How I took on the puberty blocker orthodoxy – and won
by Michael Biggs, Telegraph:
I was lucky to have been given the freedom to conduct my research, given the tendency to shut down heretical projects.
Last week, NHS England announced that puberty blockers would no longer be given to children at its gender identity clinics. It’s been a long journey to get to this point.
Almost exactly five years ago, the Telegraph broke the news that eventually led to the closure of the Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust’s Gender Identity Development Service. The Tavistock started an experiment giving puberty blockers to adolescents as young as 12 in 2011. In 2018, when I started looking for outcomes, nothing had been published. This absence raised my suspicions because I know that favourable results are speedily published. I searched for evidence using Freedom of Information requests and I made a formal complaint to the Health Research Authority.
What I discovered was disturbing: conference presentations where the Director of GIDS admitted that the results were not as they hoped; data from 30 of the patients after a year on puberty blockers showing more negative changes than positive ones.
Submitting my findings to an academic journal would have been an uphill battle. The prevailing wisdom was that puberty blockers were lifesaving medication for “transgender kids”. Instead, I announced my findings on Transgender Trend, a blog run by Stephanie Davies-Arai, a critic of the medicalisation of gender-nonconforming children, whose writing had helped to shift my views.
Read here (£)
Related Posts
Tags
Share This
