Complete miss characterisation. It is lack of data the NHS is arguing with. Not scientific evidence.
The article is bluntly stating that the NHS has made this choice because no evidence of the long term safty exists. Not because scientists say it is unsafe.
I could agree with a ban whole heatedly if blocking can’t be reversed and blocked cannot be reverted, but I would likely to oppose a ban it if blocking can be reversed and blocked could be reverted.
Gets a little fuzzy if it’s one or the other though.
Wouldn’t want someone to miss their only chance to block puberty, but also wouldn’t want someone to make a permanent choice at 13-14 which can’t be reversed if they want to later on.
When you stop taking them you go through puberty like normal. The idea is to protect trans kids from the irreversible effects of going through the wrong puberty, but not cause any irreversible effects if they’re one of the <1% that later turns out to not be trans.
You just stop taking them, and your body will start going through puberty. Like the other response said, they’re used for cis children as well when they start too early for their body to be able to handle. As with any medicine there can be side effects.
You can’t get any trans care that isn’t reversible until you’re an adult who can legally consent to it. Puberty blockers are reversible, you just stop taking them and go through puberty. This change is completely anti-scientific and pro-bigotry. It’s indefensible.
puberty blockers are used explicitly to delay having to go through puberty. they are used for kids who have precocious puberty (puberty that starts too early), as well as for trans kids. there are some marginal risks associated with them, you might grow a bit shorter, or just generally develop differently that you might have if you had allowed puberty to progress on time, but there aren’t specific health challenges people who use them face. the reason you take them is to explicitly prevent somebody from going through irreversible changes they might not like before they can make an informed decision, or before it is healthy for those changes to occur.
interestingly, most of the poor health outcomes of precocious puberty are psychological and social, not physical, which is, i think, an interesting parallel to the trans experience.
Why should I bother trying to educate you when you won’t even read the article you’re arguing over?
Puberty blockers have been well-studied and widely-used since the late 1980s. They have been routinely used to pause puberty in adolescents experiencing gender dysphoria, treat children who enter puberty too early and help adults living with a range of other medical conditions.
Links included in the article btw. Go nuts. But please, by all means, tell me how we don’t have almost 40 years of research on this proving this policy is unnecessary.
Both the health service in Sweden and Britain has recommended a complete stop to hormone blockers to children, citing lack of evidence to support the procedure.
And yet here you are, with studies and shit, saying the complete opposite. Maybe you can take your ‘evidence’ (and no, the linked article is not an unbiased source) to them; they might change their minds. Seems to me the right course of action since you are so invested.
So the UK and Sweden’s health systems get to prove your point by virtue of being an authority, but decades of studies and other health authorities don’t?
What’s the bar here exactly? If I cite systems covering more people am I right? Why are these two so special?
Also:
Clearly NHS based their decision on different studies, but by all means feel free to share
You literally asked me to share studies in your previous comment. Have you already forgotten?
no, the linked article is not an unbiased source
And Sweden/the UK are? Show me an unbiased source. One. Show me this magical unbiased source you have on hand, a status that literally no study has ever managed to achieve in human history.
“I want unbiased sources” means “I want sources that conform to my already existing viewpoint within a certain margin of error or I simply won’t tolerate it.”
Nah, you made the claim here, you have the onus of providing sources to back your claim first.
Or, you can just refuse to, but it makes your claim weaker.
That’s the way it works homie. If you make a claim, it can be challenged. If challenged, you’re supposed to back your claim up before saying “no, you”. If you can’t/won’t do that, you’re going to end up being ignored.
Which is fine, nobody has to play by the rules of public discourse, but you can’t act surprised when you get dismissed out of hand after refusing to do so.
You misunderstand, I wasn’t objecting to you having made the claim, nor the claim itself. I have zero interest in debating online, particularly when the person has been a dick in the rest of the thread.
But I do enjoy pointing out things that people might not be aware are expected so that they can be less of a dick and start engaging in good faith.
That being said, you can’t use the NHS to support NHS decisions. Also, that isn’t a link to a study or experiment at all. So it isn’t a valid source for online debate (and you’d get laughed offstage for trying that at an actual debate. Same with any given secondary source. That’s just making an appeal to authority, which can only be useful if and when the authority is being recognized as an authority for the purpose of the specific debate. Since the NHS’ decision is what’s being questioned, you just linking to their opinion isn’t useful. And I can’t read Swedish, so I can’t say anything about the other link, but I suspect it’s the same thing.
