Government won’t say if it will follow Britain’s move to ban routine use of puberty blockers
The Ministry of Health is refusing to say if it is considering following Britain’s move to ban the routine use of puberty blockers for transgender children and teenagers.
The drugs – which delay the physical changes that come with puberty – are now limited to clinical trials in the United Kingdom. Similar restrictions are already in place in Sweden, Finland and France.
In a move heralded by the British government as “a landmark decision” and “in the best interests of children”, the National Health Service or NHS has concluded there is not enough evidence that puberty blockers are safe to take or clinically effective for transgender children and young people.
The decision foreshadowed the release on Wednesday of the final Cass Report, an independent four-year review of specialist services for gender dysphoric youth in the UK, which found young people had been given life-changing treatment despite “remarkably weak” evidence.
Public health expert and Otago University emeritus professor Charlotte Paul said Pharmac data showed New Zealand children aged 12 to 17 were being prescribed puberty blockers at 10 times the rate as children in the UK.
Referral guidelines allowed for children as young as eight or nine to get blockers, she said.
When it comes to the whole Trans debate, I’m old fashioned. I think finding your true self and being comfortable in your own skin is one of the most important journeys of the human experience.
The idea that there are some men who believe they are women and some women who believe they are men and some people who believe they are both and some people who believe they are neither is as uncontroversial to me as the range of human skin, eye and hair colour.
Referring to someone by their preferred pronouns and identity is just basic good will courtesy offered to every fellow citizen.
If a trans person wishes to share a prison cell or locker room with me, I don’t care, but where I get cancelled by the woke is when I also agree that biological women have a right to philosophically and intellectually challenge some of the identity politics dogma that is being used here.
There is a legitimate debate between gender critical feminists and trans activists but what does it say about that debate when gender critical feminists have been pushed all the way over to the side of Posie Parker?
I have many self declaring feminist women who privately tell me they have real misgivings with some of the Trans woke dogma but are terrified of saying anything because the Fourth Wave Feminists, non-binary activists and trans ally vegan mommy bloggers rip them to pieces on social media.
Part of the problem is that the Trans activists themselves have helped make this debate so radioactively toxic with their cancel culture dynamics.
And that’s where the woke have led us, an intellectual war cul de sac where we just hand the Right culture war ammunition.
Puberty blockers ARE an issue but anyone who dares question it receives a Wellington woke kamikaze pile on.
We want to be respectful of people living their true selves, but the cancel culture absurdity of the woke has made the debate radioactive.
Unfortunately there is no way any of the middle class Welly Woke will EVER admit any of this despite losing 10 000 voters every single time Shannel Lal opens their mouth.
Let’s hope 50 years from now we can look back on the whole Trans debate and privately remind ourselves that was how to lose a debate.
We need far less cancel culture and far more reasoned debate using science.
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I predict that the debate about purity blockers is going to run for years and get as bitter as hell, as bad as vaccine wars.
All those parents who wanted their trans kids to be happy/supported, and themselves to be ‘trans allies’ don’t want to face the prospect that they made a terrible, life-altering mistake.
“Vaccine wars,” is not how I’d put it, but same difference. Powerful uber rich pharmaceutical companies, the odd kick back here and there, millionaire surgeons raking it in mutilating body parts. They even have a penis bank, in the Netherlands I think, much more profitable than used car parts.
So…..Do the real men leave the toilet seat up or down…..
All lefties pee sitting down, the guys are ashamed to be men.
The biggest problem with contemporary Trans issues is the way they chose to go about them. “No Debate” is a dictatorial approach, and this is a complex and contentious social issue that needs mature processing. Debate is part of that process, and there can be no assent without it.
It’s worse than that, Stuart. Young primary school children are being told mistruths, eg that classmate Jack is now dress-wearing Jill, and they have to accept this, and are expected to believe it. I could, but won’t name, a school where this is happening. Nobody can query anything without being accused of being “anti-transgender”, which is not the issue. Children’s minds are being toyed with as well as their bodies.
How long before you start agitating for the recriminalisation of homosexuality?
It worries me that trans activists are so influential in the NZ health system. According to the article linked below, Te Whatu Ora “commissioned the Professional Association of Transgender Health Aotearoa (PATHA) to update the national guidelines and referral pathways for gender-affirming healthcare.”
Why the hell is Te Whatu Ora letting an activist organization (PATHA) guide clinical practice? And the article is poor journalism, in that it fails to challenge PATHA’s misleading claim that “The Cass Review ignores the consensus of major medical bodies around the world and lacks relevance in an Aotearoa context”. Sweden and France have also stepped back from uncritical application of “gender affirming care”. And what exactly is an “Aotearoan context”?
