This is pay walled so I can’t read the whole thing, but some incredibly important context to the Cass report is that it examined 103 studies on trans youth and rejected 101 of them. Of the 50 studies on hormone blockers and 53 studies on hormone replacement therapy, miraculously the 2 they found to be ‘valid’ just happened to have inconclusive results.
Their excuse for rejecting them is that they weren’t double blind. But the thing is, it’s not always ethical or possible to do double blinds in medicine. If you have evidence that withholding medicine causes harm (guess what all those rejected studies found!!) then you’re never going to convince an ethics review board to let you withhold treatment. Even if it momentarily answers the “concerns” of terminally online transphobic freaks before they start hauling the goal post off somewhere else.
Anyway, Helen Lewis is a well known member of the terminally online transphobic freak club and has no background in any field of science to comment on any aspect of the Cass report, so here’s a breakdown of why the report sucks ass from someone who is qualified: www.tandfonline.com/doi/…/26895269.2024.2328249
This is a flowery opinion piece about a study, with no rigorous deep-dive into the substance of the study. Yeah, no. Not gonna put any weight into this.
The metastudy concluded there’s no randomised trials confirming puberty blockers work on dysphoria. There’s none about whether wrenches work well to turn nuts, either, but apparently the powers that be have decided that means it’s a sham treatment.
This entire controversy reminds me of the repressed memories episode we had in the 80s. The social worker/psychiatry medical profession attached great credence to these so-called repressed memories. People were tried and convicted on this “science” which was eventually found out to be junk “science” under rigorous scientific examination. I know personally of an individual who was convicted and later pardoned due to this trash “science”. These social issues need to be critiqued and investigated seriously before implementation. Unfortunately, in North America it’s more of a political thing than a scientific based idea. Eventually, it will be determined to be as junk science by western medicine, as repressed memories were. It’s just common sense. That’s why critics are so rigorously silenced — the proponents of this gender “science” know that it is shite. Adults are free to do what they wish to their bodies, but we should never be doing gender reassignment to children under the age of majority (18 years old) at a minimum. Children’s brains aren’t mature or developed enough to be making these profound decisions for their body. Neither should the parents be allowing this, child abuse.
It’s common sense that if you look like a boy and feel like a girl, making yourself closer to looking like a girl won’t help? How is that common sense at all?
Your concerns are valid but your conclusions don’t follow imo.
but we should never be doing gender reassignment to children under the age of majority
We aren’t. We block puberty, and we give them appropriate hormones. Gender confirmation surgery is not done until they have attained their majority.
What’s the rate of de-transitioning? Do you know? it’s about 13%, but almost 83% of the people that had a history of detransitioning did so because of social factors, not because they had regrets. That means that the rate of people that regretted their choice to transition not due to external factors was about 2%. And particularly relevant from that article: “The study also cited a Dutch research from a few years ago that was based on clinical follow-up studies of adolescents with childhood gender dysphoria who received puberty suppression, gender-affirming hormones, or both. The Dutch research found that “none of the youth in adulthood regretted the decisions they had taken in adolescence.””
FWIW, it’s “just common sense” that men can’t be sexually attracted to me. It’s been scientifically proven with magnets; positive poles repel each other, just like men must logically be sexually repelled by other men. So we definitely shouldn’t allow children to decide they’re gay. Come to think of it, we also shouldn’t allow children to decide that they’re not gay either, because they might make life-altering choices, like getting a blowjob behind the bleachers, and then they’ll be stuck being straight for their whole life.
Also, fuck right off with your repressed memories nonsense, because the same people pushing the satanic panic in the 80s, right up through the late 90s are the same fucking people pushing the trans panic.
“Common sense” is for things that are obvious. This is heavily contested in that it’s obvious in opposing ways to different people, and as such isn’t really covered by common sense in a way which can be assumed to be correct.
Common sense is to lock your doors at night or when not home, and don’t take candy from strangers. It does not extend to nuanced and intricate discussions such as this. Sense needs to be applied but to insinuate that it is intuitive to the degree of common sense is a poor stance in this discussion.
At the request of the English National Health Service, the senior pediatrician Hilary Cass has completed the most thorough consideration yet of this field, and her report calmly and carefully demolishes many common activist tropes. Puberty blockers do have side effects, Cass found. The evidence base for widely used treatments is “shaky.” Their safety and effectiveness are not settled science.
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We also don’t have strong evidence that social transitioning, such as changing names or pronouns, affects adolescents’ mental-health outcomes (either positively or negatively). We don’t have strong evidence that puberty blockers are merely a pause button, or that their benefits outweigh their downsides, or that they are lifesaving care in the sense that they prevent suicides.
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We don’t know why the number of children turning up at gender clinics rose so dramatically during the 2010s, or why the demographics of those children changed from a majority of biological males to a majority of biological females.