There’s methodology to a proper online debate. You aren’t following it, so you’re gong to keep running into people dismissing you, regardless of any validity or lack thereof in your attempts.
What you need to do to debate in good faith is to provide either links or correct citations for what you’re using to make your opinion a claim that others should listen to.
Basically, to sum up, a post that brought about objections to the decision was made. You said “but the NHS is an authority to listen to”. Others then said, “bullshit, they’re using bad science”. You then rebutted with, “nuh-uh this is their opinion, look at it again.”
That’s fine if your entire goal is to just keep saying that you trust the NHS and stand behind their opinion. That’s perfectly fine, we all gotta make choices like that sometimes. But you can’t pretend that doing so is a good faith effort at debate and discussion. You can actually state that directly, though, and then anyone wishing to argue with you can be told to piss off without any need for anything else. But it isn’t how you change minds.
Doctors used to regularly treat patients with mercury and blood letting. Then more data came out to say it was bad so they stopped doing it. That’s how medicine works.
The evidence is not there for puberty blockers and it isn’t there for mercury.
Either way the medical professionals have worked out what is best for the patient based on all the information and they have decided no to puberty blockers. No point talking about it anymore, the experts have spoken and neither of us has more data than them.
Which brings me back to my original question of why two countries suddenly closed the matter. What is your bar for who gets to decide what the truth is? Is it based on the size of the population they serve? GDP? Years as a country?
no, it wasn’t “more data”, it was just data. blood letting and mercury are pre-scientific treatments that were in use during the 1600s. puberty blockers were developed with a modern understanding of hormones, and extensively tested before they saw use in a clinical setting. you might as well have brought up magic as a legitimate medical practice that we eventually proved wrong. like, no duh, but it also has basically no bearing on the safety of a chemically synthesized hormone inhibitor invented in the 20th century.
I believe there are exceptions to the ban in the case of studies that are actively taking place. This isn’t a complete halt on their use; just the general prescription has been paused.
The side effects like the effects on bone density and brain development do seem concerning and merit more investigation.
Given the drug has been used for almost 40 years. Lack of evidence it is safe. Is just a political way of saying we have no evidence it is dangerous.
After 40 years of clinical use. With many patients benifiting from its application. And the medications passing the medical trials standards of the 1980s. Pretty much any other medication the NHS has banned or restricted use of. Was because of new evidence. Not the lack of it. I say pretty much. Because cost and politics has been used in the past. The NHS was just more open about the reasons.
Restricting a long used medicine with a lack of evidence. Is a political not a scientific choice.
Go check the UnitedKingdom subreddit if you want to see the celebratory bloodlust of the average Briton, the blatant alternative truths and so on, and this is of the young progressive sort, the average 40+ boomeroid probably no longer bothers with that mask even.
I am so tired. I’ve fought the good fight for so long for my people but in the end it’s like it was all pointless.
As much as I’d like to think they are all Ivans and Vlads from Kamchatka doing this for 50 kopecks, I feel like there can’t be that many and with such authenticity, dedicated so hard to that sub.
Like how important is demoralising the already inactive disengaged progresvives really to political power and who has so much time and resources?
The one thing AI LLMs seem to be actually quite good at is generating lots of quite ‘real’/‘genuine’ sounding comments and replies, so it really could be bots. It probably doesn’t actually take that much effort either in relative terms, if you decide you want to AstroTurf an online space.
It’s a shame because it could basically kill discussion on the internet as we know it. It’s mad to think it, but in a few years we could be telling younger generations of a time when we wrote words to each other online and it was reasonable to assume that we were talking to a real person…
There’s been a noticeable shift on r/UnitedKingdom since around the time of the Reddit protests. I no longer participate there but I’ve seen quite a bit of extra unpleasantness the few times of taken a curious look at it.
Not that it was ever a great place to discuss trans issues, but the nastiness seems to be spreading to all manner of topics now.
There may have been an organized effort by the far right to take over various national subreddits. It gives the impression that their views are overwhelmingly popular in the country, when really they’re not. The subreddit /r/Canada also got dominated by the far right, which led to the creation of /r/onguardforthee. At least one of the mods of /r/Canada was shown to be an active neo-Nazi, and another declared himself a white supremacist. There is still too much support for the far right in Canada (and we’re looking at a big lurch to the right in the next election), but it’s not as dominant as you’d think from that subreddit.
Tbf, leftists did this also. r/northernireland had a big bunch of American IRA larpers who never set foot in the country, and edgy youth from the Republic.
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