Today the High Court has agreed that children can be given puberty blockers.

In the U.K. a child under 16 cannot give consent to be part of a clinical trial, they will need a parent or guardian to consent for them.

I just cannot see how stopping the natural progression of puberty on a young persons body and brain ever being the morally right thing to do.

Counselling, counselling and more counselling should be the way forward until they reach 18 and are fully aware of what they are going to do to their body and the consequences of their decisions on their future health, both physically and mentally.

It is a trial, but I suppose that the disturbance that people feel is over the fact that it is a trial on children with a treatment that is not medically essential.

I am sure that in the past there have been trials of cancer drugs on children with terminal diagnoses; but this new trial is on normal healthy children, many of whom are neurodivergent (including my GC).

There is no other aspect of neurodiversity which we say is normal - we help these young people to find ways of overcoming the problems. It is only with gender dysphoria that we take a different approach and endorse it. I do not know whether that is the right thing to do.

I am also aware that it can be something that parents get on board with rather more readily than they might any other psychological problem, and find themselves standing up for their children's rights as a way of life.

The trial is to look at the long term effects of puberty blockers and it feels unacceptable to give children (who are too young to even begin to understand the ramifications of it all) drugs with the specific purpose of finding out if it will harm them in the long term with no hope of reversal. It does not feel right at all.

I agree with you Luckygirl3

It does not feel right at all no it doesn't Luckygirl. It's frightening that the High Court can make such a ludicrously and potentially harmful ruling .

Legalised child abuse!

Smileless2012

^It does not feel right at all^ no it doesn't Luckygirl. It's frightening that the High Court can make such a ludicrously and potentially harmful ruling .

It doesn’t seem right at all is such a straightforward response. It really just feels wrong on every level. Increasingly, we are told brains don’t mature till age 25. How on earth an 11 year old can have the capacity to consent is beyond me

It feels like one step forward and six steps back Iam.

An 11 year old can't have the capacity to consent and how can their parents consent to something that they have no idea of what the long term affects may be?

GrannyGravy13

In the U.K. a child under 16 cannot give consent to be part of a clinical trial, they will need a parent or guardian to consent for them.

I just cannot see how stopping the natural progression of puberty on a young persons body and brain ever being the morally right thing to do.

Counselling, counselling and more counselling should be the way forward until they reach 18 and are fully aware of what they are going to do to their body and the consequences of their decisions on their future health, both physically and mentally.

So we are giving children drugs that we don’t know are safe and effective. We are experimenting on them.

This is hardly new. Children with cancer, for instance, need to be treated right away; even if the treatment is so new nobody yet knows the effect those drugs could have on a baby, on an undeveloped body, brain etc.

Surgeons perform new procedures even though there is no guarantee of success, and a risk of harm/death. Because doing nothing might have worse results. Someone always has to take those decisions on behalf of children to young to understand .

In this case, "worse result" could be desperate teenagers buying hormone drugs online and self medicating. Or self-harm and serious mental illness.

For parents in that situation, the least-worst option might be to consent to puberty delay under the most rigorous of conditions and expert medical supervision.

Actually butter and jam that’s not how cancer drugs work, especially for children.

There is a protocol for all drugs before they are tested on humans and cancer drugs follow that too.

I know headlines in the media sometimes give the impression that a drug has come from nowhere and doctors are “giving it go” but it really doesn’t work like that.

There may be unexpected side effects but, as far as it is possible to have tested the drug in laboratory conditions that will have been done, before it is released for human trial.

Luckygirl said

"The trial is to look at the long term effects of puberty blockers and it feels unacceptable to give children (who are too young to even begin to understand the ramifications of it all) drugs with the specific purpose of finding out if it will harm them in the long term with no hope of reversal. It does not feel right at all."

I completely agree with Luckygirl and am dismayed that this will go ahead. Who knows the outcome of the long-term use of these drugs and where it will leave the children in their later lives. Why are the parents supporting this? They are turning them into lab-rats!

No.
This should never be permitted by law.

It is a significant factor that so many children with an ASD diagnosis self ID as trans. These children feel like outsiders already

*In this case, "worse result" could be desperate teenagers buying hormone drugs online and self medicating. Or self-harm and serious mental illness.

For parents in that situation, the least-worst option might be to consent to puberty delay under the most rigorous of conditions and expert medical supervision.*

The unknowns are the issue. Clearly some young people with gender dysphoria can be very distressed and this is a huge challenge for their parents as they live in the here and now fearing that their child will become mentally ill or self harm. This is a dreadful situation for them to be in.

However the solution is not to to give children drugs that can cause long term ill effects, many of which are not known. The solution is the ready availability of high quality support services to those children - and we all know how sparse that is. CAMHS is a crumbling service. Drugs with unknown effects should not be used to fill that gap.

When a new cancer drug is used on a child who is already terminally ill, trying this new treatment is very clearly the least worst option. Trying a new drug that feeds into the mental disturbance that a child is suffering is a completely different scenario. It is buying into the false beliefs and risking long term physical harm in doing so.

The answer is societal - abandoning gender stereotypes so that people can simply be themselves and dress and behave as they feel is right for them with no judgement, as long as they are decent law-abiding citizens.

My additional concern is that there will be lots of parents who are genuinely knocked sideways by what is happening with their child but there will be others who will lap it up in an almost Munchausen's by proxy fashion. Theroux did a programme about this in the US and the attitudes of some of the parents were very concerning. The UK trial depends on parental consent but some parents might not be the right people to give that consent.

Thanks Luckygirl for your comments here. We have a young trans person in our family. ASD diagnosis at 8 years old. Very intelligent, sensitive , socially isolated and always felt like an outsider . The high incidence of young people with ASD diagnosis who express concerns about gender needs more research imo

I agree Luckygirl but if I say anything to my children I’m shouted down , I know a youngster with a very vocal and overbearing mum , Munchausens immediately describes her

Iam64

Thanks Luckygirl for your comments here. We have a young trans person in our family. ASD diagnosis at 8 years old. Very intelligent, sensitive , socially isolated and always felt like an outsider . The high incidence of young people with ASD diagnosis who express concerns about gender needs more research imo

Yes because from my limited experience with children with ASD who express “concerns about gender,” they think it will solve some of their ASD problems.