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Medicalized gender treatments for minors became wrapped up with a push for wider social acceptance for transgender people, something that was presented as the “next frontier in civil rights,” as Time magazine once described it. Any questions about such care were therefore read as stemming from transphobic hostility, full stop.
Fascinating article. The parts about transitioning were interesting, but I was much more interested in how restricted any discussion of this topic has become. There’s no room for science, debate or discussion, there’s only your side vs mine.
Don’t look at Sweden for guidance on this. We sometimes let weird “morals” decide certain issues, to “protect the children/society”. See for instance any drug related laws, in particular cannabis where we’re still stuck in the 1960’s sipping on arguments from Nixon, our laws on sex work that Amnesty International and WHO are against, or the fact that trans people in Sweden were forced to be sterilized before having gender reassignment surgery up until 2013. A trace of the eugenics based sterilizations that were forced upon certain groups of people against their will up until 1973. We like to paint ourselves as the most progressive country in the world, and in some ways we are, but we’re very much lagging behind in some areas where strange “morals” still decide. And currently there are anti-trans winds blowing in our right-wing government, supported in some ways by the Social Democrats who are the absolute kings of letting those horrendous “morals” decide. So, whatever we do over here on this issue, don’t be so sure it’s a good idea.
Sweden has said they will do more research and issue further guidance. That’s following the science.
Many American states have said, we are just going to ban it.
Now I’m not saying follow Sweden for every issue but they’ve been more tolerant of trans people for a long time. As such, we need to follow someone or this will be banned in America without the science being reviewed.
Ok, fair, but it’s not like Switzerland is the only authority on this topic. We should collaborate with other countries, but relying on only one for any given question would be foolish and corruptible.
Sweden. Not Switzerland. I’m not opposed to scientific consensus at all.
Sweden has the longest history on this topic with in my opinion the least biased opinion. Sweden has supported trans people for a long time and their society hasn’t collapsed.
I’m not saying Sweden is perfect but I can say they have a long history of acceptance and trying to use science to guide the discussion. While you may not agree with their Covid response. They tried to follow the science. The problem in America is we’ve turned everything into a partisan shit show and ignored the science.
Well the problem is people say trust the science but they only trust it when confirms their own bias.
The ironic thing is, that’s exactly what this study is. This isn’t a scientific in the slightest, this is someone’s personal beliefs rejecting all but the couple studies they agree with to make it look like there’s a debate.
There’s always a debate to be had if you ignore the 98% of evidence that says you’re wrong.
That’s your bias slipping in. They didn’t ignore evidence that said they were wrong. They ignored the evidence that didn’t meet the standard. That’s how studies work. If something is valid and reliable, you don’t use it. Other researchers, not armchair quarterbacks like yourself will review and critique. It’s how we expand on the body of knowledge on the topic.
I think you’re confusing it with some other magazine. The Atlantic is for neoliberal centrists. It’s modestly liberal in the way The New Yorker is, but it’s for old, wealthy New England investors.
If I’m mistaken, someone please correct me, but it sounds like you’re just reading my own description of Atlantic readers back to me.
Granted, I think Atlantic readers are more likely to vote for Kerry & Obama than Bush. But economically, their policies are only subtly different from the perspective of the investor class. They’re all supply side economics guys.
Of course not. They are merely leaning on the science and the science is saying things like:
“Puberty blockers do have side effects”
“We don’t have strong evidence that puberty blockers are merely a pause button, or that their benefits outweigh their downsides, or that they are lifesaving care in the sense that they prevent suicides.”, and
“The evidence base for widely used treatments is ‘shaky’”
Everyone says listen to the science, well, here is the science.
As long as you listen to the science and stop referring to puberty blockers as necessary life saving treatment that merely pauses puberty, you can advocate for what you want. Again, just quoting the science: “We don’t have strong evidence that puberty blockers are merely a pause button, or that their benefits outweigh their downsides”
A discussion on if the benefits outweigh the downsides is no longer verboten.
There’s a reason medical practice is heavily regulated. Many established medical practices should NOT simply be left to a doctor and their patient. See eg. unannounced pelvic examinations for anesthetized women. That practice has only recently been started to be regulated in some states. If the doctor’s patient is underage, parental rights precedent has a lot to say on the matter. If you’re of the belief that parents should have no rights at all over their children’s medical decisions-- In the simple case, how will children get vaccinated before they can give consent? In the extreme case, is assisted suicide on the table? Obviously that last one is a stretch, but it proves that (to most people) it’s not always as simple as it being between doctor and patient.
They would just be a unilateral decision by the doctor.
True.
Sure, why not?
Well, you’re consistent, but I think you’ll find allowing assisted suicide for minors to be an incredibly unpopular opinion, and as such your overall argument is still not likely to be accepted at large.
You said ‘in the extreme case.’ The extreme case would be something like the teenager either living three or for years in agony or ending their life with dignity. Why should that teenager be forced to live in agony for those three years?
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