Blunder
Oh oops really? That’s embarrassing.
The evidence for using puberty blocking drugs to treat young people struggling with their gender identity is “very low”, an official review has found.
Uh oh. So all those kids we’ve put on puberty blockers have messed up their brain development and bone density and whatnot to no purpose? Oops. Our bad!
The National Institute of Health and Care Excellence (NICE) said existing studies of the drugs were small and “subject to bias and confounding”.
…
The NICE evidence review looked at what impact puberty blockers had on gender dysphoria, mental health – such as depression, anger and anxiety – and quality of life.
NICE, which provides national guidance and advice to improve health and social care, said: “The quality of evidence for these outcomes was assessed as very low certainty.”
Ok fine so it turns out the puberty blockers were not treatment, they were an experiment. It’s fine to do experiments with tweaking the sexual development of teenagers by telling them the experiments are a treatment! Fine and ethical and very progressive.
NICE also reviewed the evidence base for gender-affirming hormones – sometimes known as cross-sex hormones. These can be given to young people with gender dysphoria from age 16 in the NHS.
Oestrogen may be given to people who are registered or assigned male at birth, and testosterone to females, to start the development of the physical sex characteristics of the gender with which they identify. The aim is to improve mental health, quality of life and body image.
The review found the evidence of clinical effectiveness and safety of gender-affirming hormones was also of “very low” quality. “Any potential benefits of gender-affirming hormones must be weighed against the largely unknown long-term safety profile of these treatments in children and adolescents with gender dysphoria,” NICE said.
First do no harm.
That’s not NICE at all!
Well, that’s NICE on the naughty list. I’m sure that the TAs will respond by claiming that the evidence is irrelevant, it’s the ‘lived experience’ that matters. They’ll go on to criticise NICE for making such hateful statements based on what they admit is based on a small amount of biased (against the trans, no doubt) studies, and question NICE’s reasons for wanting ‘trans youth’ to commit suicide en masse.
Anyway, the use of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones really makes a nonsense of the TWAW/TMAM dogma. If the claims were true then there’d be no need to push the drugs, would there?
To hateful and transphobic people, this might seem to suggest a link between “physical sex characteristics” and “gender”, which only goes to show, once again, how totally blinded by bigotry these people really are. No physical characteristics are any more or less aligned with a specific gender than any other. Any body that belongs to a person who identifies as female is a female body and any body that belongs to a person who identifies as male is a male body, end of story.
The haste and lack of care involved in giving these experimental treatments to teenagers makes it seem as if the teenagers themselves were in charge.
NOW I SAID NOW GOTTA GOTTA GOTTA O COME OOOOOON I WANT IT NOOOOOOOOWWWWW!
You’re so mean.
I first started reading about trans people in Time magazine back in the 1970s. It was kind of a freak show; very medicalized; lots of focus on the surgery.
What I also remember is that a just a few years later one of the big east-coast U.S. clinics announced that they were no longer doing gender-reassignment surgery, because they found that it did not improve psychological outcomes in the people who received it.
This is a dog’s breakfast, even beyond the stupid “assigned…at birth” formulation.
What are “the physical sex characteristics of the gender with which they identify?” Aren’t there supposed to be a billion different genders? What hormones do they use for neutrois? Or a demi-boy? And spare a thought for the gender fluid. Funny how when it comes down to the crunch, there seem to be only two choices. How is it possible for a “gender,” which is allegedly an idea or feeling in your head, to have “physical sex characteristics?” I .think I know what they’re trying to say, but they’re doing a piss-poor job of doing it. “We’ll pump you full of hormones usually found in the opposite sex, i.e. the one you aren’t, but of which you think you are a member. We can’t actually change your sex, but we’re going to do this anyhow.”
not Bruce, I think you are giving them too much credit for thinking it out at all.