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/514044/ministry-of-health-taking-the-time-to-get-it-right-on-puberty-blockers
The final Cass Report is here- https://cass.independent-review.uk/home/publications/final-report/ – for those interested.
The “Aotearoa context” is that we have what I call “Churches of Greenland syndrome”. So called because when the Vikings unsuccessfully settled Greenland, they built the biggest churches in the Christian world (relative to the size of their population). Why? Because they were so far from Christian Europe (a Christian farming society) that they felt a pathological need to be as Christian and as Farmy as possible to prove to others (and themselves) that they were Part Of The World. That’s why they persisted with cow farming in a totally unsuitable environment. That’s why they built these massive churches, which still stand today.
We are remote, so we feel a pathological need to go all-in (and even more) on whatever stupid trend is currently consuming the western world. Happened with recovered memory, and Peter Ellis paid the price. Now it’s happening again.
>Public health expert and Otago University emeritus professor Charlotte Paul said Pharmac data showed New Zealand children aged 12 to 17 were being prescribed puberty blockers at *10 times* the rate as children in the UK.
One must bear in mind that there are also some men who think they’re Napoleon and some women who think they’re Joan of Arc. These are people with identity dysphoria who need care and treatment. Most have suffered mental trauma or abuse in childhood that has tipped the poor souls over the edge into insanity.
So it is with Trans people. It was previously called Gender Dysphoria by mental health professionals right up until the trans lobby movement gained some powerful political allies. Once this wave of righteous hysteria passed, it will revert to that term and certain people will be rather embarrassed by what they’ve done. Others need locking up for the damage they’ve done.
Of those teens who are supposedly trans, some as just gay, others are trying to make a name for themselves among their peers and lastly some have narcissist mothers who are treating their children like they were fashionable clothing accessories.
Do you know any trans people? I know a couple, and to be honest it’s nothing like thinking your Napoleon. Or for that matter Joan of Arc. Many of them come from nice supportive families, and while some of them have been traumatised, it’s not that common until they come out.
As far as mental health professionals go, it wasn’t so long ago that they were calling homosexuality a disease. Your last paragraph is simply beyond wrong. And shows you’ve possibly never even talked to a trans person.
Amen, this person probably has some gender identity issues they’re working though and projecting onto others
Love that cartoon: “There’s not evidence that the trans community represent a threat to any other group.” As witnessed at Albert Park a while ago…no threat at all. And as witnessed daily in words on social media: try and debate or discuss anything with them, and they get shitty and aggressive as hell.
For Christ’s sake, and any large enough group there are always some fuckwits. That applies to trans people, particularly activists, and people who comment here. Also leftists, conservatives, feminists, and just about every other group you can think of.
How would you like it if your identity was questioned by a large part of society? Eventually after a number of conversations with people “just have concerns” you’re probably going to get sick of defending yourself
https://youtu.be/sD_74lDDIgU?si=kcTgmagEgCAA9kBZ
Derrick Jensen, this is very interesting.
I wouldn’t dare offer an opinion because I have no expertise in a medical matter nor personal stake but
I do object to the engineered abuse of our language by using they and their in the singular, as in “Shannel Lal opens their mouth”.
Respectfully, is it really that hard to reffer to someone as “they” rather than “he” or “she”?
If it happens once or twice accidently I think most trans folk would understand you’re doing your best, but when it’s being done deliberately you’re just being an asshole
Interesting how people seem to make the distinction between violent activists in the trans community and violent activists who were against the Vietnam war, or the Springbok tour. Particularly as there were far more instances of violence in both of those campaigns than they have been to date from trans activists. I’m old enough to remember both of those past campaigns, and by God there were times when the person alongside me was literally frothing at the fucking mouth.
This is something I’ve been saying constantly since the Posie Parker protests last year!
I would never defend individual instances of violence like seemed to happen to that elderly woman at the protest, but any large protest movement is inevitably going to attract violent elements and if that’s reason enough to write the whole thing off then we’ll also need to condemn many historical protest movements that we take for granted today
Fifty years from now their will be an enqirey into state funded medical care. There will be a bunch of Docs and Psychiatrists reqired to attend who will likely already be dead. The media successor of Metro Magazine will label puberty blocker ‘care’ an ‘Unfortunate Expiriment’. The government will pay out millions to a group of people who will say they and their parents were brain washed and their whole lives have been completely fucked because they lost their fertility, never had children, had their breasts and cocks chopped off, body and psychological mutilation by medical professionals and the state and they continue to have ongoing health problems fifty years later due to their extremely traumatic lived experience. Meanwhile big pharma will bank.
