The Tide Keeps on Turning

In a positive week, the American Academy of Pediatics (AAP) has made the long-overdue decision to carry out a systematic review on the use of puberty blockers. Last summer, Genspect published an open letter to the AAP, which has had over ten thousand downloads, that requested gender-distressed children be treated with evidence-based interventions which ensure that benefits outweigh risks. Genspect received extensive mainstream media coverage about this issue and, with this, revealed the incoherent system that shapes AAP policy.

As it stands, there is no long-term quality evidence that substantiates the widespread use of puberty blockers. We do not know how this will affect children in the long term. Thankfully, last week’s decision by the AAP to acknowledge this galactic gap in the evidence, will highlight how there is no evidence to support the recent surge towards ‘gender-affirmative care’.

The NHS in Britain has also recently stated that they would limit the use of puberty-suppressing medical treatment to children enrolled in clinical trials. Although Genspect welcomes this change, we believe that it is never appropriate to block the sexual development of adolescents. All sorts of seismic changes take place during puberty, and we do not yet know what happens to the brain when this is blocked. We do know that between roughly the ages of ten and twenty, children move from being non-sexual to becoming sexual. With this sexual awakening, other changes occur: the brain develops layers of complexity and the individual moves from being focused mostly on him or herself to experiencing the beginning of a drive to seek a mate for life. This can manifest in a loneliness that makes adolescence difficult, but it can also encourage the adolescent to become more socially oriented. It is authoritarian for any clinician to believe that they have the almost God-like knowledge to ascertain whether any child will benefit from having their sexual development blocked, thereby inducing a lifetime of infertility and other sexual problems, all for the sake of a more aesthetically-pleasing medical transition. The vast majority of these children, if they are allowed to go through a natural puberty, will one day come out as gay, lesbian or bisexual. Not only that, but the high numbers of gender-distressed children who have other co-existing challenges such as autism, ADHD, OCD and/or eating disorders suggests that doctors should ‘hasten slowly’ rather than fast-track these vulnerable children towards the heavy burden of a lifetime of medicalisation.

The NHS have opened a consultation process ‘to seek views on a proposed interim clinical policy on puberty suppressing hormones (sometimes referred to as “puberty blockers” or “hormone blockers”) for children and adolescents who have gender incongruence or dysphoria’ and we urge readers to engage in this process. Puberty blockers were designed for children with precocious puberty. Such children might begin puberty as young as three or four years old, and they would be prescribed puberty blockers so as to delay puberty until their bodies and minds were sufficiently mature to be able to handle the changes that it entailed. This treatment, however, was not designed—and has not been formally approved—for the gender-related distress in children. It is an experimental treatment programme that has far-reaching consequences: roughly 98% of gender dysphoric children who take puberty blockers then move on to cross-sex hormones as adults. You don’t need to be a brilliant psychologist to figure out that stopping all sexual development during the teenage years leads young people to believe that there is something fundamentally wrong with their bodies.

It’s easy to lose heart in a world where Costa Coffee tries to defend its decision to include a transgender person with mastectomy scars in a cartoon mural on one of its van. Remember, though, that in the larger picture, the establishment organisations are beginning to wake up to this harrowing medical scandal.

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