I’m not particularly well educated on the subject but according to the BBC:
Fewer than 100 young people in England are currently prescribed puberty blockers by the NHS. They will all able to continue their treatment.
So why such a big fuss?
Blocks any future access to trans kids
Can puberty blocking be reversed at a later date?
Or can blocked puberty be reverted later?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Scientist have collected all the data and decided the experts on Lemmy are wrong.
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.
Good, there’s not enough scientific evidence to claim it’s safe for children, hence the ban…
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.
I have no idea what you source those beliefs on but research dome in Sweden just last year concludes:
Data on the effects on psychosocial health are lacking but there is some evidence that hormonal treatment may impact on bone maturation.
So no, I would not claim it is risk free, especially when given to children.
Funny that international studies show otherwise…
Welcome to my blocked list.
We have decades of studies. You do not know what you are talking about.
Clearly NHS based their decision on different studies, but by all means feel free to share
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.
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.
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.
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But they don’t do it for everything because things they did use it for they found out were bad, just like puberty blockers.
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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.
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.
NHS recommendation (British health/social services):
https://www.engage.england.nhs.uk/consultation/puberty-suppressing-hormones/
Socialstyrelsen recommendation (Swedish health/social services):
They each provide sources that they base their decision on. Took me five min to find.
And your sources?
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.
