRTpkDV4M3XBmMf-qWVpwh4dYPWFbgbGQ