UK — England. Expert testimony from the Keira Bell court case that persuaded judges effectively to ban the prescription of puberty blockers to gender-questioning children has been made public this week.
British newspapers The Sunday Times and Daily Mail successfully overturned a court order banning publication of clinicians’ testimony, arguing it was in the public interest to hear evidence that:
- puberty blockers are associated with impairment in brain development, bone strength and significantly higher risks of heart attacks and blood clots
- vulnerable teenagers such as those with autism or anorexia are being steered towards gender transition as a solution for other problems
- there is growing evidence of transition regret amongst those have undergone medical interventions
- there has existed failure to inform families that ‘almost all’ children grow out of gender dysphoria and that suicide rates are higher amongst those who receive medical intervention than those who ‘wait and see’
Professor Stephen Levine, a clinical psychiatrist and expert in the field of gender treatment, said puberty suppression medicine – also used for infertility, prostate cancer and to ‘chemically castrate’ violent sex offenders – was “experimental” and the injections had not been scientifically established as a “safe and effective intervention in the short or long term”.
He said: “There was no other field of medicine where such radical interventions are offered to children with such a poor evidence base.”
The NHS Tavistock Centre’s Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) with clinics in London and Leeds, began prescribing puberty blockers to under-16s in 2011. There has been growing concern ever since about the irreversible, life-changing dangers, and the steep rise in the number of children, especially girls, being referred for treatment.
Referrals of girls to the Tavistock rose from just 32 in 2009/10 to 1,740 in 2018/19, a staggering increase of 5,337% in less than a decade.
In December, the clinic suspended referrals for puberty blockers after judges ruled it was “highly unlikely” and “very doubtful” under-16s could give informed consent to a treatment whose long-term effects were unknown even to the medical profession, and that 16 and 17-year-olds should need the approval of a court to commence medical intervention.
Now the publication of expert testimony shines a light on some of the evidence that led to this ruling, which effectively left GIDS at risk of medical negligence charges if it continued to prescribe puberty blockers to children. The clinic has lodged an appeal against the ruling.
Long-term harm to physical health
The court heard from Professor Sophie Scott, director of University College London’s Institute for Cognitive Neuroscience, that “puberty blockers have profound effects on the developing body, and as part of the changes seen in adolescence involve hormonal effects on brain function, the impact of these drugs on the brain maturation are likely to be deleterious”.
Prof Levine, from Cleveland, Ohio, also warned of “life-long consequences”. He said the vast majority of females on puberty blockers for two years had lower bone density than their peers’ and early research indicated “negative effects on IQ for gender-dysphoric children”.
He said nearly 100 per cent of children treated with puberty blockers went on to take cross-sex hormones, which trigger “irreversible changes” such as hair growth and a deepening voice in females and the growth of breasts in males. Recent studies showed a four-fold increased risk of heart attacks in biological females and three times the risk of deep-vein blood clots in biological males after treatment.
Fashion instead of science
Prof Levine said modern approaches to dealing with gender confusion were based on a “cultural fashion” rather than science. And there had been no controlled clinical trials – the gold standard of scientific testing – for puberty blockers.
Scientific requirements for establishing an intervention’s utility are well known in medicine. Advances are undertaken through carefully controlled clinical trials. Why should gender problems be considered an exception?Prof Stephen Levine, evidence to High Court Dec 2020
Prof Christopher Gillberg, an expert in child and adolescent psychiatry with posts at universities in Glasgow and Sweden, said: “In my years as a physician, I cannot remember an issue of greater significance for the practice of medicine. We have left established evidence-based clinical practice and are using powerful life-altering medication for a vulnerable group of adolescents and children based upon a belief.”
Increased risk of suicide
Prof Gillberg said that, if left alone, the gender dysphoria usually resolved itself, and that as girls grew up they accepted that they wanted to live as women.
John Whitehall, professor of paediatrics at Western Sydney University in Australia, said that information given to families attending the Tavistock clinic “does not appear to share with confused children and their parents and carers the statistical assurance that almost all confused children will revert to an identity congruent with chromosomes through puberty, that ‘puberty blockers’ and cross-sex hormones have structural effects on the brain, and the warning that the rate of suicide in adults is significantly higher after transgendering.”
Autistic children especially vulnerable
The court heard evidence that teenagers with autism or anorexia and those with difficult childhoods were more likely to say they wanted to change sex. A paper published in 2020 suggested autism spectrum disorders had “a prevalence of 6%-26% in transgender populations”, much higher than the 0.9% prevalence in the general population.
Prof Gillberg said that in 45 years of treating autistic children, he saw few cases of gender confusion until 2013. Since then there had been a worldwide explosion in the number of children, mainly girls, saying they wanted to change sex.
