GO TO HELL, I CAN'T EVEN LEAVE THE COUNTRY NOW, NAZI POS!

[Dinner]

I was going to post the Cass review myself but Elok already has. There there are the reviews done in both Norway and Sweden all of which found little to no evidence of effectiveness and ample evidence of harm. Some of you stupidly supported some absolutely vile and evil **** because you were to cowardly to stand up for vulnerable children.

[Geronimo]

I was going to post the Cass review myself but Elok already has. There there are the reviews done in both Norway and Sweden all of which found little to no evidence of effectiveness and ample evidence of harm. Some of you stupidly supported some absolutely vile and evil **** because you were to cowardly to stand up for vulnerable children.

OMG. what makes you think it's cowardice and not the usual problem of not knowing who to believe? Given that we routinely compare to the literal historical Nazi party and the Third Reich's own Adolf Hitler on this forum and in this thread why don't you tell us specifically what the "absolutely vile and evil ****" was and how you know about it so we can see if that claim is any more reasonable? If the **** was just minors who underwent sex changes and then regretted it as adults please realize that there was peer reviewed published research to support doing so and by the time contrary research came to light it would seem about as credible as the authenticity of Hunter Biden's laptop. When people support something that later turns out to be wrong, even profoundly wrong, the motivation for doing so is far less likely to be cowardice than it is various forms of more palatable dis-information being widely available at all levels of discourse with no reliable tools left to the public to sort out which is which. You consume a hand-picked assortment of videos, podcasts and the occasional books and come back here condemning anyone who disagrees with the truth you find in those sources as being motivated by cowardice. You literally have no clue Dinner about what motivates them because that will take a lot more listening to viewpoints you know are wrong than you could stomach. Maybe that's also why not everyone has sat through all those videos you link for us whenever you want to make your case.

[Elok]

I wouldn't have bothered making it, but I endorse this statement. Dinner needs to dial it back.

[-Jrabbit]

Agreed, Elok. A very civil way of pointing out the rampant d1ckishness of Dinner's threadjack.

[Elok]

You're talking to a person who is scared and vulnerable and facing a sudden, dramatic increase in hateful rhetoric alongside legal persecution. Seriously, "you probably won't be genocided, just have your life royally ****ed up as collateral damage" is not helpful, man. An administration dominated by uncaring *******s who actively campaign against empathy and are supported by a sizable chunk of people who really do hate certain minorities is dangerous, even if it's not literally Nazi Germany 2.0 with Hitler reincarnated. You're not calming people down; you're dismissing their real concerns.

I'm somewhat bemused by this reaction--was anybody in this thread attempting to be comforting or calm anyone down? Even the people on Thorn's side were saying things like, "well, time for a new underground railroad," which reads to me as casually flippant and not at all an appropriate reaction to someone who sincerely believes their life or livelihood is in danger. I didn't read the OP as requiring or looking for comfort, only venting in the usual way (and thus fair game to criticize for cliched hyperbole). It seems clear that Thorn does not literally believe the government is going to try to kill him in the remotely near future; if he did, he would presumably be looking up ways to smuggle himself into Canada sans passport and apply for asylum. Or something. Basically anything other than griping on a moribund Civ forum. All this talk is, in the last analysis, so much faffing about to no purpose, and all I am doing is griping about a counterproductive tendency of the Democrats and progressives writ large to playacting Casablanca instead of dealing with the less romantic reality that our commander-in-chief is simply an incompetent gangster who hurts people as much by accident as on purpose, and can't be arsed to make things better because that would require him to give half a damn about anyone besides himself.

If you want me to sympathize with Thorn here, he is correct: this is all blatantly unnecessary, stupid, and cruel. His passport has a picture of his face on it, not his gonads. This is at best a godawful inconvenience to him which serves no purpose beyond cheap political points for the satisfaction of strangers. Beyond that, IDK what kind of comfort I can give him, without lying. These next four years are going to suck, for some of us more than others.

[Dauphin]

Hitler didn't spend 4 years in power before doing Hitler stuff. This isn't Trumps first rodeo. We can look back and surmise that death camps are probably not in the cards.

Well, the expansion of the concentration camps started in '37, about four years in, and became death camps in about '40. So, dunno, end of term timeline?

Yes, I am being tongue-in-cheek.

[dannubis]

Summary: Dinner is being a dick who feels empowered because the dick of his choice is now in charge.

[Dinner]

Summary: Dinner is being a dick who feels empowered because the dick of his choice is now in charge.

Reality is neither good nor bad. It is just what is real. I am sorry reality upsets you. I am sure you will keep lying though because I was very nice and had sympathetic things to say.

BTW Thorn should call the ACLU and see if they will help him with his legal problem.

[giblets]

I was going to post the Cass review myself but Elok already has. There there are the reviews done in both Norway and Sweden all of which found little to no evidence of effectiveness and ample evidence of harm. Some of you stupidly supported some absolutely vile and evil **** because you were to cowardly to stand up for vulnerable children.