Okay, it’s obviously up to me to shed some light on the Cass Review. Despite the likes of Family First and the anti-transgender pseudofeminist group Genspect, Spiked and the Murdoch UK gutter press standing up for it, the document has serious flaws.
Under the report guidelines, trans children and adolescents would have to wait until they’re aged from seventeen to twenty five to undergo treatment, despite the fact that according to developmental psychology, strategic reasoning is usually in place by the time an adolescent is fourteen or so. This is called “Gillick competence’ and it’s why young women under sixteen can consent to abortions on their own behalf without interference from possibly dysfunctional and abusive parents. It’s actually one reason why the abortion rights section of the feminist movement is so hostile to TERFs- the Keira Bell case in the United Kingdom might have been abused to target vulnerable younger women if it hadn’t wisely been overturned.
Providers of trans healthcare have strongly criticised the bias within the Cass Review for the total absence of evidence from within the fields of mainstream pediatrics, developmental psychology or endocrinology. Doctors Aidan Kelly and Natacha Kennedy have slammed the inadequacy of the Cass Review’s literature review and in particular, its overreliance on inapplicable randomised control trials.
For those unfamilar with medical research protocols, a randomised control trial would deny some trans adolescents access to medical treatment, meaning that their gender dysphoric experience of puberty would start, with potentially grave psychological consequences. In this context, it would come up hard against the right to informed consent within the Code of Health and Disability Consumers Rights in Aotearoa/New Zealand. Therefore, relying on inapplicable randomised control trials eliminates a substantial body of evidence that finds benefits in providing puberty blocker access for trans adolescents and children. In advocating delayed transitioning for trans children and adolescents, the Cass Review does not provide any evidence to substantiate its position.
(And frankly, doesn’t the whole procedure used to invalidate trans-inclusive medical and scientific research through the fetishisation of randomised control trials sound suspiciously like Herbert Green’s ‘Unfortunate Experiment” on women who were supposed to have been treated for Human Papillomavirus Virus lesions at National Womens Hospital, weren’t, and consequently died of cervical cancer because of Herbert Green’s unscientific premise that HPV ‘didn’t’ lead to cervical cancer? Anti-transgender pseudofeminists now seem determined to trample on the iconic feminist health heritage of Sandra Coney and Phillda Bunkle in exposing that egregious act of medical abuse of women!)
The Cass Review pathologises trans lives. Its findings are seriously flawed and they should not be given credence in our own context. And frankly, most mainstream lesbians, gay men and bisexuals (apart from the elderly pakeha lesbians who seem to have developed an aversion for intersectional politics) have had a gutsful of the echoes of our own past of pathologisation and discrimination.
Please, Martyn, realise that the anti-transgender lobby is a creature of the alt-right and anti-science Christian fundamentalists. In my experience, it’s the transphobes who are the ones who get abusive when it is pointed out that (a) gender dysphoria is a recognised medical diagnosis (b) numerous medical organisations recognise this and support the transgender community (c) anti-transgender organisations conversely have a lack of substantive medical and scientific evidence to ground their position.
The Cass Review is rather like the Aotearoa/NZ Royal Commission into Contraception, Sterilisation and Abortion was regarded back in the late seventies- as a biased and stacked abuse of the review process whose findings were at odds with most mainstream medical and scientific evidence of the time. With any luck, it’ll meet the same fate.
Thank you for breaking this down Craig, I don’t think Martyn is transphobic but he needs to do more research about trans issues and those behind the tirade trans people are facing in the US and the UK
As for the Posie Parker fiasco at Albert Park, why is that that woman’s apologists keep trying to continually sanitise her affiliation with right-wing extremists? Why was the National Socialist Network allowed to participate at her Melbourne rally? Why do they ignore her association with Quebecois white supremacist Jean-Francois Gariepy? What about the guys who were wearing the insignia of the Azov Brigade and Boogaloo Boys at her Auckland rally? Or Sam Brittenden, of Action Zealandia? Or Dieuwe de Boer?
Adults can do what they want. Kids can’t give informed consent to life changing, irreversible therapies.
Giving them puberty blockers breaches every ethical guideline we’ve got about ” first do no harm”
It’s almost as if we shouldn’t be enabling mental illness- do we do liposuction on anorexic kids?
It’s appalling the insanity got as far as it did.
