Genspect condemns reckless new trial of puberty blockers for gender distressed youth
By Genspect
Despite providing no services to support the growing number of detransitioners living with debilitating health difficulties caused by medical transition procedures, the NHS will nonetheless proceed with a dangerous new trial of experimental puberty blocking drugs.
“These are extremely potent, dangerous drugs being injected into children for the sake of an experiment. They do not improve and can often worsen mental health. There are absolutely no benefits to these drugs for children suffering complex psychological issues.” Keira Bell, detransitioner.
As the trial protocol itself acknowledges, puberty blockers disrupt the natural pathway to recovery from gender related distress, causing persistence to sterilising cross sex hormones in 98% of young people who take them. The existing research shows us that the vast majority of the gender distressed young people who enrol in this trial would have experienced spontaneous recovery under a supportive watchful waiting approach, with many growing up to be happily same sex attracted adults. Instead, the NHS trial will ensure they become medical patients for life.
Detransition and regret are perhaps the best known adverse outcomes of the medical transition pathway that begins with puberty blockers, with more and more detransitioners bravely stepping forward to tell their stories of medical harm every day. Yet the words ‘detransition’ and ‘regret’ are not mentioned even once in the trial protocol.
“I understand these blockers are being presented to you as a “pause in time”. I can tell you as someone who’s taken them for almost 3 years, it’s not that simple. There is no such thing as pausing time, time flows but it is not like a river that can be blocked. Puberty blockers remove its proper function forever.” Detransitioned Beyond Trans service user.
The protocol has been designed in apparent ignorance of what is known about detransition and regret, and therefore contains no safeguards against the most predictable long term harm that begins with puberty blockade. Detransition and regret take between seven and eleven years to manifest, yet the NHS trial will run for just two years. It is therefore incapable of advancing knowledge about the most well known adverse effect of the intervention it claims to be testing.
By adopting the activist created ICD-11 diagnosis of ‘gender incongruence’ the trial promises to unnecessarily medicalise naturally gender non-conforming youth. Children as young as ten may be placed on puberty blockers under the terms of the trial, and all that is required to qualify for a diagnosis of ‘gender incongruence’ is that the child exhibits sex non-conforming interests and behaviours and expresses discomfort with their body and with regressive sex stereotypes about expected male and female behaviour.
Sex non-conformity should not be seen as a medical disorder warranting radical intervention on the bodies of perfectly healthy children, particularly when it has been well established that they are disproportionately likely to be neurodivergent or to grow up to be same sex attracted.
“I understand the fear and the awkwardness of growing up in a gender role or expression that doesn’t fit you. This is a normal experience for lots of people, and you shouldn’t be made to feel like you need to change your body to be accepted by other people.” Detransitioned Beyond Trans service user.
Neurodivergent youth will not be excluded from the trial, despite the fact that symptoms of autism spectrum disorder including sensory sensitivities, rigid categorical thinking and feelings of difference have all been identified by neurodivergent detransitioners as factors that led them to adopt a medicalised trans identity that they now profoundly regret. Same sex attracted detransitioners report that puberty blockers disrupted their sexual development, preventing them from coming to terms with their sexual orientation and, in some cases, from confronting the experiences of homophobia that motivated their desire for medical transition in the first place.
“I think it’s a human rights violation to take that from a child because, like I said, I had no sexual experience before I went on blockers at 16.” Jet, a detransitioned lesbian woman.
Genspect urges policy makers and NHS officials to engage with our Memorandum of Understanding on Puberty and our Repsychopathologisation Campaign. These point the way to a holistic, non-medicalised model of care for gender distressed young people, one that recognises healthy adolescent development as a path to healing in itself and which fosters self-acceptance and embodiment, rather than lifelong dependence on damaging hormonal interventions. We support the judicial review brought by detransitioner Keira Bell to challenge the legality of the NHS puberty blocker trial. It is reckless to endanger the wellbeing of vulnerable young people before the profound ethical issues raised by the trial have been subjected to rigorous public scrutiny.
Genspect is an international organisation offering a healthy approach to sex and gender. Our Beyond Trans project is the only specialist support service for detransitioners in the UK, providing therapeutic support to hundreds of people who find themselves lost in transition.
For general enquiries, please email: info@genspect.org
For media enquiries, please email: media@genspect.org
Stella O’Malley, Genspect Founder and Director, is available for comment and interview.