Gee, is it possible the handful of studies you can point to are actually misleading? Do we know who the control groups in theses studies are? I'm guessing they didn't do randomized trials with placebos.

[Geronimo]

in general, what recourse does the public have if the federal government arbitrarily makes an onerous change that is impossible to legally accommodate?

[Dinner]

Gee, is it possible the handful of studies you can point to are actually misleading? Do we know who the control groups in theses studies are? I'm guessing they didn't do randomized trials with placebos.

Why would you assume the NHS or similar organizations in Scandinavia didn't do a thorough job? There is a reason this garbage was outlawed in those countries. At least for minors. Even here in the U S. the largest and most comprehensive study to date found the exact same results but then the activist doctor in charge revoked the findings under political pressure because the actual findingss didn't say what the activists wanted it to say.

[giblets]

Why would you assume the NHS or similar organizations in Scandinavia didn't do a thorough job? There is a reason this garbage was outlawed in those countries. At least for minors. Even here in the U S. the largest and most comprehensive study to date found the exact same results but then the activist doctor in charge revoked the findings under political pressure because the actual findingss didn't say what the activists wanted it to say.

You're not directly linking these studies, why would I assume you're summarizing them accurately?

[Elok]

You're not directly linking these studies, why would I assume you're summarizing them accurately?

LMGTFY. https://apolyton.net/forum/miscellan...51#post9480151

While Dinner is being his usual rancorous, hyperbolic self, the British report does in fact recommend proceeding with extreme caution and scaling back GAHC for minors for lack of evidence, and the American study was in fact not published explicitly because the person running it said it didn't get the results she wanted and she thought it would be used to justify not employing puberty blockers (my sources at that post are an official US government website and the New York Times). I don't know anything about these Scandinavian studies, but yes, there are reasons to believe that transitioning minors might not be a good idea. In addition to common bloody sense.

[giblets]

The NYTimes article is behind a paywall and newspaper headlines can be misleading. The UK government website was too nuanced for Dinner. As for "common sense", I don't know if a child who has been consistently claiming for years they have the wrong sexual characteristics can really be handled using conventional wisdom.

[Apocalypse]

The NYTimes article is behind a paywall and newspaper headlines can be misleading.

https://archive.ph/M1Pgz

U.S. Study on Puberty Blockers Goes Unpublished Because of Politics, Doctor Says


The leader of the long-running study said that the drugs did not improve mental health in children with gender distress and that the finding might be weaponized by opponents of the care.


By Azeen Ghorayshi

Published Oct. 23, 2024Updated Oct. 24, 2024

An influential doctor and advocate of adolescent gender treatments said she had not published a long-awaited study of puberty-blocking drugs because of the charged American political environment.

The doctor, Johanna Olson-Kennedy, began the study in 2015 as part of a broader, multimillion-dollar federal project on transgender youth. She and colleagues recruited 95 children from across the country and gave them puberty blockers, which stave off the permanent physical changes — like breasts or a deepening voice — that could exacerbate their gender distress, known as dysphoria.

The researchers followed the children for two years to see if the treatments improved their mental health. An older Dutch study had found that puberty blockers improved well-being, results that inspired clinics around the world to regularly prescribe the medications as part of what is now called gender-affirming care.

But the American trial did not find a similar trend, Dr. Olson-Kennedy said in a wide-ranging interview. Puberty blockers did not lead to mental health improvements, she said, most likely because the children were already doing well when the study began.

“They’re in really good shape when they come in, and they’re in really good shape after two years,” said Dr. Olson-Kennedy, who runs the country’s largest youth gender clinic at the Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles.

That conclusion seemed to contradict an earlier description of the group, in which Dr. Olson-Kennedy and her colleagues noted that one quarter of the adolescents were depressed or suicidal before treatment.

In the nine years since the study was funded by the National Institutes of Health, and as medical care for this small group of adolescents became a searing issue in American politics, Dr. Olson-Kennedy’s team has not published the data. Asked why, she said the findings might fuel the kind of political attacks that have led to bans of the youth gender treatments in more than 20 states, one of which will soon be considered by the Supreme Court.

“I do not want our work to be weaponized,” she said. “It has to be exactly on point, clear and concise. And that takes time.”

She said that she intends to publish the data, but that the team had also been delayed because the N.I.H. had cut some of the project’s funding. She attributed that cut, too, to politics, which the N.I.H. denied. (The broader project has received $9.7 million in government support to date.) Image

Dr. Olson-Kennedy is one of the country’s most vocal advocates of adolescent gender treatments and has served as an expert witness in many legal challenges to the state bans. She said she was concerned the study’s results could be used in court to argue that “we shouldn’t use blockers because it doesn’t impact them,” referring to transgender adolescents.

Other researchers, however, were alarmed by the idea of delaying results that would have immediate implications for families around the world.

“I understand the fear about it being weaponized, but it’s really important to get the science out there,” said Amy Tishelman, a clinical and research psychologist at Boston College who was one of the study’s original researchers.