This report will see more people confident to speak out over damaging practices in our kids.
The cowardice from all politicians to this point has been pathetic.
Also can we salute Newshub for going bust admittedly for a number of reasons but memorably for their utter dishonesty with their Posy Parker nazi salute story they blurred out which was just her doing up her zip.
Jaw dropping deliberate misinformation.
Inciting the trans activists to violence should have seen charges laid against media and certain politicians IMO.
Trans mania has peaked and biological reality will re exert.
We are actually talking about children here, about under-age children, not about adults. We are not talking about the transgender extremists who terrorised women in Albert Park.
We are talking about school children, who are being taught at school that they can choose their own gender. Not true. Children who can become stressed, confused, anxious, and prematurely sexualised. Already legislation potentially criminalises New Zealand parents who express concern about the non-science based transgender ideology in the school curriculum, and who can be imprisoned for expressing concern, or not wishing the children for whom they are legally responsible, to take steps which they may regret in the passage of time, and which may irrevocably harm them.
The co-morbidities for some of these kids can be sobering. Transgendered adults apparently commonly have a history of being sexually abused or subjected to sexually inappropriate behaviour in their younger years. Sexual dysphoria, a genuine condition, is apparently now being regarded as a mental condition. De-transitioning can be so difficult, that it makes sense to err on the side of caution when young children are concerned. I gather that New Zealand has one of the highest rates of prescribing puberty blockers to children, and do not know why children in this country should apparently think that they are trapped in the wrong body more than children in other countries do. It does surface in clusters.
The main issues noted in the UK Cass Report seem to be around no long term evaluation of the outcomes from using puberty blockers and insufficient examinations of other mental health issues impacting those youths who are being put on puberty blockers. Dont know enough to comment on whether it is the same in NZ. Perhaps someone else does?
It has now further emerged that Hilary Cass, the chief convenor of the Cass Review, was improperly selected. She acted as a consultant on the Florida Agency for Healthcare Administration’s notoriously biased and inadequate hatchet job against gender-affirmative healthcare, whose other imput occurred from biased conservative religious medical groups like the Catholic Medical Association, Society for Evidence-Based (sic) Gender Medicine, the “American College of Pediatrics” and the anti-LGBTQI+ pressure group Alliance Defending Freedom. As one might guess, the resultant report was a travesty of best practice evidence gathering, using defective methodological parameters like the Newcastle Ottawa Scale to illegitimately exclude most peer-reviewed journal studies using criteria that if followed consistently would also curtail the existence of statins and mammogram availability. Instead of professional peer review articles, anecdotal and subjective input from anti-transgender activists was relied upon. It is therefore no wonder that the Yale University School of Medicine strongly condemned the biased, inadequate and flawed FAHCA report.
The Cass Review is a UK Tory hatchet job. It does not deserve to be treated as a serious, objective mainstream aggregate scientific study, because it most assuredly is not. Instead, I recommend the American Psychological Association’s February 2024 “Policy Statement on Evidence-Based Inclusive Care for Transgender, Gender Diverse, and Non-Binary Individuals, Addressing Misinformation and the Role of Psychological Practice and Science.” Bear in mind that the APA has 157,000 members, runs the peer-reviewed American Psychologist journal and seventy other peer-reviewed professional journals.
Martyn, as the sibling of a trans person I can tell you from second hand experience that gender dysphoria is often at it’s worse during teenage years as that’s when most people go though puberty, and medically transitioning is like going though a different form of puberty than they go though naturally, when trans people talk about “being born in the wrong body” the changes they experience during their natural puberty are exactly what they’re talking about.
All puberty blockers do is allow a trans teen to wait until they’re older to decide which puberty they want to go though (ironally what many people opposing them claim to want) they’re also not just used for trans teens but also cis girls who get their period earlier than expected so this ban will have more wide reaching impacts than just the trans community.
The UK didn’t find any evidence that puberty blockers were dangerous, only a lack of evidence that they are safe, which sounds like a reasonable enough standards to ban them for teens until you realize how high the self harm and suicide rate is for trans youth… If we ban puberty blockers then it’s not at all hyperbolic to say many teens won’t survive long enough to make that informed decision to transition they’re intended for.
I’ve heard you say before on The Working Group that you want our trans whanau to have the same agency that all citzens enjoy, well allowing them to choose the puberty they want to go though rather than forcing them to go though a form of puberty they may not want is one of those forms of agency that most cisgender folk don’t even have to think about, for those it affects however it can literally be life or death!