Gillberg said: “Adolescence can be a particularly turbulent time when young people often make reckless decisions they later regret. Young people with autism and young people with anorexia nervosa are particularly vulnerable.”
There was “growing anecdotal evidence that many would regret their decision to undergo the biological sex change”. Doctors should tell families that they were “dealing with a live experiment on adolescents and children”.
Read more from other sources
Daily Mail
The physicians’ testimony that led High Court judge to ban child puberty blocker drugs
Exposed: the evidence of ‘a live experiment’ being conducted on vulnerable children.
The Sunday Times
Autistic girls seeking answers are ‘seizing on sex change’
Experts on gender dysphoria say vulnerable teenagers are being steered towards harmful interventions.
I wonder if the tide is turning and whether the Keira Bell case has worldwide repercussions, as I found this piece on proposed legislation in Mississippi, which pleasantly surprised me, and definitely merits investigating:
https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2021/01/mississippi-may-ban-trans-people-21-receiving-healthcare/
I love how ‘LGBTQ Nation’ calls it a bill against ‘healthcare’… it’s a bill against needlessly mutilating children at an age when they are incapable of making life altering decisions (and are being groomed by AGP coomers online).
I always gobsmacked as to how it became acceptable within some cultures to mutilate the genitals of their children, both FGM and circumcision. ….But here we are. Another form of mutilating children with a perverted focus on their sex characteristics.
It is worse than circumcision, by far.
I can’t believe people think it’s ok for a child to have a sex change operation. There’s this YouTuber called Samantha Lux (who’s a transgender woman) who encourages having children be transgender.
Here’s a comment from Samantha Lux from one of her YouTube videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GmgP8fNIo_0
“For those of you commenting “I’d never let my child make that decision”, if it wasn’t clear from the video, being trans is not a “decision” a child makes. Stop punishing your child by making them stay in a body they don’t identify with, it’s not their fault that they’re emotionally intelligent and understand their identity young. If you want what’s best for their mental health in the short AND long run, take them to a well-qualified, well-researched gender therapist and have them evaluated for gender dysphoria. Don’t punish them just because YOU don’t understand them. Puberty is poison for transgender kids, by forcing them to go through it, you’re forcing them into years of discomfort and misery. All love 💚”
Samantha Lux also made a video about puberty blockers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwgjGlrCdrw
People like Samantha Lux are a bad influence! Does she realize that there’s a lot of transgender people who regret transitioning and want their gender back, and most of them who regret it transitioning had it done when they were young?
There’s even a documentary about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pxxBQm114k
I’m pretty sure “growing up in the wrong body” isn’t going to negatively effect someone as bad as having something permanent done to them and then later regretting it. The number of transgender people who regret having a sex change operation and later committing suicide because of it are very high.
I’m pretty sure the number of transgender people who regret having a sex change operation and want their gender back are higher than most people think it is, but they keep it to themselves and to try their best to pretend to be happy about it.
Does idiots like Samantha Lux realize that stuff like sex change operations and puberty blockers are man-made things, and that humans survived and did perfectly fine without them for thousands of years?
A sex change operation is permanent. Once someone has one, their lose their natural genitalia and in most cases, they lose their ability to reproduce. A sex change isn’t a little thing like how simple-minded people like Samantha Lux are acting like it is, and that’s a decision that only an adult should be making about their body.
When I was growing up, I knew plenty of girls who wanted to be boys, and they did things like acting like boys and having most of their friends be boys, but when they got older, they became a lot of feminine and were happy that they were girls. They were just tomboys and didn’t actually want to be boys. If they would have grown up in today’s world, their parents probably would have had them have sex change operations and then their lives would have been ruined because of that.
People like Samantha Lux make me mad. She made a video about why transgender women should be allowed in female sports:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GletkHtBiE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F5-gGLd0PPY
Anyone who has a full working brain should be able to understand why it’s a bad idea for transgender women to be able to compete with biological women in sports.
Also, Samantha Lux is a drama queen who makes videos about whining about the hate comments she gets, but you are bound to get hate comments when you are encouraging stuff like children being transgender and transgender women being allowed in women sports. And if you are a YouTuber and can’t handle hate comments, then you don’t belong on YouTube.
Samantha Lux is a very hateful and confused young man. He and his cult-like followers are largely responsible for YouTube and Twitter deplatforming the feminist Vanessa Vokey.
In the early 80s, I was one of those girls who “wanted to be a boy”. However, I had been raped by two men when I was 13 and I can now clearly see that I was trying to eradicate my attractiveness to males. I am incredibly grateful that my parents/school/friends called me by my new male name and didn’t comment on my ‘male’ clothes and very short hair, so that I could go through it in my own time (in my case, a year or two). I am horrified to think what would have happened if I had been born in the 2000s…