Dr. Tishelman also noted that, even if the drugs did not lead to psychological improvements, they may have prevented some of the children from getting worse. “No change isn’t necessarily a negative finding — there could be a preventative aspect to it,” she said. “We just don’t know without more investigation.”

In the 1990s and 2000s, doctors in the Netherlands began studying a small group of children who had experienced intense gender dysphoria since early childhood. For most of these children, the negative feelings dissipated by puberty. For others, puberty made them feel worse.

For those who struggled, the researchers began prescribing puberty blockers, which had long been used to treat children whose puberty began unusually early. The Dutch scientists reasoned that by preventing the permanent changes of puberty, transgender adolescents would fare better psychologically and fit in more comfortably in society as adults.

In 2011, the researchers reported on the first 70 children who were treated with the so-called Dutch Protocol. The children were thoroughly assessed to make sure that they had persistent dysphoria and supportive parents and that they did not have serious psychiatric conditions that might interfere with treatment.

These patients showed some psychological improvements after puberty blockers: fewer depressive symptoms, as well as significant declines in behavioral and emotional problems. All the patients chose to continue their gender transitions by taking testosterone or estrogen.

The findings were highly influential even before they were published, and clinics around the world opened to treat transgender adolescents with puberty blockers and hormones.

England’s youth gender clinic in 2011 tried to replicate the Dutch results with a study of 44 children. But at a conference five years later, the British researchers reported that puberty blockers had not changed volunteers’ well-being, including rates of self-harm. Those results were not made public until 2020, years after puberty blockers had become the standard treatment for children with gender dysphoria in England.

In 2020, Dr. Olson-Kennedy’s group described the initial psychological profile of the children enrolled in the U.S. study of puberty blockers, whose average age was 11. Before receiving the drugs, around one quarter of the group reported depression symptoms and significant anxiety, and one quarter reported ever having thoughts of suicide. Eight percent reported a past suicide attempt.

In a progress report submitted to the N.I.H. at that time, Dr. Olson-Kennedy outlined her hypothesis of how the children would fare after two years on puberty blockers: that they would show “decreased symptoms of depression, anxiety, trauma symptoms, self-injury, and suicidality, and increased body esteem and quality of life over time.”

That hypothesis does not seem to have borne out. “They have good mental health on average,” Dr. Olson-Kennedy said in the interview with The New York Times. “They’re not in any concerning ranges, either at the beginning or after two years.” She reiterated this idea several times. Image

Puberty blockers are prescribed to prevent the permanent physical changes of puberty.Credit...Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York Times

When asked in follow-up emails to clarify how the children could have good initial mental health when her preliminary findings had showed one quarter of them struggling, Dr. Olson-Kennedy said that, in the interview, she was referring to data averages and that she was still analyzing the full data set.

Dr. Hilary Cass, a pediatrician who this year published an extensive review of youth gender services in England, said that the delays from the American and British research groups had led the public to believe that puberty blockers improved mental health, even though scant evidence backed up that conclusion.

“It’s really important we get results out there so we understand whether it’s helpful or not, and for whom,” Dr. Cass said.

Her report found weak evidence for puberty blockers and noted some risks, including lags in bone growth and fertility loss in some patients. It prompted the National Health Service in England to stop prescribing the drugs outside of a new clinical trial, following similar pullbacks in several other European countries.

An N.I.H. spokesman said that while the agency generally encourages the publication of data supported by its grants, researchers decide how and when to do so.

Dr. Olson-Kennedy’s collaborators have also not yet published data they collected on how puberty blockers affected the adolescents’ bone development.

But many other papers have been published from the wider N.I.H. project, including a 2023 study of older transgender and nonbinary adolescents who took estrogen or testosterone to aid their gender transition. After two years on hormones, the volunteers showed improvements in life and body satisfaction, and patients taking testosterone showed declines in depression and anxiety. (Two of the 315 patients died by suicide, a rate much higher than the general population.)

Dr. Olson-Kennedy noted that doctors’ clinical experience was often undervalued in discussions of research. She has prescribed puberty blockers and hormonal treatments to transgender children and adolescents for 17 years, she said, and has observed how profoundly beneficial they can be.

Although the N.I.H. studies are large, she said, “these are minuscule compared to the amount of people that we’ve taken care of.”

Christina Jewett and Jane Ackermann contributed reporting. Azeen Ghorayshi covers the intersection of sex, gender and science for The Times. More about Azeen Ghorayshi

[Geronimo]

The NYTimes article is behind a paywall and newspaper headlines can be misleading. The UK government website was too nuanced for Dinner. As for "common sense", I don't know if a child who has been consistently claiming for years they have the wrong sexual characteristics can really be handled using conventional wisdom.

true. the most prudent approach to handle such children would be to offer irreversible physical changes with powerful prescription drugs and/or mutilating surgery on their genitals and not consult the parents since they are notorious for abusing their relations with their children to coerce them into thoughtlessly permanently injuring their children in rash ways.

[Apocalypse]

I tried posting the NYT article but the post is "unapproved" right now so I'll just say the mods are censoring us.