People who are against transgenderism subscribe to Biblical Christian views about sexuality and gender, and want everyone to live according to those views. That is what it is all about.
These are the same people who want homosexuality and abortion criminalised and evolution wiped from the school curriculum,
That’s why it’s crazy to me that “old school lesbians and feminists” (which I think only a very small vocal amount of are doing this to be fair) are now throwing their lot in with the very people who fought against rights previously, often with near identical talking point about “protecting kids” that were used against gay people in the 80s… Make no mistake, once these christofascists put trans people in camps gays and women who get abortions are next!
Mosts radical and gender critical feminists are useful idiots for the Christian right now. I wouldnt be suprised if the charge to reimpose anti sodomy laws are led by feminists in the future.
In April 2022, the American Academy of Pediatrics, Alabama AAP, Academic Pediatric Association, American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, American Academy of Family Physicians, American Academy of Nursing, American College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, American College of Physicians, American Pediatric Society, American Psychiatric Association, Association of American Medical Colleges, the Endocrine Society, the National Association of Pediatric Nurse Practitioners, Pediatric Endocrine Society, Society for Adolescent Health and Medicine, Society for Pediatric Nurses, Society for Pediatric Urology and several other organisations testified in an amicus curiae in the US District Court for the Middle District of Alabama that puberty blockers were fit for purpose when it came to medical treatment of transgender youth.
Man, if Alabama sees though this concern trolling about puberty blockers than Aotearoa has no excuse!
Millsy is indeed correct once more, and in an unexpected way. Anti-transgender pseudofeminists (I will not call them trans-exclusionary “radical feminists” because that denigrates the real radical feminists who are the backbone of rape crisis and child sexual abuse prevention services) trace their descent from a seventies volume called The Transsexual Empire (1978), which consists of a strand of journalistic, tabloid attacks on the personal integrity of trans women and gender realignment surgery. Its author, Janice Raymond, was a former Catholic nun.
Clearly discernable in Raymond’s work is the surreptitious importation of categories from Catholic theologian Thomas Aquinas, who divides objects and categories into essence and accidents in his philosophy. Dominant social groups (men, straight people, cis people, white people and able-bodied/minded folks) get awarded “essence” and “normative” human status, while women, LGB people, trans and intersex people and people of colour (and people with disabilities) are treated as “accidents” and get subjected to social coercion, discriminatory laws and social practices to victimise and marginalise us.
In 2000, the late Pope John Paul II decided to make transgender identities forbidden to the faithful and got help from conservative Catholic psychologist Paul McHugh to do so. It took the fundamentalist Protestant US Christian Right and its satellites a while to pick up on this, but after they lost the marriage equality debate, their vindictiveness and spite drove them into adopting that agenda instead. Boris Johnson’s negligence and incompetence during the Covid-19 pandemic led the British Conservatives to adopt transphobic moral panic as a tool to distract attention from their mismanagement and dysfunctional conduct. UK tabloids and right-wing pressure groups collude with them over this.
Oh yes, and about anti-transgender pseudofeminists: Why is this single issue more important than far more pressing concerns to real feminists like violence against women, child sexual abuse, economic inequality and women’s reproductive rights? Some Maori/Pasifika and younger lesbians and bisexual women have acidly suggested to me that elements of the older generation of pakeha lesbians have adopted it as a consequence of resentment against being marginalised within feminist politics and lesbian communities due to intersectionality. Yeah, that makes sense- as a younger gay man, I had my own share of battles against older generations of gay men who were resentful that society was changing and that their control over our community institutions was also ebbing, so they turned against modern pluralism and diversity and generational change within our communities.
Women who identify as feminists these days are no different to the likes of Phylis Schafly and Anita Bryant in their social views. Has to be pointed out that lesbianism wes never outlawed in most countries.
I got it. We make all men’s toilets gender neutral and female toilets stay female.
Or we just let people live their lives. Something that bible bashing filth refuse to let happen,
We all know that when you say “let people live there lives” you mean that we have to put up with trans prisoners impregnating female prisoners, shaving in woman’s toilets and threatening old lesbians.
Excuse me, Sam, do you actually have any factual evidence to contribute to this debate, or is that comment from the British tabloids, or just anecdotal? As for the older pakeha lesbians involved, perhaps if they bothered to respect indigenous feminist gender and sexuality traditions and values, they might just get some respect back?
My commenets make a lot more sense if you consider that i believe that trans people do not posses a body of the opposite sex. I believe that trans people are born in the wrong body.
So do I, and they may require hormonal treatment and corrective surgery to remedy that.
I have no problem with that.