Puberty blockers for under-18s with gender dysphoria will be banned indefinitely across the UK except for use in clinical trials, the government has announced.
Wes Streeting, the health secretary, said that after receiving advice from medical experts, he would make existing emergency measures banning the sale and supply of puberty blockers indefinite.
The Department of Health and Social Care said the Commission on Human Medicines (CHM) had published independent expert advice that there was “currently an unacceptable safety risk in the continued prescription of puberty blockers to children”.
I don’t know about the issue enough for me to comment on if she is biased or not, but I found this NYT interview (archive.org link) and she really seems to try to be playing both sides to me. Her main arguement seems to be don’t treat this as an issue to resolve gender, that makes you ignore mental health/depression/other things, but with there not being the best care of that nature available for trans individuals, what avenue is left for them?
It sounds like she wants to go on about a lack of enough proof for her to stop treatment, but it also doesn’t sound like she has enough proof to say it’s harmful, but that doesn’t seem to discourage her helping eliminate it.
Well her position doesn’t seem to be that she wants to eliminate it at all. She says the evidence is too weak for a general green light. She supports it being offered but as research:
Also:
She makes it hard to feel out what her actual position is, which in a way is probably what she should do, but is also very frustrating because being on neither side feels disingenuous as a default these days. I don’t know enough about her to really feel I know for sure.
We had decades (centuries?) of people not getting this care. There were definitely negatives to that. We’ve had maybe now a couple decades of increasing HRT/puberty blocker stuff. I’ve heard positive stories. Everything makes it sound reversible should the need arise. Everything against it seems to not be evenly distributed across the political spectrum so walking it back feels political based on what I’ve heard cumulatively.
Keeping it as research seems it would greatly reduce its availability, and if it causes people to suffer or die, that’s not something that can be taken back, unlike stopping hormone treatment or puberty blockers seems to be. That’s the part that concerns me.
I don’t know much about the issues, but I try to stay informed, so I don’t want to go trashing this lady’s report. From all I’ve read though, a lot of doctors already have to sign off on patients before it comes to these treatments, so canceling that now seems to overrule a wide range of medical and mental doctors for a dubious position.
Well I can certainly recommend reading the interview then. One of the things mentioned is that she considers, after her research, this hormone treatment as having irreversible effects.
That’s something I always see people dancing around, sometimes saying ‘mostly’ reversible or something… Being (‘mostly’) irreversible has an enormous ethical impact. She also mentions having taken into consideration the long term psychological effects but that the research on that just isn’t strong enough to give a clear-cut advice
I read the interview as a 380 page paper on a subject I don’t really understand seemed a bit ambitious. I linked it, as I didnt know who did the report, and I wanted to hear her summary in her own words.
The comments here are full of people defending one side or the other, but no one seems to be providing any sources. This seems to be a difficult subject to approach if one isn’t seeking to affirm an existing stance. Both sides just seem to say “show me the proof” back and forth because neither will acknowledge the other.
You seem to be at least leaning in favor of the report. If you have any noob appropriate links to supporting info, I’d look at them.
Full-fledged hormone blocking + replacement certainly is about as much reversible as puberty, that is, not really. E.g. once boobs grow having tons of testosterone in your system won’t make them go away, only surgery will (did you know that the most common cosmetic surgery for cis men is breast reduction, btw?). Some stuff self-medicating enbies are doing should be reversible, like not blocking testosterone and taking oestrogen for smoother skin.
Anyhow the earliest anyone is going to get hormone treatment is 16, and that’s in Germany for clear cases with a judge having a second look at everything. Generally it’s 18. Puberty blockers don’t even need to be reversed you just stop taking them and the puberty comes, side-effects from late puberty are benign and/or manageable. Like, in a risk weighting we’re talking about being 2cm smaller than you could have been vs. suicide, it’s not even a competition.